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An Analysis Of Apple’s Adjustment Of International App Store Prices

UPDATED: Included a discussion on various sales taxes to clarify some of sections of the analysis, also corrected a mistake regarding Denmark prices.

For those of you who aren’t located in the United States, Wednesday’s news of Apple re-adjusting their prices in the App Store for international stores might have been pretty big news. For many the headline was welcome news, indeed when I woke up Thursday morning and saw they had finally re-calibrated the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ I was pretty happy about it. We first discussed the great disparity in global iTunes prices back in January and I was pleased to see Apple eventually act and restore some fairness for international consumers.

Unfortunately I soon figured out it wasn’t all good news; Apple had only adjusted the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ for apps. For their other stores such as for music, movies, TV shows and books the prices remained unchanged. Nonetheless I have revisited my January analysis, updating that data and doing some further analysis of what the price changes actually bring, what it means for individual countries and who is better or worse off.

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The App Store Turns Three After A Number Of Recent Milestones

Today marks the third anniversary of the launch of the (iPhone) App Store which launched on July 10, 2008. It launched simultaneously with what was then called the iPhone OS 2.0 software (now dubbed iOS 2.0) and was subsequently followed by the release of the iPhone 3G the next day, which came with iOS 2.0 and thus the App Store pre-installed.

The availability of third-party applications and an ‘App Store’ on the iPhone was certainly one of the most demanded features of the iPhone after it was revealed and launched in 2007. Whilst it hasn’t been revealed when exactly Apple decided to open up the iPhone to third-party apps (or if they had always planned for it), Steve Jobs was quoted in the New York Times shortly after revealing the iPhone in January 2007, as saying:

We define everything that is on the phone. You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.

Since the launch of App Store, it has become one of the defining successes for the iPhone and Apple more broadly – becoming a cornerstone feature being used in a number of advertising campaigns. Most notable is the ‘There’s an App for that’ ad campaign which highlighted the wide array of apps available to consumers (jump the break to relive the first of those).

Over the past few months, the App Store has hit a number of milestones that reveals how successful it has been over the past three years. Just in the past week, Apple revealed that there had been 15 billion apps downloaded from the App Store. Recently it was also revealed that there are now over 500,000 apps available in the App Store (100,000 of which are iPad apps) – virtually a hundred-fold increase from the 500 apps that were available at the launch of the App Store in July of 2008. Apple has also been very keen to note at their WWDC conferences that they are paying out significant amounts of money to developers; at last count it was over $2.5 billion. The question is, where will the App Store be in a year from now, let-alone another three years? The pace at which it has grown is truly mind-boggling.

[Sources: New York Times, TechCrunch, Engadget, Wikipedia]

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About This iPad 2 HD

According to a new report published today by Joshua Topolsky at This is my next, Apple is gearing up to release an “iPad 2 HD” this Fall alongside a new model of the iPhone, as previous speculation has largely confirmed with different reports about an “iPhone 5” or slightly redesigned “iPhone 4S”. According to Topolsky, the contradicting reports of a major redesign for the next iPhone and a slight hardware refresh using the existing iPhone 4 design have generated from the fact that Apple has been secretly testing the iPhone 5 components inside an iPhone 4 case – thus leading to reports from several media outlets about a new iPhone that could either feature a thinner, radically different design, or something along the lines of the iPhone 4, only faster and with better cameras. This is my next had previously claimed the iPhone 5 would feature a new “tear drop” case design, as well as a 3.7-inch screen (versus the current 3.5-inch display), a different Home button and worldphone capabilities for CDMA/GSM compatibility. This last tidbit has also been hinted by Verizon’s CFO back in April. Topolsky says Apple is likely to abandon the iPhone 4’s industrial design as it’s “out of favor” with the company’s executives.

Our sources tell us that the company has been testing the new components in old iPhone cases, for obvious reasons. Some of those reports we’ve heard about a larger screen for the old design would make sense too, as a slight tweak of the size (say, to a 3.7-inch display), would be barely noticeable to the eye, but obvious in internal component design. So if you’ve been wondering why the rumors about the iPhone 4S rose to such a din, now you know.

