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Busted Loop has passed the blogging torch. The Appslice blog is now the place where you'll find the most original research and analysis about the App Store.

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.

07/15/2009 - Busted Loop Offers Free Access to Worldwide Appstore Data


Busted Loop, a Maine based startup company, will provide a free snapshot of iTunes Appstore data starting July 16th. Their Raw Appstore Data (RAD) includes name, price, and release date for over 60,0000 iPhone apps available in the Appstore, along with the apps’ popularity ranking in each of the 77 countries where Apple has launched an iTunes store.


Still in beta, the feed is available as a comma-delimited file and can be downloaded from Busted Loop’s website at bustedloop.com. The RAD announcement coincides with Busted Loop’s appearance in the startup competition at MobileBeat 2009. A fresh snapshot will be posted on the Busted Loop website each month.


About Busted Loop: Founded in May 2009 with a mission to track and analyze the booming iPhone app marketplace, Busted Loop began publishing initial research findings on June 30th. Within days, articles from the Busted Loop Blog were syndicated in news sites around the world. The July 7th article titled How Much Does It Cost To Buy Every iPhone App? ($144,326.06) was featured in Gizmodo and Forbes.

You should subscribe to our RSS feed here. You are going to want to see the analysis we start pulling from this data over the next couple weeks...

Up until now the articles have focused on the US App Store. In response to the international attention we are now going to begin publishing more internationally-focused analysis.

As a preview, here's a chart of Paid vs. Free distribution in App Store categories for four large, English-speaking, countries.

There are definitely some geography-specific trends that are observable across categories. Some countries tend to pay for more apps than others, so they have more paid apps that are popular.

The anomalies are even more interesting. Look at the chart, and notice that spot on the right where both United Kingdom and Australia have an uncharacteristic bump, whereas the other two countries have a dip. That's the "Sports" category.

And then there's the most noticeable dip of all - the only point in which the US has the least paid apps in the Top 100 - that category is "News".

Worldwide analysis is going to be a lot of fun.

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!

We've had some really popular posts on iPhone related stuff... But that's not all we're about here at Busted Loop... so, now for something completely different!

Introducing the first public release of The Busted Loop Squarespace Jetpack!

It's a handy widget that pops up in the corner of Firefox that shows you many of the key numbers from your real time stats on the Squarespace management pages. This is the intro post. There's a permenant home page as well.

If you use Squarespace, you're probably addicted to the real time stats like we are. With this widget you can keep an eye on your Squarespace traffic numbers and recent referrers on any page in Firefox with a click of the mouse or a quick keyboard combo (alt-s).

You're going to need the Jetpack Firefox Extension to use this. We think Jetpack is an amazing advancement in extending the browser. This technology makes creating web site specific browser extensions easier than ever. I created this initial release in less than a weekend. It's a bit rough around the edges, but I'm already using it more often than Squarespace itself.

After you've installed the Jetpack Firefox extension, you can go to the page for the Squarespace Jetpack and you should see an "install" button in the top right. Once our Jetpack is installed, go log in as admin at Squarespace (if you're not already) and your stats should start updating!

Subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up to date on enhancements. See the side bar to follow us on twitter.

Leave a comment with your feedback and suggestions. Remember, this is ALPHA software.

UPDATE

Speaking of Alpha! We only have the one Squarespace account... and what do you know? It works for us! Come to find out that wasn't the case for anyone else... But I think I have fixed the problem... Now you should see a preference panel where you need to enter your squarespace base URL (i.e. http://bustedloop.com, or http://bustedloop.squarespace.com) then you can hit save and it will work!

I have also fixed a date bug pointed out in the comments by Paul, a performance issue, and I have added an uninstall section to the Jetpack homepage.

If you didn't click the "automatic update" check box when you installed the Squarespace Jetpack, you'll need to go to "about:jetpack" in Firefox and hit the refresh button.

Thanks to everyone who has tried it so far!

Dean Takahashi, author of the VentureBeat article, based his number on Mobclix data. The Mobclix reports can be misleading because they don't filter for uniqueness. Some apps appear in multiple categories: a single app can appear in the Entertainment category AND in the Action sub-genre of Games, for example.

Games are special in this regard. There are no cases of an app that's not classified as a game being in more than one category. For our purposes we only count apps as "Games" if they do not appear in another

non-game category. There are roughly 3,000 apps in this overlap area, which leaves 10,175 apps that are exclusively categorized as games.

So, about 56,000 apps and somewhere between

10,000 and 13,000 of them are games (depending on how you count). This graph will give you an idea of the growth rate for the different segments, showing the  number of unique apps each day for past month.

Special bonus feature! The total price of apps over that same time period.

$144,326.06

.. or $2.59 per app ($3.34 if you don't include the free apps (12,538 of them) in the average) and which publishers stand to make the most from you?

While we were digging around in the data for our latest post. we created this graph of the total price of all apps over time... here it is:

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!

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.

We've been working on some cool projects using App Store metrics and we're excited to see that we're not the only ones. In this article we're going to take a closer look at price changes in June using our own data.

In his post iPhone App Prices Fluctuate As Developers Adjust To OS 3.0; Nav Apps Gain Pricing Power Erick Schonfeld points to a graph that shows the total value of all apps in the "Top 100 Paid" list and notes that the aggregate price is fluctuating wildly. We've been paying attention to this metric ourselves, and have found that when compared to the "Top 100 Paid" lists for individual categories, the Top 100 overall is one of the most stable.

Here's a graph with the aggregate price for the "Top 100 Paid" along with the same measurement for a few categories. We've chosen categories that had some interesting changes in June (click to open a really huge version).

