App store analytics provider Distimo in its latest report once again focuses on in-app purchases across a variety of mobile application stores, Apple’s App Store in particular.
According to Distimo, the percentage of applications with in-app purchases is significantly higher in the App Store for iPad (10%) compared to that for the iPhone (2%). → Read More
App store analytics startup Distimo just released its May report, and zoomed in on the average number of days applications across various categories maintain their top rankings in Apple’s App Store. Analyzing data collected from November 2009 to April 2010, the company found that paid applications in the Top Overall, Games, Business and Entertainment categories stay in these categories for 27, 39, 59 and 38 days on average, respectively.
Free applications stay in the Top 100 for a significantly shorter time in those categories, with 19, 21 and 39 days on average, respectively. The exception to the rule seems to be the Entertainment category, in which free apps stay in the Top 100 for a slightly longer period of time than paid applications; 43 days compared to 38 days. → Read More
French game developer Gameloft, listed on Euronext Paris, this afternoon shared its 2009 financial results with the world. The video game publisher achieved consolidated sales of €122.0 million – roughly $170 million – for 2009, up 11% compared to 2008.
The company also specified ‘iPhone revenue’, which presumably means its income from distribution of its games on both the iPhone and iPod Touch: in 2009, that number jumped 231% YOY to reach €17.6 million (approximately $25 million). → Read More
App store analytics company Distimo has released its December report on mobile apps, this time zooming in on the physical location of publishers in Google Android Market, and how the prices of their apps compares to those of developers in other countries.
Distimo found that publishers in the Euro zone (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain) tend to price their applications higher than those in the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Japan.
The average price of an Android app published by a developer in Europe is $4.42, which is 49% higher than publishers located in the United States ($2.96). For comparison, publishers in Japan price apps $2.28 on average, while the United Kingdom comes out at an average price of $3.31. → Read More
Apple has responded to the FCC’s request for information around its rejection of various Google and third party iPhone applications for the iPhone.
In short, Apple denies that they rejected the Google Voice application, but they go into great detail about how the Google Voice application hurts “the iPhone’s distinctive user experience.” All of those statements are either untrue, or misleading, or both.
The first part of Apple’s argument, that they never rejected the application, is “a total lie,” according to many sources with knowledge of the Google Voice application process.
The second part of Apple’s argument, that the Google Voice application hurts the iPhone’s distinctive user experience, is seriously misleading. I know this because I’ve become intimately familiar with the Google Voice service and applications over the last few months. See here, here, here and here, for example. I haven’t used the Google Voice app for the iPhone specifically, because it never launched. But I have been briefed by the Google team on two separate occasions on how the app would work over the last couple of months. Also, I’ve demo’d the Blackberry version of the app, and now use the Android version of the app. → Read More
A lone messenger has emerged from the impenetrable fortress that is Apple’s App Store, and his name is Phil Schiller. Earlier this week, John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote a lengthy column detailing the plight of Ninjawords (iTunes Link), a sleek iPhone dictionary that uses Wiktionary as its data source. Gruber wrote that the application had been rejected for including numerous common swear words, going on to write that “Apple censored an English dictionary.” Not so, says Schiller, who is Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing and is widely regarded as one of the more recognizable ‘faces’ of Apple, after Steve Jobs.
In a rare moment of semi-transparency, Schiller has written back to Gruber, on the record, in an attempt to point out errors in the original column. I’ve included an excerpt below, and you can find the full letter in Gruber’s post (it’s well worth reading if you’ve been tracking the App Store closely). → Read More
Over the last few days we’ve seen a lot of attention centered on the new iPhone application from Spotify, the so-called ‘iTunes Killer’ subscription service that lets you plays songs on demand from a library of millions of tracks. We still don’t know if that app is going to make it through Apple’s nebulous approval process, but it’s already got some possible competition: Grooveshark, a streaming music service that lets you stream nearly any song from its web interface, has its own iPhone app ready for release and it’s just about to submit it to Apple. Like Spotify, the application lets you search for any song you want and stream it from the cloud almost instantly.
Now Grooveshark just needs to face the daunting Apple approval process. So will it make it though unscathed? Almost certainly not. → Read More
Apple is really, really close to hitting 1 billion app downloads across the world, according to its new countdown page. If you download an app, you’ll be enrolled in a contest to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro. TechCrunch is holding its own contest in honor of this occasion. Whoever guesses when it will hit one billion, and is closest in minutes and seconds will get free TechCrunch T-shirt. Leave the guesses in comments; we’ll contact the winner.
Apple also featured the all-time top 20 apps, both paid and free. → Read More
Are iPhone app developers getting paid on time from Apple? Not all of them. On this iPhone developer forum, there are numerous threads from developers who are complaining about delays in payments for January and not being paid the amount of money the developers are in fact due from sales. And we’ve received one complaint directly from an iPhone app developer that Apple is late on its payments for January. Apple’s contract, which is embedded below, says that payment will be made to developers within 45 days of the end of the month. That would have been a week ago.
Developers are expressing a number of gripes with Apple that extend beyond just being paid on time. We also hear (and read) that reaching Apple by phone is a complete nightmare. Emails to Apple go unanswered and customer service reps put developers on hold for 30 minutes to an hour and sometimes hang up on callers after they’ve waited to speak to an agent. Email seems to work best. → Read More
Google’s official Android Developers and Mobile blogs haven’t been updated yet, but according to an e-mail from Eric Chu to mobile application builders first republished by Phandroid, Android Market will become available to users in Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and Poland in the coming weeks.
Hello,
I’m writing to let you know that Android Market will become available to users in Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and Poland in the coming weeks. You can now target these countries for your application(s) via the publisher website at market.android.com/publish. As we add support for additional countries, we will send out subsequent notifications to you. Note that your apps will not become available in these new countries unless you specifically select them in the publisher website.
Thanks for your support, and we look forward to continue working with you on Android Market.
Eric Chu, Android Market
Apple’s App Store has finally given developers the ability to release up to 50 promotional codes for their applications, allowing them distribute their apps to press and friends free of charge directly through the App Store.
While the feature may seem like a minor addition to most people, it will be a boon for developers looking to help spread the word about their new applications. Before now, developers looking to share their application with the press or friends would need to include them as part of Apple’s Ad Hoc program, which lets developers test their applications before they are deployed on the App Store. This was inconvenient, as the Ad Hoc program requires the UUID (a unique number tied to each device) of every phone that was participating, which most people don’t know how to find in the first place. → Read More
We have stumbled across a flaw in iPhone security that allows third party developers to update and execute arbitrary code from their applications at will, totally circumventing Apple’s App Store approval process. Normally, applications (and all of their updates) have to go through a lengthy review process before they’re posted to the App Store, as Apple combs through them to ensure they don’t do anything malicious or otherwise violate its Terms of Service. This exploit may give developers free rein.
The exploit stems from a benign trick that would otherwise seem trivial to most iPhone users. Whenever you launch an iPhone application, an image called ‘Default.png’ is briefly displayed while the app loads in the background. Applications developed in-house by Apple are able to use dynamic ‘Default.png’ images, which can be modified to do a number of things, like show the current date or display the contents of the app before it’s done loading. Until now third party developers have been stuck with static ‘Default.png’ images that could not be changed after the app had been installed. To get around the restriction, developer Patrick Collison figured out a workaround that tricks the iPhone’s code signing mechanisms into giving devs access to these dynamic launch images (for a full description of the trick, read his blog post). → Read More
