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Posts tagged with "app store"

Date Night: App Store Gets Valentine’s Apps

With Valentine’s Day quickly approaching (mark your calendars, gentlemen) Apple thought it might be appropriate to launch a new dedicated App Store section to showcase apps that can turn out to be useful on that day. Like Yelp and OpenTable (because you want to go to a classy restaurant, right?), OkCupid and iLoveYou in 50 Languages. Apps can be romantic too.

If you don’t feel like going to a fancy place with your loved one, you can follow some cooking advice with the 20 Minute Meals app, featured as well. Oh, and if the dinner turns out to be a disaster, you can call a cab with Taxi Magic.

Date Night: App Store Essentials is available here.

App Store Gets Official Twitter Account

It looks like Apple has just started sharing status updates with an official @AppStore account on Twitter. The account isn’t verified yet but its first tweet has been retweeted by the already verified @iTunesMusic. So why is the App Store on Twitter? Well, according to the first public message:

Welcome to App Store on Twitter! Follow us to discover new apps, get exclusive offers, and share with friends.

It will be interesting to follow the tweets from this account closely and see if they mirror the apps Apple features every Friday on the App Store homepage. This new account expands the set of official Apple services and personalities on Twitter.com: @iTunesMusic and @iTunesTrailers tweet new material from the iTunes Store on a daily basis and @pschiller has been busy sharing Instagram pictures lately. Apple is also active on Facebook and Youtube, where all the commercials and keynotes end up in HD.

On a side note, Scott Forstall hasn’t tweeted yet.

Update: the account is verified now. [Thanks, Florian]

Oh, Satire: An App Store for App Stores

What’s better than Apple’s App Store with its 350,000 apps available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch? An App Store to download other App Stores. Chris Genetti at Draconum has imagined the following scenario: an App Store for iOS and OS X that lets you download, manage and update a variety of stores like the App Store itself, the Android market and the Kindle store.

The problem is, he may actually be right. We’re surrounded by app stores. Anyway, pretty funny.

App Store: 10 Billion Apps Downloaded

It’s official: 10 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The competition Apple launched to celebrate the new milestone has ended, and Apple is now projected towards the next milestones, 15 billion apps and 20 billion apps.

The App Store was launched in 2008, when the only iPhones available were the original iPhone and the 3G. In January 2010 App Store downloads topped 3 billion; the downloads became 5 billion during summer 2010. Thanks to the enoermous success of the iPad and iPhone, Apple added another 5 billion downloads in 6 months.

Will we see 20 billion apps by the end of 2011?

Flight Control Lands Nearly 4 Million Sales

Firemint, which recently acquired Infinite Interactive has posted on it’s blog some sales statistics of it’s popular Flight Control game that is currently featured in Apple’s Top Paid Apps of all time. As of the post it had sold 3,881,634 copies and has raked in $3.8 million dollars and that’s after Apple 30% take.

As demonstrated by the graph it released that is shown above (click for larger size) it’s pretty clear that Christmas and big feature updates really helped increase sales of the game. In particular the addition of Game Center support led to a peak of 120,000 sales, the largest peak since the release of the app. The new maps update and Retina display support were the other notable peaks.

Also notable is the sales by country, as the graph below the break shows, the US has the lion’s share followed by Great Britain, Australia and Germany.

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Cydia Adds Ability to Easily View All Your Past Purchases

Cydia, the App Store equivalent for all those jailbreak required apps that Apple has or would deny, has just received a handy new feature that allows you to view in one place all the packages that you have purchased from the Cydia store.

Jay Freeman, creator of Cydia has been working hard in recent months to improving Cydia in many ways from decreasing the all to common “Reloading” times, improving the polish and adding new features. This new feature has been a fairly common suggestion not only for Cydia but the App Store too, which whilst present in the Mac App Store has yet to reach iOS App Store - something which those of us at Macstories are hopeful Apple will add in the near future.

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How Many iPhone Apps Are There? 306,554 - And 60,000 iPad Apps

Looking at the “All-Time Top iPhone Apps” charts Apple updated earlier today, I noticed two interesting numbers worth to be shared: Apple is listing the actual number of free and paid iPhone apps available in the App Store. There are 306,554 iPhone apps available, and 201,635 of them are paid apps. These numbers are noteworthy as Apple rarely provides official stats of the iPhone App Store: they announced the 300,000 apps milestone on November 22 with the release of iOS 4.2 but there never was an easy way to instantly check on the exact number of apps available in the Store. Read more

Ahead of 10 Billion Downloads, Apple Updates “All-Time Top Apps” Page

The clock’s ticking on the 10 billion app downloads countdown, and Apple has updated its “All-Time Top Apps” page to reflect the changes that have occurred in the App Store in the past 12 months. The iTunes pages that showcase “All-Time Top Paid iPhone Apps” and “All-Time Free iPhone Apps” are available here and here, respectively.

Unsurprisingly, games are among the top paid apps. And by games, we mean Doodle Jump, Angry Birds, Pocket God and Flight Control. Actual “apps” in the top paid list include SoundHound (the music scanning / discovery tool), I Am T-Pain from Smule, Air Sharing from Avatron and Awesome Note. The list is huge as it basically sorts any iPhone app ever released by popularity and sales in the App Store. It is nice, however, to see gems like 1Password, Convertbot and Hipstamatic in the first page.

As for free apps, the usual Facebook, Pandora, Google and Shazam are the most downloaded apps of all time. Paper Toss, Bump, Skype and AroundMe are in there, too, together with dozens of other games in the first page.

These charts give us an idea of the trends in the App Store, and the kinds of apps that people want to buy or download for free. Where by “apps” we mean games. [via iSpazio]