News tagged ‘App Store’

For those who are impatiently waiting for their pre-ordered iPhone 4 to arrive or are going to get one soon, Apple has released the user guide for iOS 4 and iPhone 4 (available here in PDF). The guide is 243 pages long and can also be found in a version for iPhone accessible via mobile version of Safari. It consists of 28 chapters and reveals some information on certain features of iOS 4 related to iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.

The guide covers a great number of topics about iPhone 4, such as its physical features, setup and various software installed by default. There’s a special section on the App Store, iTunes Store and the free iBooks application. In the user guide you’ll also find more information on the iPhone’s Nike + iPod capabilities.

According to a recent Piper Jaffray's  research, out of 4 billion applications downloaded onto iPads, iPods and iPhones, 81% are free and the cost of the other 19% is averagely $1.49.

These numbers mean that Apple’s profit from apps since the opening of the App Store is $428 million, about 29 cents per application, while the company spent approximately $81 million to distribute the apps themselves.

It sounds like a huge sum of money at first, until you understand that it makes up just 1% of Apple’s total gross profit of $33.7 billion over the same period.

According to yesterday’s announcement, Apple have sold three million iPads during the first 80 days on the market since the device was launched in the US on the 3^rd of April with Wi-Fi only models. To sell 2 million, it took approximately 60 days, so it can be said with certainty that the sales of the iPad are accelerating.

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs says that people are loving iPads and it’s becoming part of their lives. The company is working hard to allow more and more people to use this wonderful device, and next month the iPad will be available in 9 more countries: Singapore, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Mexico, Luxembourg, Ireland, Hong Kong, Belgium and Austria. The information on the prices and pre-order for these countries is expected to be revealed soon.

According to the press release, more than 11,000 iPad-specific applications are now available in the App Store.

A new version of iBooks 1.1 has just been released for iPad and iPhone (you will need iOS4 to install this application). The version was shown at WWDC 2010 and included some of such often demanded features as bookmarks and notes.

A short list of what you’ll find in the new iBooks 1.1:

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Here's an official changelog for recently released iOS 4 for iPhone and iPod Touch:

This update contains over 100 new features, including the following:

• Multitasking support for third-party apps*
– Multitasking user interface to quickly move between apps
– Support for audio apps to play in the background
– VoIP apps can receive and maintain calls in the background or when device is asleep
– Apps can monitor location and take action while running in the background
– Alerts and messages can be pushed to apps using push and local notifications
– Apps can complete tasks in the background
• Folders to better organize and access apps
• Home screen Wallpaper*
• Mail improvements
– Unified inbox to view emails from all accounts in one place
– Fast inbox switching to quickly switch between different email accounts
– Threaded messages to view multiple emails from the same conversation
– Attachments can be opened with compatible third-party apps
– Search results can now be filed or deleted
– Option to select size of photo attachments
– Messages in the Outbox can be edited or deleted

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Using a popular BlackBerry and iPhone messenger WhatsApp you can now make use of its new ability to forward individual messages or delete them.

WhatsApp is a smartphone to smartphone messenger and it currently runs on BlackBerry and iPhone. With the help of push notifications utilized by this application you can instantly receive messages from your colleagues, friends and family. It’s a great alternative to SMS because WhatsApp allows you to send and get messages, audio notes, pictures and video messages without having to spend a cent. All WhatsApp features are included in the base price and you won’t need to make any extra purchases for the application.

The new version of WhatsApp features:

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New reports made by Mac Stories and PadGadget reveal new data on App Store. Here are the most interesting facts:

1. Over 2,100 titles in the Apple's App Store are iPad games;
2. 78% of all iPad apps are paid (which is almost equal to 80% value of previous Moblix report);
3. Almost 75% of all 225,000 iPhone apps are also paid;
4. 2,5 months needed for iPad apps library to reach the 10,000 milestone (For comparison, it took five months for iPhone apps and 11 months for Google's Android Market to get the same result).
5. Currently iPad apps store is the third biggest after iPhone and official Android apps store.
6. RIM's BlackBerry App World, Nokia's Symbian platform and HP's Palm/webOS have less than 7,000 apps.

It is important to note that Google currently forbids putting Android Market on non-smartphone devices, so there is no opportunity to compare the actual numbers of Android and iPad apps.

As you remember, tomorrow is the day when the WWDC officially starts, but some guy named Adam Jackson made photos of inner banners at Moscone Center in San Francisco (where the conference is held).

As you can see from the photos, the main banner features the slogan “The center of the app universe”. Other banners are focused on iPhone OS and its new features. One of them reveals applications Evernote, Bento and Air Sharing gathered in one folder named “Productivity” and the slogan “Drag. Drop. Organize”.

