- The NASA app for the iPhone entered the top charts worldwide.
- The Barnes & Noble eReader runs on Android. Will it support Android applications and the Android Market?
- Google Wave will get an app store.
- TomTom made $4.8M revenue in Q3 2009 with its iPhone applications.
- Google announced free navigation for Android.
- The Vodafone 360 App Store has launched.
- The Apple App Store is available in China.
Archive for October, 2009
Recap of this week’s app store news
Saturday, October 31st, 2009The Apple App Store hits China
Friday, October 30th, 2009
Mashable reports that the Unicom starts selling the iPhone today in China. As expected, it lacks WiFi. However, Unicom says (Yi Difei, Unicom spokesman) that they are talking with Apple about including WiFi in the next iPhone release:
We are talking with Apple and expect the problem to be solved by the end of this year
The major problem for Unicom right now is that the iPhone is available on the black market.
In August, we reported on the Games category being not available on the Chinese App Store. On October 23 however, the Games category became available, providing game developers access to the large Chinese market.
Vodafone 360 App Store Launches Tomorrow (Update: Launched)
Thursday, October 29th, 2009At the end of September, Vodafone announced 360, “A Suite of Innovative, New Internet Services for Mobile and PC”:
- An address book that integrates with social networks.
- A collection of applications, games, music and maps for mobile phones, PC and Mac.
- A phone backup service for contacts and other phone content.
- An app store with around 1,000 applications.
For us the most interesting part of course is the app store. There are however very little details enclosed. This is all Vodafone has announced so far:
a catalogue of over one thousand Apps at launch available to different handsets, downloadable through the Vodafone Shop
We are very curious what kind of platforms the store will support. Most likely there will be a strong focus on mobile widgets.
Several sources have confirmed that Vodafone 360 will be launching to consumers tomorrow. The 360 website changed from promotional material to the image below, indicating that the launch is getting close:
Vodafone 360 website
360 will launch in Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK and will be followed by launches in a number of other countries in 2010, including India, Turkey, South Africa, New Zealand, Romania and France.
More info tomorrow.
UPDATE: Vodafone 360 was launched.
The Vodafone 360 website has been displaying both the new service but also ‘work in progress’ image over the last hours. It seems Vodafone is in the process of going live, but not fully accessible yet.
Google Announces Free Navigation For Android
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009Google just announced their turn-by-turn Google Maps Navigation application for Android 2.0. Best of all, it’s free.
A few hours ago we reported on TomTom’s Q3 2009 results, asking how these would be influenced in the coming months due to the upcoming turn-by-turn application from Google. Well, from the first impressions, we can conclude that it will be extremely hard for all these paid navigation apps to compete with this full featured free app from Google.
Visit TechCrunch for more impressions of the app.
TomTom’s Revenue From The Apple App Store: $4.8M (Q3 2009)
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009TomTom just announced their financial results for the third quarter of 2009. Overall, TomTom’s profit decreased significantly from €58M in Q3 2008 to €28M in Q3 2009. They sold almost 2.6M ‘Personal Navigation Devices’ (PND), and they registered close to 80.000 downloads of their iPhone applications. Revenue resulting from all PND’s was €255M.
We are interested in seeing how much revenue their iPhone applications accounts for. In order to determine this, we need to take into account the prices of their applications:
TomTom Application Pricing
When we multiply the average price for a TomTom iPhone app ($86, assuming US pricing) with the amount of apps sold in the third quarter, this results in $6.9M total revenue. Taking into account Apple’s 30% revenue share, we can conclude that TomTom made about $4.8M revenue from the Apple App Store. This is just a fraction of TomTom’s total revenue from PND’s in the third quarter (€255M), however, profit per application sold will be much higher than for the physical devices they sell. Additionally, we need to take into account that the TomTom app was released halfway through the quarter.
It will be interesting to see how TomTom’s revenue will develop on the short term, especially since Google is rumoured to be developing a free turn by turn navigation app.
