All Articles Tagged app store

 

 

App Avalanche 5 promises more new, popular and free apps to check out and download to your iPhone at your whim. What you WON’T get is any mention of apps costing $999 — these apps are far more affordable and useful. If you don’t have the time to sift through hundreds of apps at the iTunes App Store, just take a look here for a summary. Read on for iPhone App Avalanche 5!

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Box Office is back. Only it’s been rebranded as Now Playing. Only you can’t find Now Playing in the App Store. But you can find Box Office. In iTunes. But not on the iPhone. Sorta.

Confusing much? We’re right there with you. We figure the name change is messing with the search systems, which will hopefully sort themselves out shortly. In any event…

Rumors have swirled since Apple pulled Box Office a few weeks back, covering everything from the name “Box Office” itself creating trademark issues, to Rotten Tomatoes objecting to their data being scraped, to the “donate” button violating the SDK, to Steve Jobs hating the exact shade of gray used for the inner bevel of the 3rd line down. There doesn’t seem to be any hard info yet on what the real reason was, though developer Cyrus “Metasyntactic” Najmabadi pegs the long (re)turn around time squarely on Apple (via Ars Technica):

I’ve gotten confirmation that they’re working to restore my app on the store, and I got an apology for the length of time it took to respond to me. I’m very happy by this turn of events, and I’m glad that apple will be letting me stay in the store

Najmabadi also promises several more improvements when (and hopefully not if), version 1.3 is released.

Don’t care about the why and what, just want to get it? Hit up the App Store (iTunes link) and let us know how you like it!

Confession 1: Soon as the App Store opened, I started downloading. Free apps mainly, but I bought more than I thought I would as well.

Confession 2: I don’t use most of them regularly. I mean, I use the built-in apps all the time, daily if not near-constantly in the case of Phone, Mail, and Safari. But the App Store stuff? Eh…. A couple have become regulars but most are occasional at best and some I no longer even bother to store on the iPhone (i.e. they’ve been relegated to iTunes purgatory.)

60 million downloads, 30 million in sales, and Steve Jobs thinks it could be a billion dollar business. So somebody must be using them, right?

Om Malik consulted Greg Yardley of Pinch Media (which tracks user behavior and provides statics based on that behavior for iPhone Apps) who says that, based on their sampling (which they themselves say currently consists of only a few developers), less than 20% of users return to an App at least once a day, and of them, the average time spent on an App is 5 minutes.

By way of contrast, however, Casey already posted some pretty staggering numbers from the big players like Facebook and Loopt who are seeing tons of usage.

UPDATE: Greg Yardley, in the comments below, points out that Facebook numbers are not necessarily inconsistent with Pinch Media’s.

Hmmm… Could it be that the App Store is still in its honeymoon, right smack in the middle of a little developer gold rush, where for every Apple Remote there’s a dozen (okay, 3 dozen) “I am Rich” / Flashlight applications? Since there’s no demo or beta, its easy to download free apps and moderately easy to take risks on under $10 apps, and come up less than thrilled.

All usage numbers tell us for now is that there aren’t — yet — enough really killer apps, but at the same time so many developers and companies are becoming involved, the odds of another — and another — killer app coming are getting better and better.

So, no I’m not using my iPhone Apps a lot, but I expect better apps to come along that demand I use them a lot more.

So you’ve been running on iPhone 2.0 (hopefully, 2.0.1) for a while now. And you’ve all enjoyed the plethora of quality apps at the App Store, but did you know how well the App Store was actually doing? Well, according to one of those old reputable printing press companies, pretty darn well.

The App Store holds a current pace of earning a revenue of over a million dollars a day, which roughly translates to $360 million a year. Steve Jobs issued some resounding statements about the App Store saying,

“This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” he added. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time.” and also said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software”

Though the WSJ doesn’t believe Apple will be able to derive much profit in this current 70/30 split since they only make enough money to cover credit card transactions and maintaining the App Store itself, Jobs believes that having such a direct pipeline of apps will be able to sell more iPhones much like how iTunes enabled more sales of iPods.

So yeah, that App Store is doing great. Who would have thought an easy-to-use, iTunes-like interface would revolutionize the mobile software industry? Best of luck catching up RIM, WinMob, Android..

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For the last week or so I’ve been beta testing a well known iPhone application. Beta testing involves using the 100 iPhone “Ad Hoc” distribution method first outlined at WWDC 2008. I was planning on writing up the process, and my experiences being involved in it (all straightforward, all great — all definitely far more work for developers than testers) when, thankfully for all involved, one of the foremost iPhone devs, Craig Hockenberry of Twitteriffic fame, went and did it the way it should be done.

