IPhone news and information

Archive for May, 2011

Citing a report from research2guidance, GigaOM notes that Apple's market share of app downloads reversed the backward slide that began in 2009 and recently increased by two percent. This is a far cry from the doom n' gloom predictions many pundits have been espousing for Apple's platform, and it shows that Google's Android Marketplace still has a long way to go before unseating Apple's App Store.

The report speculates that a "lock-in effect" is partially responsible for users sticking with Apple's platform. iOS users, whether they're iPhone/iPod touch or iPad owners, tend to download a large number of apps, with a fairly high percentage of those apps being paid versions. The higher number of paid apps a user downloads, the more likely it is that user will stick with the same platform. This makes perfect sense; if you're like me and you've got a couple hundred bucks worth of apps on your various devices, that's a lot of inertia to overcome if you decide you want to switch platforms.

When you flip it around and look at things from the Android perspective, things don't look as rosy. GigaOM recently cited research from Distimo that showed paid downloads represent a truly minuscule proportion of total app downloads from the Android Market. 79.3 percent of paid apps on the Android platform have been downloaded less than 100 times, and only 4.6 percent of paid apps were downloaded more than 1000 times. A 2010 Distimo report (again cited from GigaOM) noted that Android users download a disproportionately large number of free apps compared to the iOS platform, and that trend doesn't appear to be reversing.

The end result is that for all we hear from various tech pundits about Android's ascending smartphone market share being the only metric that matters, other numbers are showing that not only are users more likely to stick with iOS due to app 'lock-in,' Apple's App Store also remains a more attractive market for app developers who actually want to make money with paid apps. CNNMoney's analysis of the same Distimo report paints a very stark picture: of 72,000 paid apps on the Android platform, only two have sold more than 500,000 (but less than one million) copies over the history of the platform. Contrast that with six paid applications generating 500,000 or more downloads just in the US version of the iPhone's App Store in March and April alone.

How many paid apps have you downloaded for your iOS device, and do you consider that an impediment to switching platforms? Let us know in the comments.

Report indicates iOS users stick with platform due to 'lock-in effect' originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

According to Engadget, in an interview at the D9 Conference Google's Eric Schmidt confirmed that Apple and Google will maintain their partnership in maps and search functionality in iOS. "We just renewed our map and search agreements with Apple, and we hope those continue for a long time."

This may mean that Apple has put a hold on plans to institute its own mapping service, or that the service was never close to deployment to begin with. Whatever the case may be, it looks like Google Maps will be the default mapping service for iOS 5 at the very least, and possibly for some time to come.

Apple renews Google partnership, Google Maps still in iOS 5 originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

SpriteLoq is a new tool for Flash developers looking to make iOS games with the Corona SDK, now available on the project's website. The Corona SDK is a third-party software development kit used to put together iOS games and apps (we've covered it and spoken with the creators before). It allows devs to not only develop iOS apps, but also spread them across various other platforms, including Android and even platforms like the Nook and Kindle. SpriteLoq is a brand new plug-in for that SDK that allows developers of Flash animations to simply pull them in, whole hog, without having to rebuild from scratch at all.

You can watch a video of how it works on the website. You can simply export .SWF files from Flash, convert them using SpriteLoq, then quickly bring them back in to Corona to use in an actual app. It seems like a really quick and easy way to take a lot of work already done in the Flash environment and bring it over to a much more portable system.

SpriteLoq and Corona are both free downloads, though you'll need a license for each to actually produce a game or app with them. For the rest of us, this simply means we'll see even more Flash apps making their way over to the iOS platform.

SpriteLoq helps Flash game developers move assets to Corona originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.