The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘app-store’

SXSW Interactive is now over. While a clear winner in the “Location War” has yet to be determined, the truth is that many of the location-based services won, as all of them got a huge amount of exposure over the past week. And look for that trend to continue in a big way, as Apple is now highlighting several of them in the App Store.

As you can see in the images in this post, Apple is highlighting five of the key location players both in the App Store on iTunes, as well as on the App Store on the iPhone itself. On the iTunes version, the apps have their own area right below the “New & Noteworthy” area. On the iPhone, the five apps takes up the top five slots of the “What’s Hot” area. Simply put: This promotion is huge.

So what are the five apps? The names should be familiar to you because we’ve covered each very recently. Foursquare (our coverage), Gowalla (our coverage), Loopt (our coverage), Whrrl 3 (our coverage), and MyTown (our coverage). I’d like to think Apple picked these guys to feature after reading TechCrunch, but who knows what goes on behind the doors of the secretive company.

As any app developer will tell you, having your app featured can make or break it. Even the two most-hyped players, Foursquare and Gowalla (the two key players in the most recent Location War), stand to benefit from Apple’s ability to reach all kinds of different audiences with the App Store. Foursquare announced earlier that it had gained 100,000 new users in just the past 10 days — that type of growth may actually continue as long as Apple keeps featuring the app.

The other three, have all benefited in the past from previous Apple promotions. Notably, this helped MyTown surpass both Foursquare and Gowalla in size in under a month after its launch.

Game on, says Apple.

Brands are increasingly prominent on the App Store and Apple tends to love featuring folks like Britney Spears and Coca-Cola on the App Store’s front page. But who’s actually succeeding and which brands have managed to maintain high download numbers?

PositionApp, the app that lets you track how iPhone apps are doing on the App Store rankings, might have the answer. They track and record the top 300 apps across all demographics and have provided us with details on the top 15 apps in the US App Store. Hit the jump for the list.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

At the most recent Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company’s partners are now selling over 60,000 Android handsets on a daily basis. With that kind of growth rate, it’s no wonder that the size of the Android Market is increasing in its slipstream.

While Google doesn’t publicly show how many apps there are in Android Market, a Google rep this morning informed me that the store now serves approx. 30,000 apps in total.

We’ve spent three posts covering Street Fighter IV for the iPhone so far, and this fourth one is intended to inform you Capcom’s latest game has finally arrived in the App Store (I checked the US, German and Japanese store). Capcom itself isn’t listing the app [iTunes link] on their official “Capcom Mobile” site yet, but it is already being offered for $9.99. Initial reviews in the App Store are overwhelmingly positive

Read the original:
$9.99: Street Fighter IV for iPhone hits the App Store

Augmented reality app Layar hit the App Store in October 2009, only to be withdrawn by the eponymous Dutch developer of the program a month later due to repeated crashes reported by users.

It’s been quiet since, but an update for the app just popped up on my iPhone, with the concise and crystal clear description: “We’re back!”.

It took them four days, but Apple is finally explaining its surprise decision to remove nearly all “sexy” content from the App Store. Once again, the morsels of information come from Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller, who spoke with the New York Times for an article published earlier this evening. None of it is too surprising, but Schiller’s unconvincing explanation as to why some applications like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit app and Playboy will be allowed to remain on the store is sure to anger plenty of developers.

So why did Apple decide to pull these sexy apps?

“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see”

Which makes sense given the broad appeal of the iPhone, but Apple should have seen this coming, and it implemented parental controls for a reason. And then Schiller goes on to pour salt into the wounds of recently spurned developers with his explanation as to why a select few sexy applications will remain on the App Store.

“When asked about the Sports Illustrated app, Mr. Schiller said Apple took the source and intent of an app into consideration. “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said.”

So apparently exposed cleavage in a Playboy application is less offensive to women and parents because it’s also being printed in a magazine, or something. The decision really isn’t all that surprising, either — there’s little risk of the Playboy application trying to sneak in some extreme nudity, and with only a handful of mainstream sexy apps there’s much less clutter. Still, such favoritism sets another bad precedent for the App Store, and Schiller’s explanation just feels lame.

Of course, if you’re still looking for ’sexy’ content on your iPhone, you can still find plenty of nudity in iTunes (Apple has no problem selling R rated movies). Or you could just pop open Safari.

Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple’s App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues. Since then, the complaints seem to have died down quite a bit, but Apple is still on the case.

The company has started sending out a survey to iPhone developers asking about their experience with the program. While the long survey covers a range of things, the majority of the questions are about the application review process, and developers’ overall happiness with the program.

Examples of questions asked include:

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the Application submission process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the application review process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with the length of time it takes to get updates available on the App Store.

Apple asks you to answer with: “Very dissatisfied,” “Somewhat dissatisfied,” “Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” “Somewhat satisfied,” “Very satisfied,” or “Don’t know.”

They also ask, “What one thing could Apple do to make the iPhone Developer Program better?” and give you a text box to write anything you want. A few months ago they certainly would have gotten some interesting responses there.

Sometime around the first of the year, Apple made some changes to the App Store approval process that drastically sped things up for many developers. In fact, a number of developers noted that approval process wait time went from two weeks (or worse) to just a couple of days in some situations. There have also been reports of improved communication from the app review team.

It seems likely that Apple staffed up its app review team and also provided them with better training and instructions over the past few months. Still, if the App Store continues to grow at its blistering pace, it’s hard to imagine that things won’t get bogged down again. So during this time of relative peace, it’s smart for Apple to survey its developers to fine tune the system.

