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Posts tagged with "app store"

10.6.8 Will Get Mac App Store Ready for Lion, Remove Mac Defender

According to the release notes of the latest build of Mac OS X 10.6.8 seeded to developers on Friday, the upcoming upgrade will contain improvements for Preview, VPN and IPv6, but more importantly it will make changes to the Mac App Store application in order to get it ready for Lion’s digital distribution this summer. As noted by 9to5mac, the installer of build 10K531 reports 10.6.8 will “enhance the Mac App Store to get your Mac ready to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion”, as well as “identify and remove known variants of Mac Defender.” Last week, Apple indeed updated a support document related to the Mac Defender malware promising that “in the coming days” a Mac OS X software update would be released to automatically find and remove Mac Defender and its known variants. At this point, it appears Apple is getting ready to release Mac OS X 10.6.8 relatively soon, perhaps even ahead of the WWDC that kicks off on June 6.

As for Lion’s release, latest rumors indicated that after widespread internal testing Apple could release the OS sooner than initially expected – not in July or August, maybe at the WWDC. A WWDC release, however, would appear strange considering Lion Developer Preview 3 still has several bugs to fix and a GM build hasn’t been seeded yet. Apple is undoubtedly “enhancing” the Mac App Store’s underlying code to make the transition to Lion easier and the download process as smooth as possible, though it seems likely that the company will also sell boxed copies (DVDs or portable USB keys, as many suggested) for those users unable to download gigabytes of data from the App Store.

Selling A Copy Every Second, The Heist Overtakes Angry Birds

A few days ago we reported on a new game to hit the App Store, The Heist, which is an iPhone game from the team behind the popular MacHeist bundle. In just a few days it has done astoundingly well, managing to knock off Angry Birds from the top of the paid apps list in the App Store – which is no small feat.

It’s first day had 25,000 downloads according to The Loop, but on day two those figures skyrocketed to 89,798 purchases. Effectivelly that means for just its second day on sale, The Heist was selling more than 1 copy a second (there are 86,400 seconds in a day), supremely impressive for a paid app, even if the app is $0.99.

With revenues approaching $100,000 and sales already well above the 100,000 figure, its obvious to see that the MacHeist team have done a supremely good job in creating and marketing the game – some of the marketing included clues that were hidden in the first Twitter for Mac client this year. Will it sustain the top spot and keep off Angry Birds? Only time will tell.

[Via TechCrunch]

Ranky Shows Beautiful iOS & Mac App Store Rankings for Developers

If you’re an iOS or Mac developer, or you handle the marketing for a development studio that has apps on Apple’s App Store, you know the importance of checking rankings for your application on all the international App Stores. It doesn’t matter if your app is the next Angry Birds (probably not, though The Heist managed to take the #1 spot in the iPhone App Store after months of Rovio dominance) or something that will be fine sitting between the #20 and #100 positions, checking rankings by country and category is a common practice that helps you better understand how well an app is doing, where, and quite possibly also why.

Ranky, a new app by Studio Dalton, wants to make the process of studying rankings extremely simple, focused and beautiful. The app provides real-time results for iOS and Mac App Store apps, a feature that’s surely welcome as it allows to check for any app distributed through Apple’s App Stores. Once you’ve entered any iPhone, iPad or Mac app to track, you’ll only have to select the countries you’re interested in to start analyzing the markets. After that, for each app you’ll get an overview by category or “overall” – the same applies if you filter down apps by country, you’ll get the same screen with “overall” and “category” screens to see how your app is performing. Ranky also comes with the possibility of displaying changes since the last time you checked the app, and email and Twitter sharing built-in.

With a beautiful interface and a simple, yet powerful feature set, Ranky is a neat little tool iOS and Mac devs should test right away. Go download the app here at $0.99.

