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Apple users buying 61% more apps, paying 14% more per app→

Apple users buying 61% more apps, paying 14% more per app

The average iOS device owner will download 83 apps in 2011 vs. 51 in 2010, a 61% increase year over year. “Smartphone users are showing an increasing appetite to use apps to add features to their phones,” Munster writes,” and iOS has the leading app ecosystem.”

While the title is somewhat misleading (are we comparing iOS against Android again?), Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster looks at the at the trend of app sales and ‘average selling price’ per app since September 2008, charting a nice graph that shows the App Store’s steady increase in downloads for free and paid applications. So far in 2011, the average selling price per app is up 14% year-over-year, versus a decrease of 18% in 2010. “After the initial race to the bottom in App Store pricing, we are seeing users pay up to add features and games to their iOS devices”, Munster writes.

I think we can attribute the recent uptick to in-app subscriptions. Magazines and newspaper subscriptions sold in the App Store can cost anywhere from $20 to $60 a year, and Apple has been aggressive in advertising digital publications via ‘featured’ and ‘what’s hot’ banners. Too, there’s been a recent trend with games like Tiny Tower that can rack up a lot of money by selling in-game currency which vastly improves the experience once players are hooked. The in-app purchase and subscription models are working out very well for developers that implement them.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes,

82% of the apps in Apple’s store are free. The 18% that users have to pay for have an ASP of $1.44. According to Munster, the increase in ASP is driven by the more-expensive iPad apps that represent a growing percentage of app downloads.

Again, a lot of these new iPad apps are digital magazines. While we have seen some great apps hit the App Store for $19.99 (OmniOutliner for iPad) and $9.99 (The Hit List for iPhone), unfortunately I think developers that are willing to price their apps high are still few and far between. I must admit, however, that I have seen more $2.99 and $3.99 dollar apps this year than the $.99 and $1.99 I’ve seen in the past. Then again, perhaps my inbox is just being pitched with more expensive apps than usual. Regardless, selling apps at higher price (more representative of an app’s value) is a good thing for developers, and it’s especially important on the iPad where quality software dictates how well it can replace a laptop. With iOS 5 around the corner, I wonder if users would be willing to spend more if the iPad was their only computer?

The App Store still has some kinks to work out, but it’s currently looking pretty healthy. Consumers are buying lots of apps (and in-app purchases), while developers are raking in just a little more money than before if we’re to believe Munster’s findings.

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Hands on with Amazon Cloud Player for iPad→

Hands on with Amazon Cloud Player for iPad

For all intents and purposes, outside of the track scrubbing, the Amazon Cloud Player site on iPad simulates a basic music application reasonably well. The music quality sounds no different from when I stream my tunes on a desktop browser, and thanks to iOS multitasking, I can use other apps on my iPad while streaming music over the web. I have noticed that the service runs best if it retains the focus, however. When using another app, the music tends to stop after a song or two. A quick return to the web page nudges the stream to start up right away: something I hope is addressed in the future.

Amazon’s extended support for Cloud Player for the iPad is quite nice: if you’re an Amazon customer, all of the music that you’ve purchased or will purchase is now immediately available for playback via an online browser.

Amazon is making some nice strides with their Amazon Cloud Player, but the biggest hurdle to get users into the service is that you have to upload all of your music to their storage locker, and you still can’t play that music well on your iPhone or iPod touch (the device you’re most likely to have with you all of the time). The act of uploading isn’t something I want to do — and iPads have more than enough storage to carry enough of your music if you’re arguably normal and don’t need to carry your 150 GB library with you at all times. Too, services like Spotify can put a damper on Amazon’s service. Unless you listen to a lot of local music or uncommon artists, Spotify (especially now that it’s coming to the US) is going to have all of your music already online and ready to stream at $5 to $10 a month.

I have nothing against Amazon — I think having the option is spectacular and their addition of unlimited music streaming is big move — but it’s going to be hard to hook and sink iPad users who want to browse the Internet while listening to music, or who want the instant gratification of competing online services. What Amazon really needs is an app, although I’m not sure Apple would allow that to happen.

