Following on from a paper by Canalys into the cost of the Top 100 paid applications on the American iTunes and Android Stores, WPDang decided to add in Windows Phone to the mix. There are a lot of factors at play here, but the results are surprising, and perhaps point to the state of play of the three markets.

Apple is by far and away the cheapest, with a total cost of download of $174. When you look at this with the other two platforms, it's almost half the cost, although with better monetisation choices, such as in-app billing, iOS developers are best placed to make the user pay later (these numbers only look at the initial costs).

Android is the most expensive at $374 for the top 100 apps, while Windows Phone lands somewhere in the middle at $310, athough WP Sauce does point out that the popularity of the Xbox Live titles, which only have three price bands ($2.99 / $4.99 / $6.99) will skew the numbers towards the upper end.

A lot of people have commented on the excessive cost of Windows Phone apps, and from these statistics it looks like just a few titles have created that impression. Personally I blame Angry Brids, because everyone looks at that first. If Microsoft wanted to play hardball, that might be a good one to drop to 99p.