Launch day for us, too Thursday, July 10th, 2008

It’s been a great day at Pinch Media. Not only have we seen a lot of developers’ hard work come to fruition with the launch of the AppStore, we released just a first taste of data – really, just a smidgen of what’s to come, and it met with an extremely favorable response. (We aim to please – subscribe to the Pinch Media blog, and we’ll do our best to keep you informed on a regular basis.) And now I’m pleased to announce that we’re ending the day by rolling out some new features. Jesse Rohland and Rob Marini have just deployed a new version of the Pinch Analytics library and the Pinch Media developer site.

There’s a lot in this release, but the feature we’re proudest of (and the feature developers requested the most) is customizable, flexible action tracking. Is there something within your application that’s important to you? Now you can use the Pinch Analytics library to measure it, whatever it is. And we’re not just talking ‘number of actions’ here – this is more than some simple counter. Length of actions can be measured as well – so not only can you tell that the ‘Hello world!’ button was pressed 2,132 times, you can tell that it takes your users an average of 3 minutes and 13 seconds to complete level 1. There’s really not much you can’t measure, because we’re not limiting action tracking to a counter or a length of time – we can also tell you how many unique users experienced an event (pressed a button, completed an action, you name it), the number of application sessions that contained an event, and several other metrics.

Now that this is released and added to the rest of Pinch Analytics’ rich feature set, we think we’ve got an incredible toolset for the optimization of your iPhone application business. Want to understand just what features your users use the most (or the least), so you can focus on these areas? Need to know how fast your users are progressing through your game, or worried you’ve made a level too hard to get through? Need to see how many page views your application’s generating per session? There’s nearly an infinite number of ways this could be used – in combination with your skills as a developer – to make your iPhone application better and delight your users. And it’s all done using an extremely small memory footprint, without any clunky overhead. (To get started, just log in or register here. It’s free.)

Pinch Media’s sole goal is to help developers establish and grow their own independent businesses – and that’s behind every decision we make and every feature we put out there. If you’re a developer, and you need something, please get in touch – we’re proud of Pinch Analytics, but we think we can make it even better, and we always love hearing ideas for entirely new product and services.

iPhone application price distribution Thursday, July 10th, 2008

UPDATE 7/11/08: The launch date +1 data is out – up to 652 applications! See our latest blog post for the details and an updated chart. There’s more data coming in the days and weeks, but we won’t be adding it to old posts – so be sure to subscribe to our blog!

On AppStore launch, Pinch Media counted 552 applications – 417 of them paid, 135 of them free. (EDIT: Things are moving – we’re up to 559 applications at 7:00 PM EDT, 421 paid / 138 free. More data tomorrow.) Paid applications ranged in price from $0.99 to $69.99, with the most common price points being $0.99 (85 applications), $9.99 (82 applications), and $4.99 (62 applications). We’ve put together a bar graph of iPhone application price distribution, below.

iPhone Application Price Distribution

Pinch Media is dedicated to helping iPhone developers establish and grow their businesses. In addition to our free tools, we also distribute data about the iPhone marketplace. Subscribe to our blog for more updates on the evolution of the iPhone marketplace in the weeks ahead.

Congratulations! Thursday, July 10th, 2008

The AppStore is out! Congratulations to all the developers who got their applications in for launch – may your sales be brisk and your businesses grow! I’m off to spend the next few hours installing applications…

New York iPhone Software Developers Meetup Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

If you’re in the New York area, and you’re developing for the iPhone, we’d like to make sure you know about the New York iPhone Software Developers Meetup – our second Meetup, and our first after WWDC. Next Monday, July 7th at 7:00 PM – exact details are on the Meetup site. Joshua Keay from Magnetism Studios and I will be sharing some speaking time – I’ll do some general speaking about iPhone application business models, and Joshua will be talking about indie development as a business. Hope to see you all there!

Pinch Analytics & client-side caching Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

At Pinch Media, we make sure everything we do takes into account the incredible iPhone and iPod Touch platform our products run on. Usually we’re taking advantage of additional features, like the iPhone’s incredible location-aware frameworks, but sometimes we’re dealing with limitations. The iPhone is powerful, but like all mobile devices, the iPhone is much less powerful than a desktop computer, and like all mobile devices, the cellular connection is often imperfect. On the subway, in the dead spot on your freeway commute, while out enjoying nature somewhere remote – your connection isn’t always going to be at full strength 100% of the time.

Today I want to point out one of the advanced features of Pinch Analytics we’re especially proud of: client-side event caching. We built this to accommodate non-existent and low-strength connections on the iPhone, as well as the uncertain connectivity of the wifi-only iPod Touch. Whenever an event occurs but there’s not a speedy connection, it’s written into storage on the iPhone / iPod Touch and remains there in a compressed format until connectivity is present at a later date. As far as the reporting’s concerned, it’s as if the iPhone’s connection was always strong. I was in South America recently, with my iPhone in airplane mode to avoid obscene data charges, and used applications with Pinch Analytics installed the whole time. When I returned – the reporting was complete.

Working with intermittent connectivity is essential for accurate analytics and advertising reporting, and I believe we’re the only iPhone-dedicated product to do this right. But this feature is only one small piece of what’s necessary to fully optimize for the iPhone. Our development team has years of experience building and optimizing applications for the Mac, and we’re confident we’ve got the best product with the best performance – to try it for yourself, register now.

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