Quimondo

Ch..ch..ch..ch..Changes...The 10 most updated iPhone Apps

When I first started this exercise, I thought that I would find that the most changed apps were the ones "Gaming the System", in essence making artificially small changes that would put them back in the consumers eye when each new version came out.  In fact, it looks like that may only be the case with two of this small set of apps. Each of the remaining 8 apps made substantial changes over time.  That said, it's amazing to think that an application as simple as "Bubble Wrap" would have had 33 updates and "Classic Tic Tic Toe" would have had 29.  [It's even more interesting to note that both of these were created by the same company...!]

Overall, of the 54,463 applications that were reviewed, almost 10% had more than 5 updates, 1.5% had more than 10, only .12 % had more than 20 and a mere .02% updated more than 25 times.  Three apps have changed more than 30 times, and one application, "Brain X Get Smarter", has had an amazing 40 updates! Here's the top 10 list and a chart representing the rest.

	Title	Updates
1	Brain X Get smarter!	40
2	iBubbleWrap!	33
3	GymGoal Lite	32
4	Fast Food Calorie Counter	30
5	Unit Converter	29
6	iFitness	29
7	Money	29
8	Spend - Budgeting	29
9	Classic Tic Tac Toe	29
10	Vision	27

New Release and Update Patterns for iPhone Games

Every day, more applications are being released and updated on the iPhone AppStore. While the initial release minimum per day has been around 40 games per day, peak daily releases has risen steadily from 40 in January to over 120 in June. It would be interesting to speculate whether this is ultimately shaped by the number of applications Apple can test and approve per day, or if this is a direct indication of the number of games being submitted by developers.

 

While the number of initial releases seems to be growing linearly, the number of application updates seems to be staying rather constant, on average about 60 per day. This is interesting, as one would expect the number to increase relative to the number of applications in the AppStore.  There were two lulls, one around the end of year when Apple was on Vacation, and the other in preparation for the 3.0 OS rollout.

 

 

Added together, all releases (Initial and Updates) seems to show a clear curve, with a peak in the middle of May. I don't know whether this means we are seeing a decline in developer activity, or whether developers are hunkered down for adding 3.0 functionality.  Discoverability continues to be a huge issue, so I am waiting to see a change in activity indicating developers may be reconsidering new development. At this time, there does not seem to be a slowdown in the "panning for gold" in them thar  iPhone hills.