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.
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