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Posts tagged with "app store"

Mac App Store To Launch Next Week?

According to a rumor posted by Appletell, Apple may launch the Mac App Store as early as next week:

An inside source has just told us that Apple is targeting a Monday, December 13th launch of the Mac App Store. The company apparently told developers to have their software prepared for a launch as early as Monday the 6th of this month, but our contact would be shocked if that happened at this point. Apple has made no official announcements regarding this, and delays could always happen, but there’s a push to be launched before Christmas, well ahead of the previously estimated January release. Guess from where this push has come.

The website claims that Apple is ahead of its schedule for the new store opening, and Steve Jobs wanted a December 6th launch, but it didn’t happen. We didn’t hear anything from developers about a December 6th release, we just know that there’s a deadline for apps to be submitted that should end sometimes later this month.

At the Back to the Mac event on October 20th, Steve Jobs said the Mac App Store would launch in 90 days – which made us think of a late January 2011 opening. Last week, Apple seeded a new build of OS X 10.6.6 to developers to ensure Mac App Store compatibility and even clarified its position on the availability of trials and beta apps in the new Store.

[via MacRumors]

Will Mac App Store Users Really Miss Demos? Probably Not.

The big news this morning is that Apple clarified its position on demos and trials in the upcoming Mac App Store and confirmed what we thought would happen all along: developers can’t have demo versions of their apps in the Mac App Store. Only full-featured retail versions will be accepted. Clearly, Apple doesn’t want to offer limited-time or “half baked” apps in its new Store, and it’s forcing Mac developers to go the iOS way with either free or paid apps.

That is going to cause a few problems and headaches for many, many OS X developers. For years, they have been trained to release demo / trail versions of applications, with a paid version to purchase immediately or after the trial runs out. And indeed Apple suggests just that: keep hosting trial versions on your website, because you’ll be able to insert a link to it in the App Store description page of the app. Just as it’s possible now in the iPhone and iPad App Store. Read more

How Much Money Does A News App Make?→

How Much Money Does A News App Make?

According to the top grossing stats Writer and WIRED generate a similar amount of revenue in the US app store. Which is around $1,200-2,000 or 300-500 downloads per day. It’s hard to say how that translates into global sales, but according to our own stats the US is by far the strongest revenue market (about 75% of Writer’s sales) and as such a good indicator.

Now, what if, as some might argue, the real economical value of iPad apps comes from the ads you can plug into a news app? (Which is the classic anti-paywall position). Well, if so, why not publish the app for free, so you can reach much more readers and become a truly attractive ad platform?

Oliver Reichenstein makes a good argument. For an indie developer, $2000 per day isn’t too bad. But for someone like Wired? Perhaps advertisement is the only option, but with a free app.

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Apple Now Featuring “Holiday Apps & Games” In The App Store Homepage

With Christmas just around the corner, Apple decided it was about time to start featuring holiday-related apps and games in the App Store. After all, they’ve been doing this for music and movies in the iTunes Store for a few weeks now, promoting apps sounded like the next most obvious step. So here they are, grouped together in a nice section Apple is featuring with a simple and elegant in the iPhone and iPad App Store homepages.

This is a direct link to the new section. As of right now, apps such as Angry Birds Seasons, Christmas Sudoku HD and Talking Santa for iPad are included.

We’re pretty sure more will come in the next weeks, and we think it’s a very nice way to put apps parents and kids will find interesting in this time of the year under Apple’s spotlight.

Shocker: Apple Rejects Magazine App About Android→

Shocker: Apple Rejects Magazine App About Android

A Danish magazine publisher called Mediaprovider submitted an iOS app to the Apple App Store recently – with probably a pretty good idea that it wouldn’t get approved. Why? Because the app was a digital magazine all about Android called ‘Android Magasinet’.

Straight from Apple’s Review Guidelines for iOS apps:

Apps with metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected.

Why even bother developing one?

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Single-Station Radio Apps Are The New Fart Apps: Banned

Remember the App Store Review Guidelines Apple published a few months ago? They’re available for you to read here, although an Apple Developer account is needed. Basically, Apple opened up to many more kinds of apps and frameworks with the publicly available Review Guidelines, but took a clear position on some kinds of apps as well. Namely, fart apps:

We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.

Read more

Just Ahead Of Thanksgiving, Games Take Over The App Store

Frankly, I saw this coming: with all the offers and deals that have started to pop up in the App Store since last week, the rapid arise of games in the App Store charts doesn’t come as a surprise at all. Still, the results and numbers are noteworthy: while counting all the games in the App Store is nearly impossible (at least basing on official data, which Apple doesn’t provide), we can simply take a look at the “Top Paid Apps” and “Top Grossing Apps” charts to see what happened.

Games are dominating the Thanksgiving week in the App Store. Especially on the iPhone App Store, where at the moment of writing this only 26 apps out of the top 100 are non-games apps. The fact that we refer to them as “non-games apps” also tells a lot about the environment Apple created. The situation is slightly different on the iPad App Store (“only” 40,000 apps, newer platform) but the trend is just about the same on both the stores. Games are selling like hotcakes, huge discounts or not. Read more

MacStories Black Friday Guide: 150 Great iOS Apps [Update: Mac Apps, Gadgets]

With Thanksgiving just around the corner and that credit card already set up with your iTunes account, it’s impossible to resist the temptation to grab all those discounted apps in the App Store. Indeed, great deals have surfaced this past week and we’re also waiting for Apple to go public with its own Black Friday deals.

We don’t think you should force yourself to not buy all those discounted apps and gadgets because you have to save money for the iPhone 5. No, there’s time for that. We want to offer you a roundup of the best apps we think are currently discounted for Thanksgiving, great pieces of software we have reviewed in the past and you should go buy right now. We haven’t listed any app in here, we have simply collected the ones we love.

So jump after the break, fire up iTunes and check out these amazing deals from the App Store. Read more

Apple: Over 40.000 iPad Apps Available, Battery Life Is “Legendary”

Two interesting tidbits from today’s Apple iOS 4.2 press release you might have missed with all the excitements for the new OS:

iPad users can now run their favorite apps and switch between them instantly, while preserving iPad’s legendary battery life.

Today, customers have downloaded more than seven billion apps from the groundbreaking App Store and more than 300,000 apps are available to consumers in 90 countries, with more than 40,000 native iPad apps. Over 125 million iOS users around the world can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel.

While Apple isn’t new to using peculiar adjectives to describe their products (just think of the “magical” iPad), the data provided in the press release are definitely noteworthy. Read more