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Growl 1.3 To Be Released on Mac App Store, Introduce Lion Support and Drop GrowlMail Support

The developers of Growl, a popular notification system for OS X that’s been around for years and it’s completely free to use, have announced that the plugin is going to become a Mac App Store application through a complete rewrite with OS X Lion in mind, dropping support for older frameworks and “hacks” like GrowlMail and GrowlSafari that wouldn’t probably make it past Apple’s approval. For those not familiar with Growl, the notification system became popular among Mac users because of its highly customizable nature that enabled almost anyone with basic coding and design knowledge to create “themes” for it that changed the appearance and animations of the notification tickets displayed on screen. Growl is supported by hundreds of different applications for the Mac, including big names like Twitter and Dropbox. We have covered a handful of beautiful themes for Growl in the past, and the success of this plugin also inspired several iOS developers to create mobile apps capable of plugging into the desktop system to fetch or send remote notifications. Growl is the undiscussed king of notifications for OS X apps.

Yet the developers are willing to change everything about Growl to get it ready for the Mac App Store and turn it into an app as requested by Apple to developers submitting software to iTunes. In a post on Growl’s official Google Group [via Steve Streza], developer Christopher Forsythe has announced that the upcoming 1.3 release will bring important changes such as the aforementioned Store availability, as well as full support for Lion and a new “app” form that has the obvious advantage of allowing users to easily upgrade to new versions by simply checking on their Mac App Store purchase page. One of the common complaints about Growl, in fact, is that the app often requires the user to download and perform an upgrade. As the existing version comes with a .DMG file that contains an installer for a System Preferences panel, the current Growl 1.2.2 forces users to manually upgrade every time a new version is out. With the Mac App Store and Growl becoming “an app”, the developers want to eliminate the convoluted process of opening and mounting a disk image file, running an installer, and manually upgrading from System Preferences. Read more

The New Brain Behind Your Photos

One of the new features of iCloud that was announced at WWDC but was slightly overlooked by bloggers and iOS users is Photo Stream. Built into the native Photos app for iOS devices, iPhoto for Mac and the Pictures folder on Windows PCs, Photo Stream will allow you to automatically find on any device the photos you’ve taken on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. With the addition of the Apple TV 2nd gen, Photo Stream will let you watch these photos on the bigger screen with your friends and family. How does it work? For those that missed the announcement, here’s a quick recap: because iCloud automatically stores, updates and pushes your content on all your registered devices (be them iPhones, iPads, or Macs and PCs running the iCloud control panel), Photo Stream acts as an extension of the mobile Camera Roll that, rather than just storing pictures locally, also pushes them to the cloud as soon as they’re taken, provided you’re on a WiFi connection. If you’re not on WiFi, Photo Stream will upload the photos from the Camera Roll to iCloud as soon a a new connection is established.

As explained by Steve Jobs on stage, and later demoed by Eddy Cue, the main purpose of Photo Stream is that of easing the process of importing photos shot on, say, an iPhone to an iPad or Mac for better viewing. With previous versions of iOS, users were forced to email pictures themselves and open the message on OS X to save the photos (facing at the same time a risk of quality loss due to email limitations); create an account on social services like Flickr or Facebook to upload photos from their mobile devices to avoid a desktop transfer process; even worse, users had to go home, find a USB cable, connect their iPhone to a computer, launch iPhoto or Image Capture and manually import the most recent photos. That’s a long and tedious process Apple wants to eliminate with a smart, automatic system that always puts the most recent photos on all your devices. In fact, Photo Stream can display the 1,000 most recent photos on iOS devices, whilst files are stored on iCloud for 30 days due to storage limitations on both ends (iOS and Apple’s server farms). On desktop computers, which come with more storage, Photo Stream stores all photos. Again, this new functionality works out of the box with any iOS 5 device configured with an iCloud account, and Photo Stream can be enabled in the Settings app. On the desktop’s side, right now Apple is requiring developers to download a special beta version of iPhoto and the iCloud control panel to test Photo Stream, but once iCloud publicly launches this fall everything will be baked in with no further configuration needed.
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The iPad: Now With 100,000 Apps Available

At the end of March we ran a story on the iPad App Store reaching the 75,000 apps milestone in less than 365 days since the original iPad came out in April 2010. Considering the competition the iPad had to face in the past year (though some people say there really isn’t a tablet market) and the options given to developers when it came to choosing which platform to develop for, seeing iPad users gaining access to almost 100,000 apps in roughly 12 months was a surprise – looking back at those statements from tech pundits who claimed the iPad was “dead in the water”, the 75,000 milestone surely helped putting things in perspective.