App store analytics company Distimo has released its December report on mobile apps, this time zooming in on the physical location of publishers in Google Android Market, and how the prices of their apps compares to those of developers in other countries.

Distimo found that publishers in the Euro zone (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain) tend to price their applications higher than those in the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Japan.

The average price of an Android app published by a developer in Europe is $4.42, which is 49% higher than publishers located in the United States ($2.96). For comparison, publishers in Japan price apps $2.28 on average, while the UK comes out at an average price of $3.31.

In Android Market, application prices are denoted in the publisher’s home currency, which is how Distimo is able to look at the differences in pricing per region. Looking at the physical location of publishers of paid applications, Distimo found that 65% is in the United States, and 12% in the United Kingdom. This makes sense of course, because those are the countries Android Market arrived first.

The Euro zone accounts for 20% of publishers, and Japan for a mere 3%.

Distimo doesn’t only track Android Market, and in fact has just broadened its analytics services to include Windows Mobile Marketplace and Nokia Ovi Store next to Android Market, BlackBerry App World and the Apple App Store.

Unsurprisingly, Distimo found that applications for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile are generally priced higher. This is likely the result of the fact that more enterprise applications make their way to those devices, and its owner are more keen on spending money for tools that help them to do their jobs more efficiently.

According to Distimo’s report, the average price of applications for Android, iPhone / iPod Touch and in Nokia’s Ovi Store hovers around $3.50. Windows Marketplace for Mobile and BlackBerry App World are clearly more expensive, averaging $6.99 and $8.26, respectively.

Last week, we previewed Chomp, a new service that aims to offer a better review and recommendation system for iPhone apps. Today, the service, which is an app itself, has gone live, with its app now available in the App Store.

As we noted, the service is sort of like a Yelp for iPhone apps. But what makes it work is that it’s simple and intuitive. When you load up Chomp, you’re taken to a screen with just four main options: Live App Reviews, Recommendations, Add People, and Bookmarked Apps. As you might imagine, the Live App Reviews are is a stream of new app reviews coming in, in realtime. Recommendations give you a list of apps to download based on the apps you’ve already reviewed. Add People gives you an easy way to connect with others on the service using your real friends on Facebook, “App Celebrities” (high profile users), and top app reviewers. Bookmarked Apps is obviously a way for you to note apps that you may want to download later.

But the key to the service is reviewing the apps. And that’s as simple as doing a search for the app you’d like to review and giving it a heart (good) or a broken-heart (bad) rating. You can also leave a comment with your thoughts about the apps (though it’s not required), but this is limited to only 60 characters, to keep things brief. This review system works well because again, it’s kept simple. And doing these reviews is the key to getting good recommendations. The recommendation area works well also because it allows you to easily get more informations about any app, see its reviews, and of course, download it right from the App Store on the iPhone with a couple clicks if you decide it’s something you want. (And yes, Chomp gets affiliate fees if you do that.)

There are a number of both web-based and iPhone apps out there now doing these types of recommendations. There’s an obvious need for this with well over 100,000 apps now in the App Store. But Chomp is the most intuitive ones I’ve tried yet. And its recommendations already seem to beat the pants off of the App Store’s built-in app recommendation engine. Chomp co-founder Cathy Edwards (also Chomp’s CTO) single-handedly wrote the app recommendation technology which they call AppRank, co-founder Ben Keighran tells us. And the simple Chomp app reviews definitely seem like a better approach than the App Store arbitrary 5 star system, with reviews that are most of the time just spam, or useless.

To help spread word about the app, Chomp has enlisted Digg founder Kevin Rose as one of its first App Celebrities. They’re also hoping to get heavy users tweeting about the service to help spread it virally.

Find Chomp in the App Store here. It’s as free download.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Through much of last year, the Associated Press threw public barbs and veiled threats at Google, while in private it was renegotiating its licensing agreement with Google News. That agreement is believed to be up for renewal at the end of this month, yet no new AP stories have appeared directly on Google News since December 23, 2009.  (AP stories licensed by other news sites such as ABC News or the New York Times do continue to appear, however).  So what’s going on here?  Is that the end of AP stories on Google News?

I’ve been doing some sniffing around, and it is not the AP that is withholding its content.  This conclusion is also supported by the fact that older AP content from before Christmas continues to be available on Google News.  If the AP were no longer licensing its articles to Google, those older articles likely would also no longer be available.  (The AP has talked about withholding news from certain licensees for a set period of time, but those were measured in minutes and hours, not weeks, and it would operate on a rolling basis.  The AP stories on Google News just stop on December 23).

So it appears that Google made a unilateral decision.  What’s going on here reminds me of what News Corp does to Time Warner Cable every four years or so when the contract for all the Fox television channels comes up.  Fox threatens to pull its channels in a very public manner, and then at the eleventh hour a deal is struck, just like what happened on New Year’s.  Google is trying its own Foxy negotiating tactic here.  It is showing the AP in a very visible way what will happen if Google News no longer carries AP stories, and they are doing this before the negotiations are up so that the AP can measure the loss in readership that Google News brings.

In the TV world, it’s the content companies such as Fox, which have the negotiating leverage because they bring the audience.  It almost seems like Google is trying to prove the opposite is true with online news: that distribution is king, not content.  Meanwhile, on Friday, Google News gussied up its home page by adding its Fast Flip project at the bottom (see screenshot below), and is highlighting other newspaper partners with its “Living Stories” project. Whether or not we ever see AP headlines on Google News again depends on which one needs the other one more, and who concedes first in the negotiations.  

Which would you rather live without, Google News or the AP?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0