Interested in Ad Hoc distribution and how iPhone beta testing works? Get you to reading over at his site, Furbo.org.

Meanwhile, Erica Sadun over at TUAW presents a very well though out essay on how Apple could (and should?) improve the App review process with more objectivity, consistency, and transparency.

In [redacted] NDA land, John Gruber over at Daring Fireball offers an interesting theory, via a reader: what if it’s all about patent protection? Seems Apple might start the clock ticking when the NDA is lifted, and the technology gets published, and their lawyers may not have all the dots and crosses in place yet.

Finally, is it time to put BoxOffice on a milk carton yet?

As Rene just mentioned in the previous post, we’re getting sales numbers for various iPhone apps and these sales numbers are very, very promising. John Casasanta of development house Tap Tap Tap hit us up on our tip line about his article on the sales figures at the App Store.

Early on, folks in the Blogosphere were able to get a handle on sales figures simply by checking the download count at the bottom of each page. Apple apparently decided that developers might just want to keep some of that info private, so that was taken down around the same time that Apple started actually delivering real sales numbers to developers. Many of these developers, as Rene mentioned, are just going ahead and publishing these sales numbers despite, as Casasanta says, traditional business instincts to hide exact numbers because they don’t want to seem to be bragging or (if things aren’t going well), failing.

But these numbers are news because of their sheer size — it’s almost as if developers are compelled to share in the same way we might if we’d, say, won the lottery. “Look, I know it’s not nice to brag, but Holy Crap Look At This.”

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The iPhone App Store Avalanche continues, with seemingly dozens of new Apps popping up every day (though no word yet on NetShare or Box Office!), but as busy as things look out front, they’re just as busy behind the scenes.

So what’s going on? Business. It’s booming. (At least if your customers aren’t getting error codes -4 or 5002 when trying to access iTunes!) Apple began to report download stats to developers, and some developers have begun to share those stats with the blogsphere.

What do they say? Read on to find out!

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Box Office is missing. No, we’re not talking about the gross from the latest Eddie Murphy “film”, we’re talking about the iPhone App. While NetShare remains in its very own little Schrodinger’s App box, some carriers’ (AT&T, Rogers, etc.) prohibition against tethering and Nullriver’s Installer.app/Cydia roots makes the drama at least somewhat fathomable. What about Box Office?

Box Office is (was?) an App that used either manually entered or CoreLocation derived positional information to show you a list of theaters and movies playing within a user-definable radius (e.g. 10 miles). Users could “favorite” certain theaters to bump them to the top, and quickly click through the RottenTomatoes or MetaCrytic reviews, movie information, etc. In other words, it was a useful piece of software in the otherwise incredibly high noise to signal ratio (i.e. CrApps to quality) the initial App Store land rush has given us.

And now it’s gone.

Yup. For the last couple days, clicking on the Box Office link returns an iTunes error saying the app is not available in (your country) store. Posting on the MacRumors forums, developer Metasyntactic, claims not to know why it was pulled either (after the jump):

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It’s the end of July and there’s still plenty of summer left, so snow and avalanches are still many months away. Fortunately, any time of year is perfect for an App Avalanche, and there are always new and updated apps in the App Store for your iPhone. It’s time for App Avalanche 3!

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At the TechCrunch Mobile Web Wars event (basically a Silicon Valley roundtable discussion), the topic of conversation often turned towards, you guessed it, your favorite gadget, the iPhone. Many Execs were claiming that the traffic generated by the iPhone is extraordinary and the amount of apps downloaded in a matter of weeks are jaw-dropping.

Here are the notable facts and figures:

• Pandora has been available for 18 months in other mobile platforms which resulted in 12,000 monthly subscriptions to the service. In 6 days with the iPhone…350,000 installs on the iPhone.
• And before you cry foul because of the paid vs free debate, Pandora says that the App Store lets the company make money through ads whereas on other devices they were forced into a subscription method.
• 1 million Facebook users downloaded the Facebook App
• Average iPhone user is 47 times as active on Loopt as those on other phones

It wasn’t all cheery for the iPhone though, Vice President of S60 software technology management David Rivas continues to claim that his devices can do everything that the iPhone and also offers hundreds of millions of users to choose from. But Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous (TTR and Twinkle), fired back saying you need a “developer environment and a delivery channel” to capitalize on those users.

Right now the iPhone does. And everyone else doesn’t. Zing.

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