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The WSJ iPhone App and Negative App Store Reviews→

The WSJ iPhone App and App Store Reviews

Jakob Nielsen at UseIt.com offers an interesting breakdown of the issues behind the design of the WSJ iPhone app’s initial login screen, which is causing customers to leave negative iTunes reviews as they think the newspaper is forcing existing subscribers to pay again to read content on the iPhone. That is not true (subscribers of wsj.com can access the app for free), but according to Nielsen a poorly designed login screen that puts the focus on new subscriptions and registrations, rather than login, is tricking users to believe that existing subscriptions don’t count against iPhone access.

Wildly persistent users might notice the much smaller Log In area at the bottom of the startup screen. However, they’re unlikely to press this button because their experience with the app so far has taught them that they must register (and pay extra) before being allowed to log in.

Those few users who do press Log In will finally see that they can use their existing www.wsj.com credentials to access the app. However, as the many negative App Store reviews attest, few users ever make it this far.

The full report with screenshots of the WSJ iPhone app and proposed mockups to address the issue is available here. Subscriptions and logins for existing subscribers have always presented usability problems for developers of mobile newspapers and magazine apps, struggling to find the best way to promote both new subscriptions and free access for existing, paying customers. Apple wants to improve the process with its native subscription system based on iTunes accounts, and indeed several publications are experimenting with the new APIs provided by Apple to offer web-based login screens that allow for new registrations and iTunes subscriptions, like The New York Times did in its latest app update.

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Give Me My Eject Key Back!→

Give Me My Eject Key Back!

A couple of months ago, I visited the OWC offices and took advantage of OWC Jamie’s workbench skills and had him perform some “OWC Love” on my 2011 MacBook Pro by removing the optical drive and replacing it with an OWC Data Doubler + 750GB HDD – to compliment the 480GB SSD I already have inside as my start-up disk.

With the optical drive removed, I started thinking about how the Eject key was now totally useless, and I thought that maybe there might be some way to re-purpose it to do something useful.  Turns out that I was by far not the first person to ever have this thought and that there are apps pretty much dedicated to remapping the Eject key.  These apps are especially popular with MacBook Air owners who are without an internal optical drive right out of the box.

One of the cool things you can do to a MacBook Pro is remove the optical drive in place of an OWC Data Doubler, which turns your optical drive bay into a usable bracket for a second internal hard drive. The benefit is that you can either achieve super fast speeds by setting a pair of SSDs in RAID 0, or you add additional space or a scratch disk to your machine without the added bulk of external storage. In doing this, however, the eject key on the MacBook Pro becomes needless. After all, how many times do you normally use that key anyway? Erik offers some great advice on how to map your eject button to something functional, while retaining the ability to eject a USB optical drive.

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How The iPad Changed A 9-Year Old Girl’s Life→

How The iPad Changed A 9-Year Old Girl’s Life

Evonne Barry at the Herald Sun tells the story of Holly Bligh, a 9-year old girl from Melbourne, Australia, whose life has been changed forever since she started using an iPad instead of regular paper and textbooks. As the publication reports, in fact, Holly has albinism, a condition that, alongside her skin, also affects her vision. Before the iPad, Holly’s parents and teachers were forced to print out papers with larger characters in order to let her read properly. The iPad, with its multitouch capabilities, changed that. Holly can now read her books with ease thanks to pinch and zoom, and her mother says the device is improving her ability to be independent from teachers as well.

But there’s more. Holly’s mother, Fiona, decided to send an email to Steve Jobs to personally thank him for producing a device that contributed so deeply to the betterment of her daughter’s life, and he replied.

Within hours of directly emailing multi-billionaire chief executive Steve Jobs, she was thrilled to receive a response.

“Thanks for sharing your experience with me. Do you mind if I read your email to a group of our top 100 leaders at Apple?” he wrote.

Mr Jobs signed off with “Thanks, Steve”, and asked for a high-resolution photo of Holly with her iPad.

This isn’t the first example of how the iPad as a revolutionary device changed the lives of children affected by different conditions and disabilities. Still, it’s always nice to hear a good story, rather than speculation on the next MacBook Air or Sandy Bridge CPU. Make sure to head over the Herald Sun for the full article.

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Designing GitHub for Mac→

Designing GitHub for Mac

It blows my mind that no one tried to do anything special. Git (and it’s DVCS cousins like Mercurial & Bazaar) provide an amazing platform to build next generation clients — and it’s like the entire OS X ecosystem left their imagination at home.

Eventually, I (well, many of us) decided that better native clients (OSX, Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc) was the best way to grow GitHub. And since we all use Macs — we should start off with an OS X application.

