busted loop

Please visit the August RAD feed download page to get a complete set of worldwide iTunes App Store ranking data. Slice it and dice it and let us know what you find. We love the feedback!

You may have noticed that we haven't blogged since our presentation at the MobileBeat2009 startup competition. I don't have much time to explain, but a graph is worth a thousand words (note: the blog post and meetings per day lines are 7 day averages.)

Something missing from that graph is the number of checkins for our code repository. We've also completed a major rewrite of our App Store Crawler that allows us to collect and deliver this data more frequently and efficiently.

The end result: worldwide data is flowing fast, and we're free to get back to analysis and discovery. We've still got to keep up with a whole new level of conference calls and data requests, but the international action is at our fingertips like never before. We'll let you know what we find.

Earlier this week there was excitement about Mobclix numbers indicating that the iPhone game count has exceeded 13,000. We provided an alternate measurement that puts the total a little lower, but regardless of how you count them up, games are the largest category of iPhone apps. Every day 40-200 new games are added to the App Store (and between 10 and 50 are removed). If growth continues at this pace you'll be able to choose from over 25,000 games by the end of the year.

The flood of new titles has created fierce competition among publishers, and as a result we've seen lots of version updates to existing games. Almost a quarter (24%) of games were updated or added in the last month. Over half of game releases in the App Store are less than 90 days old.

The ratio is even higher for the most popular titles: 36% of games across Top 25 lists have a release/update date less than 30 days ago. Comparing the Top 25 to the least popular games in each category we see that the proportion of "old" games is similar but the segment of very new titles is much smaller:

The least popular segment, which is made up of the lowest ranking 100 games each category, has a marginally lower ratio of 90-days-or-older titles, and about half the ratio of 30-days-or-newer games. The difference is made up of games that are between 60 and 90 days old. There's some good analysis to be done on that segment, we'll get to that in a later article that's not focused on games.

The numbers and charts above are based on the entire App Store game universe - All apps that appear in any game sub-category. Because the sub-categories have very different characteristics (like they're not all the same size) they each behave differently. It's not really fair to measure them all together. Doing so can combine competing metrics, causing them to cancel out and not be represented in the results. For example, you may have heard about the explosion in role playing games for the iPhone. This chart shows the huge segment of very new releases.

Unfortunately I don't have the slightest interest in Role Playing games. But I do love racing games, and there's not enough good ones for the iPhone (I'm hoping someone finds a way to use the compass for driving...) Take a look at the same chart for the Top 25 Racing games. It confirms what I already know: not nearly as many new racing titles.

But averaging isn't always bad, and we do it all the time anyway. To prove it I'll give you this table sorted by the average age of all games in each genre. I also included the oldest and newest release in the Top 25 lists.

Some of the apps in the Top 25 lists are over a year old!

Right here! See links below to download App Store rankings for over 50,000 apps.

The iTunes App Store is changing rapidly. There are thousands of new apps every week, and the number of new publishers is keeping pace. At the same time, apps disappear from the app store every day. Apps move up and down in popularity, change price, and even shift from one category to another. It's a churning urn of burning funk!

We have lots of App Store data and we love digging around in it. Some of you find this stuff really interesting too, so we offer you some raw data in the hope that you will find it useful, and that you'll derive something interesting and share it with us. We've packaged up two recent snapshots of our ranking data from the US iTunes App Store, one week apart.

If you're unfamiliar with the structure of the App Store, these notes may be helpful:

1. Apps are organized into categories
2. The Games category has a number of sub-categories
3. Apps can belong to multiple categories
4. Rankings are relative to other apps in the same category
5. There are other ranked lists that contain apps across multiple categories

The data is de-normalized, and is presented in as simple a format as possible. Each record consists of:

• Category name
• Rank
• App
• Price

Questions are welcomed, critique appreciated, insights revered. So download our data, pop it in a spreadsheet or database or whatever your flavor, and get back to us with your results!

UPDATE: 7/16/09 check out the new data, world wide!

The term "mobile app" is starting to become commonplace. I can use it with my dad and he knows what I mean. People have heard enough in the press and done enough shopping in the iTunes store to get the idea of buying software for a cell phone. But will Apple, who indirectly coined the term "podcast" with their omnipresent iPod, do the same thing with the iPhone?

Here you can see that people started looking around for information about mobile apps back in the middle of 2007.

Zero to 6.00 in two years, looks like pretty serious popularity growth.

It's important to always get some context, so I picked the first other term that came to mind.

Apparently if I'd been using the term "iPhone app" instead my dad would have understood me a lot sooner.

Here's a graph with iphone, palm, and android apps for the past 30 days:

Getting back to the original question of "iphone" becoming the "Q-tips®" of mobile, here's one last search trend for you to ponder:

This doesn't necessarily mean anything, but google trends is fun to play with.