AppShopper

An otherwise unremarkable $0.99 app released today by iPhone developer Spielwerk has had a big win due to a mistake by Apple.

The app iGlowStickPro is a simple glow-stick entertainment app and really had little to distinguish itself from the hundreds of other apps released this week…. until a mistake on Apple’s part positioned it as the #1 selling paid app in their top 100 list. (See image on right).

These top 100 lists serve as a massive amount of advertising for developers who make that high, but iGlowStickPro’s positioning was simply an Apple glitch that was quickly corrected. The incorrect list was up for maybe 1-2 hours, but the impact has already been seen.

iGlowStickPro is now ranked #40 in all paid entertainment apps already. A huge rise for day #1 of sales. Other apps listed may have also seen sales boosts, but many of them were already ranked so the difference so far has been less dramatic.

The Top 100 lists seem back in order as of this writing.

With the introduction of in-app purchases or downloadable content (DLC), one question that remained for developers and other App Store followers was whether or not Apple’s top 100 grossing applications included these sales. I had a chance to speak with Bolt Creative’s Dave Castelnuovo in a Podcast the other day, and their Pocket God application recently included DLC. He was able to confirm that based on his sales numbers, the Top 100 Grossing definitely included these DLC purchases.

This was further confirmed by the appearance of Ngmoco’s Eliminate Pro in today’s Top 100 Grossing Games list. Eliminate Pro is unique in that it is one of the early apps to be released for Free and rely entirely on DLC for its income. It has done well enough on its launch, that it has started ranking in the grossing list:

Long term, this will be an interesting metric to follow to see how well a DLC-only game like Eliminate fares over time. While it may not reach as high a peak as a traditionally priced game, there’s a chance it will sustain a steady income for a longer period of time, if there’s a constant stream of DLC buyers.

You’ll notice the front page (http://appshopper.com) brings you to the What’s New tab switched to the “Popular” view by default.  This list represents a boiled-down view of the Apps that receive the most interesting amount of activity on AppShopper.com.

You can, of course, still view the exhaustive “All” App activity list by switching over using the All/Popular switch, or find it directly at http://appshopper.com/all.  Additionally, many variations of the All/Popular App activity are available via RSS links.

Enjoy,

Chris

This particular data set was requested by Imangi Studios to try to answer the question if application size affects a developer’s chances in reaching the Top 100 lists in the App Store.

I should warn you, however, that this data can’t actually answer that question, since correlation does not necessarily equal causation.

The reason the 10MB cutoff is so important to developers it that Apple restricts over the air (EDGE, 3G) downloads to applications <10MB in size. Otherwise, you need to find a Wi-Fi hotspot or download the app on your computer. Developers are quite aware of this and make special efforts to reduce the size of their applications to < 10MB if possible. The thinking is that you want to capture as many impulse purchases as possible from iPhone owners on the go.

So here's the data.

App Size in the Top 100 Paid Apps Over the Past 30 days

Meanwhile, the percentage of all paid applications in the App Store that are <10MB is actually 86.2%. So there actually seems to be a negative correlation between app size and Top 100 ranking. Here's the data for the top 10:

App Size in the Top 10 Paid Apps Over the Past 30 days

Note that while it looks like the trend is increasing, a look at the data over 90 days shows it’s cyclical.

With only 10 apps at a given time, this graph is going to be more affected by the flavor of the week in terms of iPhone apps, so take with a grain of salt.

So despite 86% of apps being less than 10MB, only ~60-70% of them make it into the top 100. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean anything by itself, as very low quality apps may also be very small apps. What I do think it means is that > 10MB is certainly not a death sentence for an app.

At the end of last week we saw a massive number of App approvals on the iTunes App Store. This resulted in a over 1300 apps (of which over 300 were games) appearing in one day alone. We had heard Apple had had quite a back log of approvals, so hopefully, they have cleared the queue for now.

Number of Apps approved by day:

Number of Games approved by day:

Introducing the new Top 200 App listings!  These lists replace the former Top 100 and may now be filtered by category and top paid / top free / top grossing Apps.

Search results are now sortable by relevance, price, update, and rating.  Note: relevance is only shown in most to least relevant order.  Other sort options may be sorted either way.

Top 100 lists are now sortable either way by top 100 position, change, peak, rating, and price.

Chris

The Top 100 app rankings are now updated hourly as opposed to daily.

We’re aware that the site has been rather sluggish recently.  We’re working to address these issues so it should return to must faster performance levels soon.

You might notice that some apps are showing updates today that have long been updated.  Due to a previous bug, some updates were never picked up.  We’ve revamped our code, so this shouldn’t happen again in the future.  Average ratings are also coming back, and many are already back.  In the next 24 hours or so, we expect them all to be back.

We have more changes coming as well.