A couple of things to note:

1. Medical apps are expensive!

2. Prices within category specific Top 100 lists are much more unstable than the Top 100 Paid overall

3. Even though Distimo's report makes the Top 100 price seem erratic, it's partially due to the scale of their graph.

Look at this graph of the daily change rate for the Top 100's total price. In the past month it barely hit 10%.

Furthermore, within the category Top 100 lists there is a lot of instability being caused by just a few high priced apps. As these apps cross the #100 threshhold they move in and out of the list and have a big impact on the total price. This is not the case for the overall Top 100 paid list, which sees expensive apps introduced far less frequently.

Referring back to the first graph, we have been able to identify the cause of every increase and decrease in price within category Top 100 lists. It would be boring to read (or write) about all of them, so we picked just a few interesting ones to show you. Check out the annotated graph and details below:

1. Proloquo2Go, with a price of $149.99, had a two-day stint in the Top 100 Paid Educational category.

2. Shortly after initial release MobileNavigator Europe became a Top 100 Paid Navigation app, with a price tag of $94.99.

3. The same Navigation app, MobileNavigator Europe, was increased to $139.99.

The Distimo report attributes this Navigation price spike to Apple allowing turn by turn navigation, and it's interesting to see that almost all of the increase was due to a single app.

TechCrunch concludes that Nav apps are gaining pricing power, and we agree. Navigation app prices will increase as publishers add valuable turn-by-turn features and big players like TomTom and Garmin bring new products online.

Games:

Education:

Lifestyle:

All clouds generated at Wordle.

Don't forget to check out the rest of the categories!

Fun with numbers!

I love digging into brand new data when the only strategy is to dive in and explore. The output of every query is a real discovery.

It's even better when its a huge pack of exclusive data about a cutting edge and very trendy topic. Today it's the iTunes App Store, which has been a subject of much study this year. Pinch Media published a presentation that gives some insight into how app ranking translates to daily downloads, and a recent report by MobClix examines the distribution of users among the 2,309 free apps they track. Both of these are based the subset of apps in their "network" and are not necessarily representative of the App Store as a whole.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on comprehensive, raw ranking data for the entire US App Store, spanning all the different categories. I have many days of it, but so far I've only begun to look at a single snapshot. Just for fun, here's a chart of paid vs free across all categories:


And here's another one with just games, by genre. Remember, games can appear in more than one genre:


Now that I've got you hooked with some colorful pictures, let's dig in deeper.

Clearly the majority of apps are not free. Yet if you browse any category in the App Store and sort by "Most Popular" you'll see that there are lots of free apps near the top. Below is a breakdown of paid vs free for the top 100 apps in each category.


Even though the majority of apps cost money, the majority of the "most popular" apps are free. To compensate for this, I'd expect there to be a concentration of paid apps at the bottom of the popularity curve. To test this theory, lets check out the 200 least popular apps in each category. (Games are omitted. Multiple genres makes it just a little tricky, and I'm keeping it simple for now)


This is starting to get exciting! Notice how most of the categories have no free apps at all in the bottom 200. It turns out that at the bottom of every category there are pages and pages of paid apps, uninterrupted by even a single free app. See for yourself - pick any category, sort by popularity, and click through the pages looking for free apps. It may take up to 50 pages depending on which category you chose, but you'll eventually find a page that has only paid apps. Keep on clicking and you'll see that this continues all the way to the last page.

We call this segment of paid-only apps in each category the "dead zone". App Store popularity is based on daily download rate, so the apps in the dead zone for each category have fewer daily downloads than even the least popular free app in that category.

So how many times per day are apps in the dead zone downloaded? Well, since the vast majority of downloads are for apps near the top, we assume that the least popular free apps in each category have very few downloads per day. Probably none.

Another interesting thing we noticed is that the size of the dead zone, and the percentage of paid apps that die varies quite a bit across categories. Here's another paid vs free chart with the dead zone carved out. I've also added a line showing the mortality rate based on total paid apps in each category. (You can click this chart to open a larger version)

If you're an iPhone App developer you may be wondering "What does this mean to me?", and you've probably got a hunch that it's not good news. Our interpretation is that most paid apps fail. These "dead" apps may have had some sales shortly after they were released, but once the honeymoon is over, that's it. No more sales.

I'd love to hear your feedback on this analysis, especially if you're the publisher of an app currently in the dead zone. Is it true that these apps are failures? Let us know!

But when it rains it pours... Busted Loop has an internal project that needs significant bursts of computing power throughout the day, and one of our clients is looking to replace a $1000/month build server with a cheaper alternative. Fortunately, the client has a large investment in Rackspace and some substantial bandwidth requirements, which made the choice of which service to embrace pretty easy, with a bit of a hurdle...

No API?! The RackspaceCloud API isn't going live until Q3 of this year... This struck me as odd because I believe the Rackspace Cloud is powered by the Slicehost technology which has an API.

Oh well... This is 2009, the web is the API.

Introducing the RackspaceCloud Command Line Tool!

It's a groovy script I wrote that does the bare minimum we need to complete our projects; create, delete, resize and list servers in the Rackspace Cloud and some variations on those themes and a way to keep an eye on our bill!. I'm basically wrapping the web site features with a groovy API and then wrapping that in a command line tool. I'll switch features to the official API when it's released. We needed this tool pretty quickly so the API (in the script guts) isn't perfect and will be refactored before I package it up for general consumption, but I think there's enough in this command line tool to be generally useful.

In the future there will be commands for controlling DNS settings, fetching the internal IP of the server, rebooting, and anything else that stands in the way of our completed solutions.

If this is useful or interesting to anyone besides us, I can post more about how you can use the API in your groovy or java code to add this functionality into your apps.

If you think this is interesting, please use the "share article" links at the bottom of the post and leave a comment.