AppShopper

Apple’s iTunes Stores seems to have had some problems overnight, so we’ve paused our updates for the time being.  Don’t worry.  We’ll be back up as soon as the iTunes Store is back to normal.

We’ve just updated AppShopper.com and added user accounts for personal App tracking!

Immediately obvious should be the two new tabs: “My Apps” and “Wish List.” Users must register and log in, to add Apps to these personal lists.

With Apps in your personal “My Apps” and “Wish List” lists, you can take advantage of:

• email notifications to keep abreast of price and version updates to the Apps you own
• subscription to your personal “My Apps” and “Wish List” RSS feeds
• list organization by App rating and sorting

Note: the personal RSS feeds are not secured by login.

We expect that managing these lists of Apps is intuitive enough, but for a little explanation: Apps are added to your personal “My Apps” or “Wish List” tabs by clicking the individual app’s “own it” or “want it” checkboxes, respectively. These checkboxes appear in underneath the price box for each App on both the front “What’s New” page as well as the search results page. You may also take Apps from your Wish List to your My Apps list via the “bought it” checkbox. Apps may be removed from the lists by mousing over the App icon, and clicking the “X” that appears.

After logging into your site account, we recommend searching for the Apps you own/want to build your lists. From then on, sign up for email notifications, and keep an eye on “What’s New” and search around for existing apps to grow your “Wish List.”

Of course, let us know what you think!

chris@appshopper.com

For those keeping track, the App Store now officially has 10,000 apps that can be downloaded. This number is a harder number to track than you might expect. Apps are constantly being added and removed from the App Store. Removals aren’t necessarily all due to legal issues or the like. Frequently, developers pull apps for various reasons and reintroduce them later.

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.

Several sites have suggested that the App Store has reached over 10,000 iPhone and iPod Touch apps. Whether or not that’s true depends on your perspective. While over 10,000 apps have been released, there aren’t actually 10,000 apps currently in the App store.

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.

Still working on some other features, but I managed to release a small one tonight. App pages now have multiple screenshots from the App. This primarily is true for new updates, so if you search, apps that haven’t been updated for a while may not have all screenshots shown.

But all the new ones have them, and over time, the rest will catch up.

For an example, see TileMatch and click on the left and right arrows.

This list doesn’t represent popularity in terms of sales (we don’t have access to that information) but in terms of attention that they draw on this site. This should be obvious when you see the most “popular” app is a $899.99 app that clearly just piqued the curiosity of a lot of people.

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)

We’re doing some upgrades and maintenance on the site tonight (Sat, October 25th), so you may not see updates for a long period of time (hours). Don’t worry, they are being recorded, but will show up all at once later in the evening (if all goes well).

We have a number of features that have been requested, and hopefully those will be coming soon.

Update: Things are sort of working now, but we will still be on slower than usual updates during Sunday. It should be worth it in the end. We’ll be back up to usual (and more) on Monday.

We’ve received a lot of suggestions, and just wanted to let you know that most of them are in the works in one form or another. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, it’s just been slow to come.

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.

No need to adjust you settings, the App Store seems to have taken Sunday off.

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.