Yet Apple and third-party developers have set a new record: in 453 days since the original iPad came out on April 3, 2010, the App Store has more than 100,000 iPad-exclusive apps available. Either specifically targeting the tablet, or released as universal updates to existing iPhone apps, at the moment of writing this there are 100,161 iPad apps in the Store. How do I know? The App Store app itself on my iPad shows that.

Obviously, one could argue that the iPad’s development scene was “helped” by the success of the iPhone in the previous years. The original iPhone came out with no SDK in 2007, and developers were told to create web apps for it. Apple listened, and months later they released the first developer tools to create native apps for the iPhone. With the release of the iPhone 3G in 2008, Apple also launched the App Store, a unified marketplace to browse and download apps. The rest is history: a few graphical enhancements, sections, and 10 billion downloads later, the App Store is Apple’s crown jewel as far as digital downloads go. A success that has inspired the company to create an OS X version and name it Mac App Store which, unsurprisingly, is once again helping developers sustain their business because of the ease of use of the whole process. On the other hand, users love discovering and buying apps from the App Store because it’s simple, it’s full of apps, and it’s regularly updated. It’s a win-win scenario for Apple (who keeps a 30% cut off every transaction), the developers, and the users.

What’s next for the App Store and, more specifically, apps for the iPad? 100,000 is an important milestone, but don’t expect things to change dramatically in a short period of time. Considering how Apple rolls, the App Store will be slightly tweaked to accomodate new sections as it’s always been, more apps will be released in the next weeks, and users will keep buying apps and games. Don’t expect a revolution because Apple has reached 100,000 apps for the iPad. But that’s not to say the result isn’t remarkable or that new things aren’t coming: with iCloud going public this fall and Automatic Downloads already set in place, Apple wants to make the process of buying and syncing apps to iOS devices even simpler. With Lion approaching its public launch on the Mac App Store in July, it’s clear Apple is betting on the App Store brand as the de-facto solution for downloading software for iOS and OS X devices.

Congratulations, developers. Now onto 200,000 apps.

Don’t Be Stupid: Keep App Reviews To Yourself While Using an iOS Beta

These past few weeks of iOS 5 testing and casual talking with my fellow writers and Twitter followers had me thinking about the fact that some people really don’t get the difference between “public previews” and “developer-only betas”. I’m talking about those people who are leaving negative reviews in iTunes for apps that are allegedly “broken” under iOS 5, which reached the beta 2 status last Friday.

There’s an important difference between previews and developer betas. With previews, like iTunes in the Cloud, Apple feels confident enough to release a new piece of software with new features to the public and let everyone enjoy it until the final version (with more features) comes out. Example: automatic downloads and past purchases. In spite of Apple calling it a “beta”, this is in fact a public preview (that requires iTunes 10.3, also public) of the new iTunes in the Cloud system that will gain the additional Match functionality this Fall. So why is Apple letting regular users mess with a beta? Because it’s not really a “beta”, not in the sense we geeks are used to when seeing the beta label on Apple’s various Dev Centers. iTunes in the Cloud is a public preview of something that will grow even bigger in a matter of a few months. The company knows it’s stable enough for everyone to play with. All the systems are in place. No third-party support is required. All users can benefit from it now, and will get to use more functionalities once the faux beta label goes away. It’s a good deal. Read more

Apple Ramping Up Component Orders For July MacBook Air Refresh?

A report from DigiTimes today claims that Apple’s supply chain for its MacBook products will begin to “run in full gear” from early July as Apple prepares to a launch an updated MacBook Air. The report is in line with previous suggestions that Apple will wait until late July to launch a refreshed MacBook Air to coincide with the launch of Lion – which DigiTimes itself corroborates in the report.

[Increasing orders for components] is in line with Apple’s previous strategy to ramp up deliveries prior to the launch of new products.

The report does also mention that Apple expects to take “deliveries of over eight million MacBook Airs in the third quarter”. However, as MacRumors has pointed out, that figure is extremely large and actually represents double the amount of all Macs sold in the second quarter.

[Via DigiTimes]

iPhone 4: A Retrospective, One Year Since It Launched

Today is June 24, 2011. Believe it or not, it has already been one year since the iPhone 4 went on sale across the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan to literally millions of people who eagerly waited in line to get their hands on the latest and greatest iPhone yet. The history of the iPhone 4 has been remarkable, controversial and fascinating, filled with prototype leaks, criminal investigations, amazing technology, scandals, mystical white unicorns, new carrier allegiances and more. Come along with me as we mark the one-year anniversary of the iPhone 4 with a walk down memory lane.

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