Curious - unlike last week, there wasn’t a single update to the AppStore this Sunday or so far Monday morning. This might provide us with a bit of insight into Apple’s operating procedures - assuming application updates and additions resume again tonight, it’s quite consistent with a review team that works Monday through Friday, with applications approved that day either going live the same day or early the next morning.
A little more than a week in, the pace of new and updated application approval is one of the biggest causes of developer dissatisfaction - there seems to be no way to predict how long the process will take, since there’s no consistency from application to application. We’re all hoping that Apple both streamlines this process and provides developers with a clear indication of how long the process will take - based on their responsiveness to developer complaints over the past week, I can’t imagine improvements aren’t coming.
For those keeping score at home, there’s currently 877 applications in the AppStore, 665 (76%) paid, 212 (24%) free. Finally, in response to community requests, we’ve removed the ‘Books’ category from our regular applications feeds and added an RSS feed solely for them - if you’re a bibliophile like me, you can subscribe to it here.
Apple’s added the ‘Books’ category to the AppStore, and has moved the e-books released by AppEngines and others there. This is yet another quick response to user feedback, in line with the AppStore alphabetization tweaks - many thought the sheer number of e-books were spammy and complained.
The AppEngines e-books are nice - I’ve bought a couple, and even though it’s free, public-domain content, the work that’s gone into the application is worth the $0.99 to me. Personally see the AppStore e-books issue as a ‘business model failure’ on Apple’s part. Because it’s not possible to download the free application and then buy the content as you need it, companies like AppEngines have to release a new application for each book. This works for now, but I wonder if it scales. What happens when an e-book publisher partners with a real-world publisher, and ends up offering thousands of new titles - presumably for considerably more than $0.99?
Although I’m sure this isn’t an easy task, hopefully Apple will support additional revenue models in the future, including subscription-based models and paid downloadable content packs. (Some support for trial periods would be nice as well.) In the meantime, the creation of a ‘Books’ category is a good first step.
A bit of a housekeeping question: with the number of ‘Books’ in the AppStore undoubtedly about to increase, would you like to see them remain in Pinch Media’s RSS feeds or filtered out? AppEngines is providing us with an easy way to remove them, should the majority of readers want them gone.
We’re happy to announce today the release of a few new RSS feeds which provide a way to view activity in the Apple App Store without having to load up iTunes or the App Store on the iPhone yourself. The first two feeds are the most recent stream of new and updated applications added into the App Store updated hourly.
New applications feed
New free applications feed
Updated applications feed
We just started aggregating this data yesterday so the updated application feed is only based off of applications we’ve seen updated since yesterday. This feed will grow as we discover more applications releasing updated versions. The links inside of both of these feeds will take you directly into the App Store. If you’re using NetNewsWire on the iPhone, you’ll need to click “Open in Safari” for it to work. Loading the feed directly in mobile safari and clicking will load the application in the App Store just fine.
Our next two feeds are updated nightly and show the top 100 list of free and paid applications and also their ranking as of when we updated the list the previous day. Like the previous two feeds, clicking the links inside the feeds will take you directly into the App Store.
Top 100 free applications
Top 100 paid applications
Just like Pinch Analytics, we are releasing these feeds free of charge and they may be used however you’d like.
An interesting dynamic in the AppStore - for the first time since launch, ‘free’ is not the most popular application price. In addition, the percentage of applications that are free is falling. At launch, almost a quarter of applications were free. As of this morning, Pinch Media tracked 798 applications in the AppStore - 161 (20.2%) free, 637 (79.8%) paid. I’ve heard some theorize that Apple emphasized paid applications over free at launch, but this (admittedly-short) trend suggests that this isn’t the case - perhaps Apple wanted more free applications, but they simply weren’t forthcoming.
At the same time, competition among paid applications is leading to price cuts - Pinch Media has tracked 67 separate price drops since AppStore launch. Almost 69% of paid applications are now $4.99 or less and $0.99 is the most popular price point (with 188 applications, up from 85 just five days ago.) $9.99 remains the second-most popular price point for an application, but it’s a distant second with 96 applications.
A graph of current AppStore application price distribution is attached. Compare that to the graph at launch, less than a week ago.
Pinch Media records a lot of data as part of our reporting on the AppStore, but there’s a lot we deliberately don’t publish. For instance, we don’t report on reviews. Reviews are currently the easiest-to-manipulate aspect of the AppStore. A person doesn’t have to use the application to review it, and the number of reviews are low enough that an unscrupulous developers can ’stuff the ballot box’ - similar to asking all of your friends to vote for your items on Digg.
For applications that collect e-mail addresses, I/m sure we’ll see the sort of aggressive review manipulation that comes to all review-based systems in time. Here’s a few of the tricks we commonly had to deal with back when I worked for a comparison-shopping engine:
a) asking users for reviews in corporate promotional e-mails,
b) conducting surveys on user satisfaction, and then asking only the happiest users to provide reviews,
c) tying reviews to incentives - only providing the incentives when the review had been written.
In short, online reviews are an extremely weak thing to base your rankings on. Which is why I’m happy to report that Apple doesn’t seem to do this. We took AppStore applications’ review scores (out of 5) and ranks (where they appeared on the ranked ‘top 100′ lists) and checked to see if the variables were correlated - that is, if higher ranks meant higher reviews, or vice versa. The result: there’s no significant relationship between reviews and AppStore ranking. (For the statisticians out there, the correlation coefficient was around -0.10.)
For AppStore rankings, reviews simply don’t matter. Considering the number of ways they can be manipulated, this is probably a good thing.
