Posts tagged with "app store"

Apple Hits 50 Billion App Downloads

As expected, Apple has hit the 50 billion app downloads milestone today. The countdown that the company launched two weeks ago was updated with a new “Thanks” image on Apple’s servers earlier today, which is now publicly available across Apple.com and the iTunes Store. On Apple’s website, there’s a new photo of an iPad running Paper by FiftyThree and displaying “Thanks” as a handwritten note; on the promotion’s webpage, Apple writes “50 billion app downloads. One really big thank you”.

Apple will award an App Store gift card of $10,000 to the lucky customer who downloaded the 50 billionth app, plus a $500 App Store gift card to each of the next 50 people to download an app.

In the past five years, Apple shared various App Store download milestones: three billion apps had been downloaded by January 2010; 10 billion by January 2011; 15 billion in July 2011; for the 25 billionth app download in March 2012, Apple awarded  Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China — who downloaded  Where’s My Water? Free — with a $10,000 gift card. Apple announced 40 billion App Store downloads in January 2013, with 20 billion of them in 2012 alone.

The iOS App Store opened on July 10, 2008. After 1770 days (4 years, 10 months, 5 days), 50 billion app downloads make an average of over 28 million apps downloaded each day (28.2 million). In January 2013, Apple announced 500 million iOS devices had been sold; assuming the number jumped to 560 million after Apple’s Q2 2013 results, that would make an average of 89.3 apps downloaded for each iOS device sold.

According to Apple, “the grand prize winner will be announced soon”.

Marco On Free Trials→

Some great counterarguments by Marco Arment on the (annual) debate on App Store free trials.

Personally, I think that free trials would help the sales of apps priced at $9.99 and above. While it’s true that we, as geeks, tend to try as many apps as possible, I admit that I would feel uncomfortable with spending $40 on four apps that may not even be what I’m looking for. But I also agree that trials may create new problems for the “middle class” of apps that get tried but not bought. It’s a difficult problem to solve. Surely Apple must have better data and insight to corroborate whatever decision they’ll end up making.

From Marco’s post, I’d also highlight this footnote:

Abolishing the “top” lists from all App Store interfaces and exclusively showing editorially selected apps in browsing screens would do a hell of a lot more than trials to promote healthy app economics and the creation of high-quality software.

Exactly.

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Apple Reveals New “All-Time Top Apps” Following Countdown To 50 Billion Downloads

Alongside the countdown to 50 billion app downloads posted earlier today, Apple has also published a series of updated charts for the top downloaded apps of all time. Apple posted the same charts last year, after the App Store hit 25 billion downloads, and had done the same in January 2011 ahead of 10 billion downloads.

Apple’s charts of the Top 25 apps of all time provide a precious insight into the trends of the App Store for free and paid apps downloaded by iOS users on their iPhones and iPads. While the charts from 2012 and 2013 are largely similar in terms of presence of games and brands like Angry Birds and Facebook, there are some interesting differences worth noting.

Below, we have compiled the complete list of updated “all-time top apps”, alongside some notes about the differences from last year’s charts. Read more

Happy Birthday iTunes Store→

Good roundup of iTunes Store numbers (with subsequent inferences) by Horace Dediu.

I meant to include the following chart in our Q2 2013 overview, but I didn’t have time to create it. Below, you can see how the 850,000 App Store apps Apple touted last week are divided across the iPhone and iPad after the launch of each device’s App Store (July 2008 for iPhone, April 2010 for iPad).

The increase you see after the iPad’s 30th month corresponds to October 2012 – when Apple unveiled the iPad mini.

(click for full size)

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Lessons From The Yahoo Weather App→

Dan Frommer:

“Do we really need another weather app?” Actually, if it’s better, we do. Imagine if they’d stopped making new search engines after HotBot or new smartphones after the Samsung BlackJack.

I couldn’t agree more.

For free/inexpensive apps, the traditional rules of market saturation allow consumers to more comfortably try new apps; at the same time, annual OS updates enable developers to constantly experiment with more powerful technologies to fix problems consumers didn’t even think they had.

Apps are not refrigerators. With software, the diffusion of innovations is cyclic, and that’s why, as far as the App Store is concerned, editorial curation, smart recommendations, and new discovery algorithms will be key areas of improvement. We should never stop thinking about tomorrow.

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Apple Posts “Learn More About In-App Purchases” Page In iPad App Store→

Good move by Apple. The page contains screenshots, links to support documents, and a clear explanation of Parental Controls. Apple knows that In-App Purchases are usually bought by children using their parents’ devices, and they also made sure to explain the differences between IAPs to “remove ads” and “buy virtual food”.

It’s strange that the, in the US, the page is only featured on the iPad App Store.

This doesn’t fix the several other problems with In-App Purchases and developers exploiting the platform. Games like this shouldn’t be approved to begin with. Hopefully a section that highlights clever, genuine implementations of In-App Purchases is next.

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Apple Restricting Special Characters In App Descriptions→

Mikey Campbell:

As seen in the image above, Apple is no longer allowing developers to submit app description edits with the unique character sets, which in this case includes a checkmark, explosion, “no symbol” and a speech bubble. It is thought that others are included in the new restrictions, but that has yet to be verified.

It appears that Apple has also started restricting usage of glyphs that aren’t necessarily emoji.

I would welcome a change to text-only release notes. While emoji and other characters can add a bit of fun and personality to otherwise boring release notes, some developers were overusing them.

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AppShopper Is Back On The App Store

Speaking of App Store discovery services, AppShopper is back on the App Store today (after last year’s removal) with a brand new iPhone app called AppShopper Social:

Our original AppShopper app was removed from the App Store due to a conflict with a new set of App Store rules introduced last year. Since that time we’ve been hard at work creating a new app to continue to provide useful functionality to our users and also remain in compliance with Apple’s rules. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve released AppShopper Social. The new version of the app still contains the core Wish List functionality that we’ve always had, but also introduces a social discovery portion to the app.

AppShopper is, by far, my favorite service when it comes to finding new apps and receiving notifications for updates and price changes. I have been beta testing AppShopper Social for the past months, and I think the new version makes a lot of sense: rather than offering a better interface for the App Store charts, the main area is now a Stream of app recommendations from people you follow. You can follow websites like AppShopper and TouchArcade, or log in with your Twitter account and find friends who are using AppShopper. When I say that App Store discovery needs more human curation, this is exactly what I mean (in addition to the work Apple itself is doing with sections and collections).

The new app resembles the old version of AppShopper, if only with a fresh coat of paint. In the Stream, you can view All/iPhone/iPad/Universal apps, filter by category, type of app, and paid/free/both. Tapping on an app in the list opens the usual single app page with “I want it/I own it” buttons (the Wish List is still there), screenshots, description, changelog & app activity, and ratings by websites with a link to their reviews. Presenting App Store ratings mixed in with reviews from writers who do this professionally is a very welcome addition in my opinion.

There are some things in the new AppShopper that could be improved: the process of adding friends from Twitter could be further developed with a screen showing how many Twitter friends are also using the app, and, currently, it’s not possible to view a user’s complete profile to show all the apps he/she is recommending to others. I like the refreshed design of the app pages, but I’d like to see a list of friends who have recommended the app in there as well. And, of course, the app isn’t Universal yet and essential features like What’s New haven’t still been enabled as the AppShopper team is figuring out how to get them past Apple’s review process. Fortunately, the team also says they’re working hard on improving the app, and I’m looking forward to the next updates.

The App Store doesn’t come with any social features (besides sharing) or connections to reviews from trusted sources, and I believe AppShopper Social fills an important gap in terms of app discovery and recommendations.