Kyle Neath has posted an excellent overview of what designing the official GitHub Mac app was like, the challenges he and his team had to face when dealing with Apple’s recent interface changes coming in Lion, and the overall “new trend” of Mac apps inspired by their counterparts.

Check out the whole story and screenshot gallery here.

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How To Child-Proof Your iPhone→

How To Child-Proof Your iPhone

Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger shares a series of interesting tips to “child-proof” an iPhone (though most of these features are enabled on the iPad as well) to make sure kids using a device won’t get access to functionalities like deleting apps and pulling the trigger on in-app purchases. Something I never had the chance to play with is the restriction settings panel for location and email:

Next, exercise (limited) control over location services and email accounts. First, tap Location to see the locations options screen. You can disable/enable location services on an app-by-app basis or turn it off entirely. Once you’ve set this up how you’d like it to be, select Don’t Allow Changes. Likewise, tapping email accounts and then Don’t Allow Changes won’t let you modify existing email, contacts or calendar information or create new ones. Of course, Jr. can still read your mail (and reply to it), so this isn’t entirely useful.

You can read more at 52 Tiger by hitting the source link below, and enable restrictions under Settings->General on your iOS device. Apple has been criticized in the past for not offering the right tools to parents to prevent children from spending money in iTunes, though with iOS 4.3 they introduced a broader set of restrictions and brought the in-app purchase window (when a device asks for your Apple ID password) from 15 minutes down to 5 minutes.

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The New York Times’ Final Cut Pro X Q&A→

The New York Times’ Final Cut Pro X Q&A

Following the much discussed backlash over the launch of the “revolutionary” Final Cut Pro X for Mac, The New York Times’ tech columnist David Pogue has compiled an interesting Q&A on the available/missing features of the application, with direct input from Apple.

The “missing features” generally fall into three categories: features that are actually there and have just been moved around, features that Apple intends to restore and features that require a third-party (non-Apple) add-on or plug-in.

Among the covered topics, Pogue reports Apple says re-enabling support for the multi-cam functionality is a “top priority” for the company.

Complaint: There’s no multicamera editing. In the old FCP, you could import the footage from various cameras that covered an event (say, a concert) from different angles simultaneously, and then easily cut back and forth between them while editing. It was a star feature of Final Cut, and it’s gone from FCP X.

Answer: Apple intends to restore this feature in an update, calling it “a top priority.” Until it does, here’s a stopgap facsimile of multicam editing: If you drag two clips into parallel timeline tracks, you can choose Clip->Synchronize Clips. By comparing their audio tracks, the program aligns the clips exactly. Now, each time you select a piece of the upper video track and press the V key (“disable”), you are effectively cutting to what’s on the lower video track.

Another feature that generated much disappointment in several Final Cut Pro X reviews on the Mac App Store is the impossibility of opening old FCP projects. Pogue confirms this:

Complaint: Can’t import old FCP files.

Answer: As I noted in my column, this is true; your old projects are stranded forever in the older FCP program. You’ll have to keep both programs on your hard drive, and edit the old projects in the old program. When you install the new FCP, your old copy is safely preserved.

Read the full, technical Q&A here. In the weeks leading to the release of Final Cut Pro many professional video editors suggested it would be difficult for Apple to ship a completely rewritten version usable since day one by large studios and production houses. As Final Cut Pro X has been re-imagined from the ground up, clearly Apple needed to cut some features out of the first release, but they’ve already confirmed they’re aiming at making the update cycle for FCP faster with releases every 6 months or so.

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Apple granted patent on webpage scrolling behaviors→

Apple granted patent on webpage scrolling behaviors

So Apple got yet another patent granted today, and now there’s yet another media firestorm over whether it means Cupertino will be able to sue every other phone manufacturer out of business, or at least out of the business of making multitouch devices. And, as usual, most of the hysteria is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of what the patent claims actually say, and what behaviors they actually cover in iOS. I don’t know why we keep repeating this sad cycle, but I do know that it’s always, always better for us to read the claims and try to figure them out for ourselves — and in this case, they’re actually pretty narrow.

What the media made out to be a broad patent that would allow Apple to bully competitors is incredibly specific to frames within a webpage that displays other content. Nilay provides an example of a Google Maps embed, and explains that companies have to meet a lot of specific criteria to infringe on the patent.

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