Other banners emphasize the popularity of Apple’s App Store. “4 Billion Apps Downloaded”, «200,000 Apps on the App Store» - these are the slogans found on the photos.

The last banner has the word “appvertise”, which means it is focused on iAds, new advertising technique in iPhone OS 4.

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Starting from today Google allows looking for iPhone apps on its mobile search page. The feature was announced on its official Mobile Blog. The idea, according to software engineers Paul Hadfield and Milena Nikolic, was to help users quickly download a necessary application while searching information about it.

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This Tuesday Adobe revealed its new digital viewer technology for creating e-magazines that can be viewable on touchscreen devices like Apple's iPad.

The technology was first demonstrated when the iPad version of Wired magazine was introduced. We wrote that Adobe had to rewrite the software in Objective-C for Apple to approve it. Since the release iPad Wired edition stays near the top of the App Store sales chart with its price $4,99.

Here's what the vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe David Burkett said about new technology:

"We aim to make our digital viewer software available to all publishers soon and plan to deliver versions that work across multiple hardware platforms. It's safe to say that if you are already working in InDesign CS5, you'll be well on your way to producing a beautiful digital version of your publication."

Judging by the Wired iPad edition, new digital viewer technology can offer integrating videos, 360-degree rotatable images, slide shows and more directly into the magazine.

YouPorn, one of the world's largest porn sites, has announced that they will be soon iPad compatible. The site has begun re-encoding their entire video archive to make them viewable on the iPad. In the App Store parental controls can limit access to content inappropriate for minors. On the web, this gets much more difficult.

You may remember our post about "Wi-Fi Sync" app that allows you to sync your iPhone/iPod touch with iTunes via Wi-fi. Well, this week Apple rejected it. But its developer Greg Hughes submitted it to Cydia (an unauthorized source of different software for jailbroken iDevices), and now it is available there for $9.99.

Greg also told Engadget that he talked to Apple representative and he said the case was not about any violations.

"While he agreed that the app doesn't technically break the rules, he said that it does encroach upon the boundaries of what they can and cannot allow on their store. He also cited security concerns."

"Wi-Fi Sync" is currently available only for Mac users, but Hughes promises to release version for Windows.

According to TechCrunch, Wireless Quattro had recently contacted iPhone app developers to introduce their new "Verification of iTunes Purchase" program. The company is an Apple subsidiary,and it currently develops forthcoming iAd program.

ViP helps developers to promote their apps in App Store via ads which appearing in iPhone apps. With this feature they can track download conversion rates in real-time. Such information is proprietary to Apple, so Quattro promotes the product and its "exclusive integration with the App Store", because such a feature is unavailable to other ad networks, and such information mentioned in the e-mail:

"Verification of iTunes Purchase uses no SDK or server-side integration — this cannot be duplicated by any of our competitors".

Other advertisement companies such as Google's AdMob can only estimate conversion rates, but such data cannot be as precise and detailed as Quattro's one. For enabling conversion tracking every developer that uses AdMob must integrate the company's advertising API into his code.

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Ryan Tate from Gawker quoted people closed to the matter who said that Steve Jobs is dissatisfied with the free app New York Times Editor's Choice. The reason is that it has a limited content of the daily NYT.

The story started when some time ago Amazon made a deal with Times and received exclusive rights on its full content. So now if you have Kindle you should pay to gain full access to the NYT edition. The same full content is also available on the web and it's free. Moreover, the deal apparently implies that other competitors may have the full text but they must sell it at a higher price.

Few days ago the New York Times decided to raise the subscription price on the Kindle, from $13.99 to $19.99 per month. That was no wonder because the NYT warned before that they want to charge readers nearly $20-30 per month. With such a deal Apple was left with a truncated version of the NYT for the iPad. Ironically, the same version for iPhone remains to deliver the full content.

Obviously, that is the reason why Apple has been ignoring the NYT iPad app recently. It is even not listed as a "noteworthy" or "favorite" in the App Store. User reviews are also mainly negative and many people ask where the full content can be found.

Today Steve Jobs revealed that last Friday Apple's iPad reached one million sales:

"One million iPads in 28 days -- that's less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone. Demand continues to exceed supply and we're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers."

The company also revealed next facts:

• 12 million apps for iPad were downloaded from the App Store already;
• 1,5 million e-books were downloaded from the iBookStore;
• 5,000 applications were created specifically for the iPad (the number of apps for iPod touch and iPhone is more than 200,000)

There were no information revealed about a breakdown of 3G vs. Wi-Fi-only sales, but one analyst told that on Sunday 49 of 50 retail stores were sold out of both models.

Piper Jaffray's analyst Gene Munster predicts that the Wi-Fi iPad will be more popular and will take 60% of sales while iPad 3G-capable model will carry only 40% of overall sales. He also believes that Apple has already more than 1 million iPads, which proved to be true.