The Daily for iPad Nearing 1 Million Downloads

The Daily, the iPad-only magazine built by News Corp. with help from Apple when the two companies unveiled iTunes app subscriptions in February, is about to hit 1 million App Store downloads, TechCrunch reports. At the TechCrunch Disrupt panel entitled “Disrupting Publishing from Tablets to Links”, The Daily publisher Greg Clayman said the app is nearing the important milestone of 1 million downloads, though he didn’t provide any details on the number of people that decided to subscribe to the app since late March, when The Daily started charging for content after an initial free run sponsored by Verizon Wireless. The Daily currently comes with in-app subscriptions priced at $1 per week or $40 per year; a report from April suggested The Daily, both because of paywall and editorial choices, was seeing a decline in popularity in spite of Apple’s heavy promotion on Apple.com and the App Store homepage. Others suggested the same when News Corp. confirmed 800k downloads in 3 months and a $10 million loss over the last quarter to run The Daily operations.

However, 1 million downloads is a notable milestone that, in the words of Clayman, puts The Daily “in the large pantheon of large news apps.” Our first impressions of the app still hold true today – The Daily isn’t the fastest news app available on the App Store and not even the iPad 2’s beefier processor managed to make The Daily run smoothly without crashes of sorts. The Daily is expected to become available on more devices later this year, including the Android tablets that have been rolling out in the market in the past months.

Daedalus Touch for iPad

I’ve started to shy away from the bulk of text editors that hit my inbox since few bring something different to the table. There’s only so many ways you can rewrite a text editor, and while I’d love to cover everything the ones I really want to showcase have to offer something truly unique for me to sit down and crank out a review in TextMate. It’s terribly difficult to find something that stands out, but I think those disappointed with the App Store’s current offering may find something of interest here. Daedalus Touch for the iPad is different in part because of how it allows you manipulate documents in a hybrid stack & coverflow style that takes advantage of gestures, and not lists, to organize your ideas. There are no lists or hierarchy of folders, but rather stacks of sheets that contain your text. Of course it has Dropbox and TextExpander support (a must nowadays), which means you don’t have an excuse not to check Daedalus past the break.

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App Store Hits Milestone Of 500,000 Approved Apps

Just after midnight this morning, the iTunes App Store approval team pushed through a batch of app submissions, making the total number of submissions exceed 500,000 apps. It means that in the 34 months since the App Store opened in July 2008, there have been just over half a million apps published to the App Store.

To celebrate the event, Chillingo (developer), 148apps (mobile app blog) and Chomp (search company) created an epic infographic. It’s full of a tonne of interesting factoids such as: Angry Birds stayed at number 1 on the paid apps list for 275 days, the App Store launched with 500 apps, each developer submits an average of 4.6 apps and so on.

The actual number of apps available for download is currently closer to the 400,000 mark because of various replacement and withdrawals of the past 34 months. We also know that at least 75,000 of the apps are for the iPad – a figure revealed in late March. To see the full infographic jump over to the 500K Facebook page put together by Chillingo, Chomp and 148apps.

[Via Fortune]

Dragontape for iPad Lets you Browse, Share, and Edit Video Mixtapes

We traditionally think of the classic mixtape as an audio compilation of power songs and remixes that we’ll then share with friends or pass along to the cute girl two seats behind you in math class. Recently brought to my attention was Dragontape, a website that takes the concept of the mixtape further by combining YouTube and SoundCloud, effectively allowing you to create video & audio playlists of music, concert, and related promotional videos for your favorite artists, gigs, and tours. With Dragontape for the iPad you can watch the latest mixtapes, browse through what’s popular, and revisit favorites all without the need of your web browser.

While it’s obvious you can preview the collections of video, not-so-obvious is the ability to edit movies iMovie style to clip and cut your way to the perfect mixtape. You can save and edit mixtapes to your liking, though I didn’t find the controls initially intuitive (you’ll also need a Dragontape account to save any edits you make to a mixtape). Too, the iPad app is still reliant on sometimes fussy YouTube videos, which may not play on the iPad. “Not optimized for mobile,” it says. What’s interesting to me, however, is how Dragontape handles the integration with SoundCloud with YouTube video. For a clip, Dragontape displays a synth-y, pixelated equalizer that bounces to the beat of the music that’s used as a placeholder for video.

