Quimondo

iPhone App Pricing - "I'd buy that for a dollar!"

As the number of applications increases each day, (now over 30000 unique apps) the price charged for those applications remains fairly consistent. Many might think that free apps rule, but the 99 cent app is actually king of the hill. 

 

 75% of all apps in the AppStore are priced under $2, and the 99 cent app has increased its percentage share by over 5% in the last couple of months.  The percentage of free apps has stayed fairly constant at about just over 20%. It's interesting to note that greater than 90% of all the apps on the AppStore cost less than $5, with the $9.99 band representing the set of "premium" apps that represent the bulk of what's left.

Microsoft Acknowledges iPhone

Many premier internet sites inspect the User Agent of an incoming request to see if the content is destined for an iPhone. Those that do this have given users a much cleaner and enjoyable experience on the device. Those that do this incorrectly have often left users frustrated and unsatisfied

Users of Microsoft's MSN Mail or Hotmail have recently been in the frustrated and unsatisfied camp. In fact, the user experience has degraded over the last year, where text and headers have been shortened to the point of being unusable. As you can see in the left picture, message titles and sender info used only 10 characters on the screen.

Microsoft has finally fixed this by updating their Mobile Live Mail content with iPhone specific rendering, making it much easier to see who is sending you mail and what the subject is.  (You can see this updated look on the right side of the photo.) Individual emails are now rendered properly for the screen as well.

Thank you, Microsoft, for finally updating your mail site.  Now, if you could please make it so I can scan more than 10 email entries at a time....

Number of AppStore vendors approaching the 10,000 mark

When Apple unveiled the AppStore in July 2008, they claimed that 250,000 people had downloaded the iPhone SDK,  that 25,000 had applied to sell on the AppStore and 2000 had initially been admitted into the program.  Since the launch of the AppStore, the number of developers has been rising consistently each day, and the number of unique vendors on any given day will soon reach 10,000.

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AppStore Limits Discoverability - iTunes' Magic Number is 3500

At turn of the year, after a scheduled Holiday break period,  the number of applications available in some of most popular iPhone categories suddenly shot skyward.  The Entertainment category was most affected, reaching almost 4900 applications by mid January.  At that time, a decision seemed to have been made to limit the number of applications visible using the category browse capability of the desktop iTunes, and by Valentine's Day three categories (Entertainment, Games(All) and Utilities) were being limited to 3500 applications retrieved.  At the time of this writing, Books, Education, Lifestyle, and Reference have since reached this plateau.

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It is the hope of every developer to get their application seen and available to the public.  We know that an iPhone user is not going to be scrolling through 140 screens of apps (assuming 25 per screen) looking for new applications. Without removing this boundary, the only other way to find an application in iTunes would be to search on the right keyword using the search facility.