Category: App Store
On September 1, 2016 Apple sent out an email to developers with some upcoming App Store policy changes. One of these was labeled Quality Apps and seemed to be aimed both at apps that would no longer pass the review process and apps that have been long abandoned. Quality Apps Quality is extremely important to us. We know that many…
Sun & Moon 1.0.3 is a small update, which is focused on fixing a few edge cases that could lead to UI weirdness and also the removal of iAd and the in-app purchase to disable ads since it has been discontinued. The revenue gained from the ad banners and the in-app purchase ($64 since release) is not enough to warrant…
The App Store’s Top Free, Paid, and Grossing charts are probably the most effective aspect of the App Store – too effective. Top charts are common to all forms of media, from The New York Times’ bestsellers list of books to Billboard’s top ten lists for music. The popularity of top charts is simple: people want to know what other…
On average, games accounted for approximately $25 of the $35 spent across the 110 million iPhones active in the U.S. during 2015. Second-place Music accounted for $3.40, or less than one sixth of Games. I’d love to see the numbers from previous years to see if there’s a trend.
In 2011, 63 percent of apps were paid downloads, selling for an average of $3.64 apiece. By last year, a mere 27 percent of downloads were paid, and the average price had fallen to $1.27. […] There are now more than 1.5 million apps in the App Store (Android users have 1.6 million to choose from), but by 2014, the…
Among other gems: A few developers provided similar stories of how App Review had rejected their app for some reason which the developer disputed, and after a few messages back and forth it was obvious to the developers that they weren’t making any progress. Rather than continue the argument, these developers decided to reject their own app, and then resubmit…
A recent client project (an OS X app) had some functionality that included acquiring the path to the frontmost Finder window. The only way to get that path is via AppleScript: tell application “Finder” set frontpath to POSIX path of (target of window 1 as alias) end tell Using AppleScript in a sandboxed app requires an entitlement. The official one…
iOS Revenue. I brought this up last year and we still haven’t licked it. We had a change of heart — well, an experimental change of heart — and reduced the price of our iOS apps in 2015 to normalize them at $9.99 or less, thinking that was the upper limit and/or sweet spot for iOS app pricing. But it…
I’d rather buy a McDouble and throw it out the window than spend even $0.99 on the App Store. There’s no logic, but I just don’t like to spend money on apps. TL;DR: user pirates app rather than spending a dime on it then finds out he likes it and it is worth the money. Yeah, the App Store doesn’t…
Portfolio 4.1.4 is a relatively small update, focusing primarily on fixing a few elusive bugs related to the gallery list in the content manager. It also brings an iPad Pro-sized icon now that Xcode finally supports setting one (why that was not possible to do prior to the iPad Pro’s release I have no idea). Release Notes Fixes The gallery…
In the two weeks ending January 3, customers spent over $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases, setting back-to-back weekly records for traffic and purchases. January 1, 2016 marked the biggest day in App Store history with customers spending over $144 million. It broke the previous single-day record set just a week earlier on Christmas Day. Paraphrased, “customers were bilked…
As I write this, I have just pressed the submit button on my first app written in Swift: Sun & Moon. I covered it briefly before, but in short, it’s an app for checking the rise and set times of the sun and moon either locally or at a city somewhere on the planet. It was a project both to…