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.

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.

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.

Number of Apps approved by day:

Number of Games approved by day:

So, here are two notable app releases related to the milestone:

Adventoozle is the 10,000th app that is currently available for download. If you disregard the removed applications and just want to know what’s the 10,000th app introduced to the App Store (as found on AppShopper), that would be Checktubes.

Neither of these benchmarks are at all “official”. They simply represent the 10,000th apps we found here at AppShopper, and don’t reflect actual approval/acceptance order from Apple.

TapTapTap put together a mosaic (pictured above) to mark the occasion.

By our count, there have been 10,030 apps released to the App Store. About 354 of them have been pulled for various reasons (trademark issues, discontinued apps). Some may have already been re-released. So, there are 9,676 apps that you can actually download right now.

Still, that’s a huge number and the 10,000 mark will be breached very soon. Here’s the breakdown of the apps per category:

• 24.0% Games
• 11.6% Entertainment
• 10.9% Utilities
• 7.8% Education
• 5.6% Productivity
• 5.4% Lifestyle
• 5.3 %Healthcare and Fitness
• 5.1% Books
• 4.6% Reference
• 4.0% Travel
• 3.4% Sports
• 3.3% Music
• 2.9% Navigation
• 2.8% Business
• 2.6% Finance
• 1.8% Social Networking
• 1.5% News
• 1.3% Photography
• 0.5% Weather

I’ve turned on a new page: Top 100 lists for both paid and free apps.

What’s neat is it tracks the rankings on a daily basis and gives relative changes for each app as well as peak rating and # of days on the chart. I only have historical data for the past 19 days (as of this writing) so even the oldest apps will only have a maximum of 19 days on the chart. App name links to the AppShopper page while the price links to the iTunes store directly.

Besides just finding out what the most popular apps are, an interesting way to look at it on a daily basis is at the apps that are moving the fastest up and down the charts. This is easily seen by scanning the “Change” column.

Today, for example, Strategic Assault is the biggest (Paid) gainer by appearing at #67 on it’s first day in the Top 100. Meanwhile, Hooked: Pocket Fishing has fallen the most (Paid) with an 11 place drop to #79.

Enjoy.

Here’s a bonus list, based on some data that is coming soon to AppShopper. The average rating is shown, with the number of votes that it was based on in parenthesis.

Highest rated new Paid apps with at least 5 votes

1. gSearch 5.00 (6)
2. A.I. Disk 5.00 (10)
3. Virtual Villagers: A New Home 5.00 (28)
4. iVote Pro 5.00 (6)
5. iAdviseMe 4.50 (6)
6. Faces! 4.50 (8)
7. Darts 4.50 (10)
8. American Dominoes 4.50 (8)
9. iLambo 4.50 (7)
10. RainbowNote 4.50 (6)
11. Photo Hunter 4.50 (26)
12. Fizz Snow 4.50 (8)
13. Cor.kz 4.50 (7)
14. aPix Hotties 4.50 (13)
15. iFishing 4.50 (19)

In the meanwhile, here’s an interesting list of the most popular new apps from the past week. I’ve split them up into the most popular Paid and Free apps and also separated Games out into its own list, since they tend to dominate the lists.

I’ve also removed apps that were new this week and then quickly dropped in price, as that can skew the results for those apps. This list isn’t perfect, as Apps introduced just yesterday will be at a disadvantage, but it’s still an interesting list.

Maybe it’s due to the holiday weekend, but the App Store is uncharacteristically quiet today, with no new Apps, no App Updates or Price Changes being reflected in the store. It’s not like this every Sunday.

Last Sunday we saw:

• 53 New Apps
• 28 Version Updates
• 21 Price Changes

But there’s still a little time, and many of the app releases do seem to happen later in the evening.