POW V1.2 just hit the app store. This is definitely the biggest update since POW’s original release, including:
- New menu interface, now easier to navigate
- 3 new free sounds
- 2 new premium sounds
- Disable ads (and unlock premium sounds) via in-app-purchase
- Awards! 20 awesome awards for you to earn. These should be fun ^_^
We definitely hope you like the new update!
The exact same plot as I made for app developers can be made for the apps themselves. Check it out below, and Shotgun Free at #32. Most of these apps shouldn’t be surprising, though I do find it crazy that Facebook has so many more ratings than the next highest, some 2.5x the #2. Wow.
James and I had a great chance to chat with Rob Woodbridge from UNTETHER.tv a week ago, and the interview is now online. Check it out for a bit of our backstory and thoughts on the mobile app ecosystem.
Having made my claim that ratings are a good indicator of downloads I’m going to look at the top app developers. As of a week or so ago 39,175 developers have at least 1 application on the store. I’ve compiled the Top 100 app developers and included them in a plot below. Check out Inedible Software at #68. There are two things I find interesting about this data:
1) The top app developers are gigantic. Gameloft has just about 2.3% of all ratings, which means they probably have near 2.3% of all downloads. Digital Chocolate is almost as large, with about 2% of all ratings. We ourselves have 0.23%, which from Apple’s stated total number of app downloads is just about spot on.
2) The top 100 app developers have 40% of all ratings! Looking down a bit further, the top 170 control 50%, which means that the bottom 39,105 developers have as many downloads as the top 170. Tough market.
I’ve been working hard the past couple of weeks to scrape a whole bunch of data from the iTunes App Store. Before I ask what I think are some interesting questions, however, I’d like to state why I think the number of ratings for an app is a very good indicator of number of downloads. Three reasons:
1) You can’t rate an app if you haven’t downloaded it. Some percentage of those who download an app are going to rate it, and so it stands to reason that the more downloads an app has, the more ratings its going to have.
2) We’ve found for our own applications that the number of ratings goes up quite linearly with the number of downloads. The rate isn’t the same from app to app, but its the same to about an order of 2.
3) I made a nifty plot of the number of ratings for the top 3000 entertainment apps in the order of popularity. The ordering by popularity is given by Apple and I have no idea how its calculated, but it definitely weights number of downloads very very heavily but also takes into considerations things like price and the current Top 100 standing.
The reason why this claim is important is that Apple is exceedingly stingy with download numbers. It’s even a pain for us to find our own! To analyze the market, however, all we need are relative download numbers. And if ratings are a good indicator of downloads, then relative rating numbers should make us good to go.
Inedible Software is pleased to announce the release of its first iPad application Bazooka. Bazooka is a virtual rocket launcher, complete with smoke and fire particle effects and high quality sound. Users hoist Bazooka up to their shoulder and pull back to fire off a blast. Due to an initial rejection by Apple for containing “minimal user functionality,” users also have the gratuitous ability to choose between several background images, including a bunny rabbit and outer space.
Bazooka is currently available for $0.99 on the iTunes App Store, exclusively for the iPad.
Inedible Software is pleased to announce the launch of their sixth iPhone application, One Hit Wonders. One Hit Wonders is designed to help users locate one-off, likely forgotten about songs in their iPod library. To do this it only shows songs with a unique artist and album – in other words, a user’s own personal one hit wonders.
Many people nowadays have huge music collections with tons of albums and playlists. They’ve also added random individual songs given to them by friends or downloaded as singles. Such tracks can easily be lost, and so One Hit Wonders was created to help users reclaim these gems. They took the time to add them to their library, so they should have a way of finding them again.
One Hit Wonders is currently available for free on the iTunes App Store and is compatible with all iPhone and iPod touch models.
I just spent most all of this weekend at iPadDevCamp. The event is the fourth of its kind, though the first three were called iPhoneDevCamp. They’re put on by a few developers and all-around-good-guys Raven Zachary, Dom Sagolla, Chris Messina, Chris Allen, Blake Burris and William Hurley.
The event had a few keynotes from some pretty heavy hitters (like Bob Borchers, former Apple bigwig now Opus Capital bigwig), a bunch of barcamp style training sessions (including one from Saurik of Cydia, king of iPhone jailbreak land), and a hackathon. A couple really sweet projects came out of the hackathon. I also got a good chance to hang out with our friends from Burstly, which always makes an event more fun.
I’m not sure when the next one is, but I’ll definitely be going. It’s an exhausting weekend, but a fun one.
I’d like to officially announce the start of development of Shotgun Duel, the sequel to our popular applications Shotgun Free / Pro. One of the major enhancements is the addition of multiplayer dueling (hence the name), which we’ve been working on quite diligently. James and I had our first duel yesterday, and I won. More info to come.
In the last few days we released updates for Air Guitar, Shotgun Free and Shotgun Pro. We managed to fix what seems to be all of the major outstanding crashes, most of which were on iPhone OS 2.2.1. We (James in particular) get quite upset when our apps crash, and while we think we generally write stable code there are always a few things that fall through the cracks. I think and hope we just swept all of that up.
