That’s become a very familiar situation for developers of paid
applications.  Often we’ve been the bearers of bad news.  A developer
releases their application, watches their stats intently, sees a big
spike in application usage from Pinch Analytics, celebrates - and then
the sales report from Apple comes, and they see nothing has changed.
As the small cracking community built out better distribution
mechanisms, we’ve seen the usage spike from the initial day of theft
grow larger.  Today, certain applications are stolen twenty times as
often as they’re legitimately purchased.  Theft of three-to-four times
daily sales is typical.

There’s been a lot of debate about application piracy in the developer
community.  Views range from ‘this is a simple way to try before you
buy which should have been in the AppStore anyway, and is therefore
understandable and potentially even profitable’ to ‘this is simple
theft, which directly impacts developer revenue.’  Many questions have
been raised  about pirate behavior  - where they’re from, how they use
applications, whether they go on to buy applications, and so on.
There’s also been some debate about the nature of the jailbroken
community - whether jailbreaking is primarily a way to add additional
functionality to your phone or just a prerequisite for piracy.

To answer all of these questions, Pinch Media has added jailbroken
phone and pirated application detection to its analytics library and
reports.  Developers can now see how many users are running their
application on jailbroken phones and how many users are running
cracked copies of their applications, and draw their own conclusions.
Developers can also see application usage patterns, so they can
determine whether pirates use their applications more or less than
their other users.  Finally, we’ve taken pirated installations out of
our sales estimates, so they more accurately reflect your real
revenue.  If you’ve installed a recent version of our analytics
library (r24 or later) in your application, you’ve already got the
stats waiting for you in your account.

Here’s some screenshots of our new functionality:

You’ll also have an opportunity to win an iPod Touch!  We love these
things for development - you really can’t have enough of them for
testing - and we’re giving away three to developers who visit us and
get a demo.

You do not need to be a WWDC 2009 attendee to participate, but guests will need to register to attend. For more information about the party and to register for this exciting event, click here.

For more interesting things you could do with our API, see our previous post.

There’s still a ton of other projects we’d love to see built with our API. Just off the top of our heads, this includes:

• dashboard widgets, for a variety of platforms
• a native OS X application
• integration with other iPhone service providers, including sales report parsers
• e-mail alerts, text messaging, RSS feeds, etc. for easier consumption of stats
• a ‘has my application been tested yet?’ service
• sales and usage data ‘co-ops’ - share yours to see others’
• integration into other analytics products
• website ‘flair’ - show off that unique user number!
• better data visualizations (don’t like our graphs? make a new interface…)
• Twitter / IM bots for stats retrieval

If you’re working on one of these, or any other project involving our API, let us know — we’d love to help you promote it.

Pinch Media collects a different subset of data - we only know about the applications that use Pinch Analytics, and we don’t know anything about individual users, but we’ve got the complete picture when it comes to application runs, unique users, usage times, and so on - no panel here. And although we’re not inclined to talk about our specific clients, they do include a few applications mentioned in comScore’s press release.

This is awesome, because comScore’s data combined with our data lets us draw some conclusions we’ve never been able to draw before.

First, we can confirm that comScore’s data is pretty solid. For the most part, the ratios are right - applications higher on their list have more users than applications lower on their list, and in the correct proportions. (So an application with double the percentage reach actually does have about double the lifetime unique users.) Note that US application usage isn’t the same thing as world application usage - some of the applications on comScore list have stronger usage than others in other countries.

Next, we can combine comScore’s numbers with our own numbers to figure out the entire size of the application-using market. This is simple math - if we know an application with X% reach has Y users, how many users would an application with 100% reach have? Our best estimate, based on the data we’ve got combined with comScore’s reach percentages - the total number of devices running applications is between 22 and 23 million. This does assume that comScore’s US panel is representative of application users worldwide, but it’s a better estimate than any we’ve had in the past.

Finally, we can combine the 22-23MM figure with Apple’s recent announcement that more than 30MM iPhones and iPod Touches have been sold to get the estimate in the title of this blog post - about three-quarters of iPhone / iPod Touch owners have downloaded applications from the AppStore. That’s a higher percentage than we figured, and speaks to both the quality and variety of the applications available on the AppStore and the relative ease of downloading apps.

Developers interested in joining over 1,000 live iPhone applications and tracking their own application usage can sign up for our free Pinch Analytics product here.

At the same time, we look at startups like Twitter and marvel at the sheer amount of infrastructure surrounding them. I come across a new client, a new mashup, or a new tool that leverages their platform almost every day. And none of those tools were built by Twitter themselves. I’d argue that Twitter’s API contributes more to their success than their website.

You can tell where this is going - we’ve got a lot of great developers using our product and we simply can’t do everything for everybody ourselves, so today we’re releasing a full REST-based API to our entire developer base, so you can build whatever you like with it. (Here’s the overall documentation, along with the docs for our Application Service and Analytics Service.) We’ve been using this API internally for a while - for example, our iPhone-optimized site, which lives at iphone.pinchmedia.com, is built with it.

With our API, you could:

• Completely redo our user interface. Want to see the data presented in a different way? Go for it. Our interface not handling your thousands of actions so well? Build your own.
• Integrate with other systems. There’s absolutely no reason why our stats can’t appear in your reporting dashboard. You could even make Pinch Analytics a subset of your own product, which you offer to others.
• Roll out that Pinch Analytics iPhone application you’ve always wanted. (And if you use Pinch Analytics in it, you can build the first application that can see its own stats.)
• Use your stats to promote your application, by embedding automatically-updated usage statistics inside your own website or by sharing them with popular review sites.

I’m sure there’s a thousand other things I’m not thinking of - which is entirely the point of an API. If you build something awesome that others could use, let us know, and we’ll feature it. Happy coding!

Like many things here at Pinch Media, our iPhone-optimized site is a work in progress — if you run into any issues, or have any feedback, please let us know.

UPDATE: We’ve added some screenshots, below.

Pinch Media is watching all the developments very carefully and will continue to provide developers with the best possible advice as we learn it - but we’re also launching new reports to allow developers to gain more direct insight into their applications’ audience. Starting today, a new Pinch Analytics client entered alpha testing, which provides developers using Facebook Connect for iPhone with age and gender demographics - one of our most requested features.

Gender demographics are simple, yet powerful - for any standard time period, from a single day to your application’s entire lifetime, instantly see what the breakdown between male and female usage is, for a variety of metrics.

Age demographics are similarly rich - divided into ten different standard buckets. With Pinch Analytics, you can now understand what your audience is like and how it changes over time, in order to provide optimized experiences and content and keep your users coming back to your apps.

Additional reporting options are already under development and will be released in the near future.

Pinch Media is the only iPhone analytics company to offer demographic reporting, along with a wide variety of other custom features and insights. To start receiving demographic reports - along with Pinch Media’s dozens of other reporting options - register for Pinch Media, create an application, and see the ‘join demographic beta’ link in the analytics sidebar. We look forward to seeing your Facebook Connect applications in the near future!

I’d also like to add that this is the first feature where the specification was written entirely by our product management intern, Nicole He. Nicole’s attention to detail produced the most thorough spec written at Pinch Media to date. Thanks to her work, if you can see it, you can download it, no matter where the data appears in our site.