Apple Press Release:

In the two weeks ending January 3, customers spent over $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases, setting back-to-back weekly records for traffic and purchases. January 1, 2016 marked the biggest day in App Store history with customers spending over $144 million. It broke the previous single-day record set just a week earlier on Christmas Day.

“The App Store had a holiday season for the record books. We are excited that our customers downloaded and enjoyed so many incredible apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, spending over $20 billion on the App Store last year alone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We’re grateful to all the developers who have created the most innovative and exciting apps in the world for our customers. We can’t wait for what’s to come in 2016.”

These are some incredible numbers and unsurprisingly Apple dedicates a significant portion of the press release to spruiking how Apple creates and supports 1.9 million jobs in the U.S., 1.2 million jobs in Europe, and 1.4 million jobs in China.

Apple also details some of the most popular apps in the App Store:

Gaming, Social Networking and Entertainment were among the year’s most popular App Store categories across Apple products, with customers challenging themselves to Minecraft: Pocket Edition, Trivia Crack and Heads Up!, and staying in touch with friends and family using Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Snapchat. Games and subscription apps dominated this year’s top grossing titles including Clash of Clans, Monster Strike, Game of War - Fire Age and Fantasy Westward Journey, as well as Netflix, Hulu and Match.

The launch of the all-new Apple TV® and Apple Watch® have paved the way for entirely new app experiences, changing how people consume content through their television and providing useful information at a glance on Apple’s most personal device yet. Since its launch in October, the new Apple TV’s most popular apps include Rayman Adventures, Beat Sports and HBO NOW. Chart-topping apps for Apple Watch owners include fitness apps Nike+ Running and Lifesum, and iTranslate and Citymapper in the Travel category.

Curiously (or perhaps not), there was nothing in the press release specifically about the Mac App Store – which today celebrates its fifth anniversary (more on that shortly).

For the past two years, Gilad Lotan (Chief Data Scientist at Betaworks) has been collecting data from Apple’s App Store RSS feeds. Last week Lotan published nine interesting findings in a post on Medium – complete with over a dozen fascinating charts.

Here we can clearly see both weekly cycles in app usage, but also longer term trends throughout the year. Facebook Messenger, which relaunches as ‘Messenger’ in June, stays very close to the top position throughout the whole year, while both Viber and Tango start strong and slowly drifts down the chart. Find My Friends, on the other hand, displays high volatility — drastic changes in ranking, hence app engagement — especially throughout the summer months, and Twitter has clearly weekly cycles.

The best part of Lotan’s story is definitely the accompanying charts, which really help tell the story alongside his commentary. But here’s one more snippet to encourage you to read his whole article:

Here we look at new applications that not only reach a notable spot in the top chart, but also sustain it to some degree. As you can see below, a handful of these apps are music related: SongFlip (free music streaming), Musicloud (stream music from your Dropbox mp3’s), and Free Music HQ (what it sounds). Moments is the Facebook app that helps you find yourself in friends’ photos, and Triller helps users make music videos on their phones. There are also two applications that help upload content into Snapchat. See a trend here? Media, media, and more rich media!

Nick Statt, writing for The Verge, has a suggestion to make sure you end up using the app that’s right for you:

And therein lies the secret to finding the best apps: don’t use what works until you know it works better than the rest. In an era of free services and near-instant downloads, it often costs us nothing but our time and a little bit of effort to experiment with half a dozen products before settling on the one we’re most comfortable with. And nothing is ever perfect. No matter what we read, or how many stars or good reviews something has, it takes a firsthand investigation to see if it’s perfect for you.

This pretty much sums up the way I look at years of app coverage here at MacStories, and why I’m not a big fan of “the best app for X” roundups with a single recommendation. In today’s sea of mobile apps, “best” is a fleeting reward, often reset with weekly updates, semi-annual redesigns, features adopted by other apps, and discontinued services.

“What works for you” is, I think, a more approachable, relatable consideration. There’s an argument to be made about evaluating dozens of similar apps and pointing out an absolute “winner” in terms of amount of available features, stability, price, or other objective metrics, but a single “best” implies a one-size-fits-all nature that just doesn’t work with the App Store anymore. Maybe seven years ago, when you could count iPhone apps in the hundreds, but not today. To mention a recent example: I could say that 2Do is my favorite task manager or the one with the most customization options or free updates, but it’s not necessarily the best for everyone.

This is also why I strive to keep a fresh mind and stay curious about apps. The only way for me to stay on top of the ever-changing App Store ecosystem is to try as many apps as I can and challenge my preconceptions – always asking myself “Would this app make me save time, be more efficient, and work better?”.

Sometimes it’s not fun, it’s a time-consuming process, and it’s definitely not cheap, but, after all, this is what I chose to do. And it often pays off with some nice surprises.

Hwee-Boon Yar:

I wrote a couple of Ruby scripts and pulled charts from the iOS US app store using RSS feeds from Apple, downloaded the icons and extracted the primary colors used in each icon. I then wrote a Mac app to generate the numbers, charts and tables. The Newsstand category includes apps from several charts and did not have a separate paid app chart so while I have included the data for completeness sake, I wouldn’t be looking at it.

I extract the primary color from each icon and put them loosely into one of these color groups: red, green, blue, black, white and gray. If they are identified as black, white and gray, I look at their secondary color and try to place them into red, green, blue instead where possible (e.g a small, single blue letter on a white background might work better if it’s classified as blue instead of white).

The app icons for each chart are then stacked vertically. The taller a column is, the more commonly that color is used for icons in that chart.

The data was pulled over several days from 16 Dec to 22 Dec 2015.

You may remember a similar research by Stuart Hall from earlier this year. Hwee-Boon Yar’s builds upon it with more details for categories and a full breakdown of distribution of app icons. I’m always fascinated by these studies.

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore:

Apple’s App Store for iPhone and iPad is adding a new category—Shopping! It’s no secret that there’s been an explosion in online shopping and iOS has driven a lot of that growth. Thanks to an incredibly rich ecosystem and empowering technologies like Apple Pay, there’s no better way to compare prices, check reviews, and grab deals when on the go than iPhone, and no better place to sit back, browse, share, and check out than on iPad. And that’s probably why Apple is moving shopping apps out of Lifestyle and into a category all their own.

From Apple’s developer blog:

The new Shopping category is now available in all 155 App Store territories. This category makes it easy for iPhone and iPad users to find and enjoy apps that enhance the shopping experience—including mobile commerce apps, marketplace apps, coupon apps, and apps that incorporate Apple Pay.

Interesting that Apple has teamed up with some of the featured companies to run promotions to celebrate the new category. And it’s a smart move to do this before the holiday season, when millions of people will be buying gifts and browsing catalogues directly from their iPhones and iPads. Yet another example of just how much mobile has changed online commerce over the past few years – it needed its own App Store category.