Posts Tagged ‘Apple App Store’

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New Apple App Store Category ‘explicit’?

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

In the past few days a lot of buzz went around about the removal of more or less explicit sexual content apps from the Apple App Store. Apps like Wooble iBoobs, were removed from the store while other explicit apps like the Playboy app remained. In total 5,000 apps, are said to be pulled away. From our data we saw a decrease over the weekend of 2,000 apps. This most likely is the first weekly decline since the store launched.

Now developers that are trying to add new apps through iTunesConnect, can select a new category (screenshot) called ‘explicit’, however the category doesn’t show up in the actual App Store yet. We’ll keep you posted if Apple will launch this category anytime soon.

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Distimo Report – December 2009

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
It is our pleasure to release our monthly Distimo Report, based on December 2009 data. Distimo Report Logo
This report covers five application stores: Apple App Store, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store and Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

This month’s most important findings are:

  • In Google Android Market, 65% of the publishers are located in the United States, 12% in the United Kingdom, 20% in Europe and 3% in Japan.
  • Publishers located in Europe price their applications highest with an average of $4.42, which is 49% higher than publishers located in the United States.
  • Applications in Apple App Store, Google Android Market and Nokia Ovi Store are priced at around $3.50. Windows Marketplace for Mobile and BlackBerry App World are more expensive, averaging $6.99 and $8.26 respectively.
  • Because of Microsoft’s market validation guidelines and additional fees for distributing applications in more than one country, the number of applications available in some countries is only a small percentage (<5%) of applications available worldwide.

You can download the report here.

This report was covered on TechCrunch here.

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Posted in Android Market, Apple App Store, BlackBerry App World, Distimo Report, Nokia Ovi Store, Windows Marketplace | 1 Comment »

Apple App Store Tops 130,000 Applications Available

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Apple App Store Tops 130,000 Applications Available

Apple App Store Tops 130,000 Applications Available

As of today, the Apple App Store contains well over 130,00 applications: 131,562 to be exact. The store keeps growing at a rapid pace; on January 5th, Apple announced that they reached the milestone of three billion downloads. Just over 3 months ago, the store contained 85,000 applications.

Hence the amount of applications added in the past three months amounts to about 500 a day. When comparing these number with the numbers of one week ago, we can see that the Business category grew fastest, with 763 applications added in just one week. The category with the largest percentage of applications added since last week is Books, which grew 4.81%.

We have updated appstores.info with this information.

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Posted in Apple App Store | 2 Comments »

Apple’s Black Friday Featured Apps

Monday, November 30th, 2009

To celebrate Black Friday, Apple put up a new section titled “App Store Essentials – Black Friday”. As we monitor all apps worldwide, we are able to track the influence of this promotion on the rankings of the featured applications.

Below you can find the rankings of these apps in the category they were published in:

Black Friday Rankings

Santa’s List – Christmas Gift Organizer entered the Productivity Top 100 because of the promotion, as well as Pocket Price (Lifestyle) and TheFind (Lifestyle), all achieving a ranking of 33 or better. Christmas Gifts List even entered the Overall Top 100 because of the promotion.

Being one of the apps in these promotional places greatly influences rankings and hence downloads, as we have seen before with “Apps for Everything” and “App Store Picks“. We will keep you posted on other promotional events by Apple.

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Posted in Apple App Store | 1 Comment »

Most Popular Apps In The Chinese App Store

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

At the end of October, the Apple App Store was officially launched in China with the operator Unicom selling the first iPhones. The App Store was however already accessible in China at the end of August, but lacking the Games category. After three weeks of iPhone sales in China, we decided to make an overview of the most popular content.

These are the 20 most popular paid applications, since the launch of the iPhone in China:

Most popular paid apps in Chinese App Store since iPhone launch

Most popular paid apps in Chinese App Store since iPhone launch

A few takes from this:

  • Games are now supported in the Chinese Apple App Store
  • Prices for paid content are in USD
  • From the top 20, half of the applications are specifically aimed at Chinese users
  • 9 out of 20 top applications are Games, compared to 11 out of 20 for the US App Store (see for more details on the US app store our latest report).

These are the 20 most popular free applications, since the launch of the iPhone in China:

Most popular free apps in Chinese App Store since iPhone launch

Compared to the most popular paid apps, a few things catch our attention:

  • 13 out of 20 top titles are Games
  • 8 of the top 20 applications are specifically aimed at Chinese users

As the Wall Street Journal reports, there are big opportunities for developers in the Chinese App Store. Especially if the billing methods, that are now limited to credit card improve, because credit cards are not common for Chinese consumers yet.

We will keep tracking the applications in the Apple App Store in China and will report whether it will continue to offer a large proportion of local content.

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Distimo Report October 2009: In-App Purchasing And Cross-Store Developers

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Every month we publish a report highlighting trends in the different mobile app stores. Distimo Report for October 2009 is now available.

The report covers the Apple App Store, Google Android Market and RIM’s BlackBerry App World.

You can download the free report here.

New and noteworthy:

  1. Developers publishing applications in multiple application stores price their applications lowest on Apple’s App Store.
  2. The same application titles are priced significantly higher on BlackBerry App World and Google Android Market than on the Apple App Store.
  3. On the Apple App Store, Games and Social Networking applications have benefited most from in-app purchasing for free applications.
  4. BlackBerry App World prices have been increasing since mid-October, from $5.11 to $5.60 (+9.6%), while pricing on the Apple App Store and Google Android Market have remained fairly stable.
Developpublishing applications in multiple application stores price their applications lowest on Apple’s App Store.
The same application titles are priced significantly higher on BlackBerry App World and Google Android Market than on the Apple
App Store.
On the Apple App Store, Games and Social Networking applications have benefited most from in-app purchasing for free applications.
BlackBerry App World prices have been increasing since mid-October, from $5.11 to $5.60 (+9.6%), while pricing on the Apple App
Store and Google Android Market have remained fairly stable

The report was covered by TechCrunch here.

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Posted in Android Market, Apple App Store, BlackBerry App World, Distimo Report | 7 Comments »

The 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.

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Posted in Apple App Store | 2 Comments »

TomTom’s Revenue From The Apple App Store: $4.8M (Q3 2009)

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

TomTom 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

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.

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Posted in Apple App Store | 1 Comment »

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

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Free Apps Penetrating Top Grossing Rankings on Apple’s App Store

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

With the release of iTunes 9, Apple introduced a new category, Top Grossing, ranking the apps that are grossing most on the App Store. The price point that occured most today was $4.99 among these 100 apps (27 apps priced at this pricepoint in the US). However, in some countries, free apps penetrate the top grossing ranks as well.

Yes indeed, this is caused by the fact that these free apps have implemented in-app purchases, which were introduced a few days ago. This results in free apps making revenue as well, and apparently, Apple takes into account these in-app purchases for determining rankings in the Grossing lists.

According to our data, which takes into account all countries worldwide, there have been 12 free apps that entered the overall grossing list on Apple’s App Store. Comics (iTunes link), even achieved a ranking of 7 in some countries, outperforming apps such as Fifa 10 (€7.99, rank 17) and Tweetie 2 (€2.39, rank 11).

We expect more free apps to enter the top grossing lists soon, as more free apps will implement in-app purchases and consumers getting more accustomed to buying items inside apps as well.

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Posted in Apple App Store | 1 Comment »

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