There are some quirks about Dragontape, as pinch-to-zoom for video has been replaced with simple taps, and the background image displayed when browsing mixtapes ends up being a pixelated, centered mess that attempts to be cool, but is unfortunately unappealing. Otherwise, the menu and video controls look incredibly sharp: perhaps Dragontape is aiming for distinctness between the interface and background album art in their own, weird way. Simply changing the fading between tracks prompts users to save the altered mixtape: you’ll quickly develop that dismissive “Cancel” reflex. The app has crashed for me a few times, but I’m interested in Dragontape’s mobile interface enough to keep me from deleting the app off my homescreen as others may do.

There’s flaws, and the app icon doesn’t make clear the that name is Dragontape (and not Drag On Tape), but this is a novel idea that needs to be explored. Those YouTube playlists you peruse can all be intermixed for a better browsing experience, and I sense an opportunity for discovery as Dragontape moves out of beta and integrates with other popular video sites. I personally enjoyed watching lots of promotional tour videos with Dragontape, but maybe you’ll have a much more creative use for it. The price for admission is free on the App Store. You can learn more about the service and create a Dragontape account on their official website and iPad landing page.

Survey Reveals 63 Million iOS Gamers Download 5 Million Games Per Day

The National Gamers Survey, compiled by research firms Distimo and Newzoo from March data has revealed that there are roughly 63 million gamers on the iOS ecosystem who (individually) download, on average, 2.5 games per month. Games represent half of all apps downloaded across the iOS and Mac App Stores with more than 5 million games downloaded per day – based on the survey that included the US, UK and five other European countries. A clear majority of 4.6 million are downloaded for the iPhone or iPod Touch whilst just over 400,000 are for the iPad and just a sliver for the Mac with 41,000 per day.

The survey also revealed that in-app purchases within games is becoming an increasingly common feature found in games with revenue from in-app purchases also representing a large proportion of total revenues. 88% of the top 300 games on iOS are free, but across and free and paid games, two fifths of the revenue is now coming from in-app purchases. On the iPhone and iPod touch it represented 40% of gross revenue and 32% for the iPad. These high figures may give reason to why Lodsys has recently started to target developers that implement in-app purchases; it would certainly raise a lot of revenue if they received license fees from even just a portion of developers.

Some more statistical data about the spread of iOS devices was also revealed, noting that across some of the countries surveyed, including the US, UK, France and Germany, between 6% and 7% of the online population have an iPhone. Whilst of those iPhone users, between 50% and 75% play games. As for the iPad, the report claims 15 million Americans actively play games on it, whilst 7 million Europeans do so – exceeding the number of people using Sony’s PSP.

[Via RazorianFly]

Angry Birds Reaches 200 Million Downloads→

Angry Birds Reaches 200 Million Downloads

At the paidContent Mobile conference today in New York City, Rovio “Mighty Eagle” Peter Vesterbacka announced Angry Birds has reached a total of 200 million downloads on all platforms. This figure includes the Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio games available on the iPhone (free and $0.99 version), iPad (free and $4.99 version) and Android handsets (free, ad-supported). BusinessInsider also reports other announcements from Vesterbacka, which will possibly extend the popularity of Rovio’s brand even more:

On top of the app’s success, Vesterbacka says an Angry Birds book will launch this summer with distribution through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Google. Plus, the company is working with animators for its own Angry Birds movie.

And then there’s the merchandise. Rovio has deals with manufacturers in China for Angry Birds gear such as lunchboxes and toys.

The number is impressive and I’m pretty sure it makes Angry Birds the most downloaded mobile game of all time, or at least the most download App Store title ever. In the past months, Rovio reported other notable figures such as 10 million downloads for Rio in 10 days, or the 200 million minutes people spend playing Angry Birds every day.

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