UPDATE: Google just announced Google Maps Navigation; new post coming up.
Google Wave To Get An App Store
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Google Wave
According to BusinessWeek, Google is very likely to build an app store for Google Wave. BusinessWeek spoke to Lars Rasmussen, Google’s software engineer manager who directs the Wave team: “So many developers have asked us to build a marketplace – and we might do a revenue-sharing arrangement.”
Google of course hopes that developers will build applications for Wave that make the communication platform even more attractive, the same approach as Apple and other manufacturers and operators use for making their platforms more useful and fun.
A challenge for Google would be to let the apps work with any device Google Wave is compatible with. The Apple App Store has been so succesful because of the ease of development for the few iPhone models out there; for Google Wave this could be different, because of the multitude of devices Wave will support.
However, Wave attracts significant attention among developers already. Since Wave’s introduction in May, developers have developed hundreds of add-ons for the service, according to Rasmussen.
Will Barnes & Noble’s eReader Support Apps?
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Last week, Barnes & Noble officially launched the nook, a touchscreen-based color eReader device, to rival Amazon.com’s bestselling Kindle. The nook runs on Google’s Android OS, resulting in the ability to support Android applications, next to the eBooks that B&N offers through its store on the device.
Currently, the Android Market is not present on the device, but rumors are starting to appear that it will support Android Market very soon. Supporting applications would offer a wide range of new possibilities of the device to consumers and could help to set the nook apart from its heavy competition. The most important requirements to be able to run Android apps are in fact already in place: the device runs the correct version of Android to support the Android Market and its apps, and has wireless connectivity. However, there is one barrier.
The nook uses AT&T’s 3G network to let consumers download and purchase eBooks when no free Wifi network is available. B&N partnered with AT&T to provide this 3G connection free of charge to end users for using the eBook store. This makes sense for B&N, because they directly generate revenue from the store. But if you put the Android Market on the device, the data consumers use will go up tremendously, and B&N will not generate direct revenue from this.
We think there could be three ways for B&N to allow the Android Market and applications on the nook:
- The Android Market will only be accessible via free Wifi connection, no 3G.
- B&N will take a revenue share from applications sold through the Android Market.
- Consumers can purchase additional 3G data plans to support other services outisde the B&N eBook store (e.g. the Android Market and its apps)
NASA App for iPhone Entering Top Charts Worldwide
Monday, October 26th, 2009
NASA released its iPhone App, “Nasa App for iPhone”, two days ago (October 24th, iTunes link). It has been doing very well in the first three days of existence. As we analyze all apps worldwide, we gathered some statistics on how well this app is doing:
- Right now, the app is ranked number one in the Education category in 44 countries (out of 77 countries in total)
- The app entered the Education Top 100 in almost every country where the App Store is available (73), with an average rank of 2.4.
- Of all 77 countries, the Nasa App entered the free Top 100 Overall in 40 countries, with an average rank of 27
There are more apps that showed similar performance on the first few days after launch, for all of them however it was hard to maintain this position for a long time.
Recap of this week’s app store news
Friday, October 23rd, 2009- Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in its 4th Quarter (ending Sept. 26), and since the App Store’s launch, 2 billion apps were downloaded
- The Palm App Catalog is now -partly- accessible in your browser
- Free apps have entered the Top Grossing ranking lists on Apple’s App Store because of in-app purchasing now being possible for these apps
- BlackBerry App World is rumored to support themes, from November 9th
BlackBerry App World to offer more than apps?
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Blackberry App World
BlackBerry App World has been live since April this year and is available in 18 countries. The store now contains 2,998 applications. For an overview of the most popular content and pricing, see our latest free report. In the store applications in the common application categories are available. Now several rumors point to support for more than applications.
BlackBerry App World is rumored to support themes from November 9th. Nokia is already offering more content than applications and games in its store. From the Ovi Store launch, personalization items such as themes and ringtones, and audio & video have been filling half the store. Will the same happen for BlackBerry?
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