Apple relents. Bobble reps rule!
An iPhone app illustrated with caricatures of the 111th Congress finally gets the green light
Photo: App Store
At least someone at Apple (AAPL) has a sense of humor.
Less than a week after the iPhone Developer Program rejected as "objectionable" and "defamatory" an application illustrated with caricatures of U.S. Senators and Congressmen, the company has reversed itself and approved the app.
Bobble Rep for the iPhone and iPod touch was conceived by director Ray (Super Capers) Griggs and illustrated by Mad Magazine caricaturist Tom Richmond. The drawings serve as an entry into a data base of information about the politicians, whose oversized heads bobble when shaken or flicked with a finger. The app is now available for sale here for $0.99.
"I'm glad Apple came to their senses," says Richmond, "and realized that this app is not only not derogatory or insulting to our congressional representatives and senators, it's a beneficial program and a little fun as well."
Richmond spent months drawing the heads of all 540 members of the 111th Congress, including nonvoting members from Puerto Rico and Guam.
Fox News on Saturday was taking credit for Apple's decision to approve the app, although it was Richmond himself who drew national attention to its rejection earlier this week with a widely read entry in his blog.
See Apple bans Nancy Pelosi bobble head.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
The iPhone's first 100,000 apps
Games dominate with nearly 17% of titles. Entertainment, books and travel are close behind.
Click to enlarge. Source: 148Apps.biz
Less than 16 months after it opened for business, the App Store now offers more than 100,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, according to an Apple (AAPL) press release issued early Wednesday.
Two independent sites, AppShopper.com and 148Apps.biz, which track listings in the U.S. App Store, count 97,026 and 96,161, respectively. [UPDATE: A third, apptism.com, lists 100,699.]
Apple's total includes 3,000 or 4,000 apps available only in its 76 overseas stores. Another nearly 9,000 apps have been approved by Apple but for one reason or another are no longer available for download.
The distribution of applications remains roughly the same as it was a year ago. According to 148Apps' count, the U.S. App Store carries, among other offerings, more than 16,000 games, 13,000 books, 2,700 navigation programs, 1,200 medical applications and 442 weather apps.
Below the fold: A bar chart comparing the App Store's 100,000 with the numbers available at the official application markets for Google's (GOOG) Android platform, Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, Nokia's (NOK) Symbian, Palm's (PALM) Pre and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile phones.
Apple earnings set new record; shares explode in after-hours trading
So much for expectations. Apple (AAPL) blew past them all — its own and those of a crowd of increasingly bullish analysts — by reporting its most profitable quarter ever, earning $1.82 a share on revenue of $9.87 billion for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2009.
The Street was expecting quarterly earnings of $1.42 on revenue of $9.2 billion, according to Thomson Financial.
Apple's shares exploded in after-hours trading. Having closed at $189.86, shares leaped more than 13 points in the next hour and 40 minutes to $202.87 — one thin dime away from the all-time high of $202.97 set in intraday trading on Dec. 27, 2007.
Sales for the year were a record $36.5 billion, up 12.5% from 2008. Earnings per share for the year topped $6.29, up more than 17% from the year before.
Strong sale of iPhones — following price cuts and the introduction of a new model — helped boost Apple's earnings.
But the big surprise was the Macintosh. Apple sold 3.05 million Macs for in Q4 — a 17% increase from same quarter last year — thanks to its new Snow Leopard operating system, re-energized back-to-school sales and a big order from the state of Maine.
"We are thrilled to have sold more Macs and iPhones than in any previous quarter," said Steve Jobs in a prepared statement."
Highlights from Apple's earnings report include:
Mixed reviews for iPhone's Rock Band
Photo: Electronic Arts
On Monday, nearly two weeks after Electronic Arts (ERTS) confirmed its imminent arrival, the iPhone version of Rock Band — one of the most successful video game franchises of recent years — showed up on Apple's (AAPL) iTunes App Store to mixed reviews. (App Store link here.)
The lion's share of the first 40 messages on the App Store were one-line positives: "Amazing." "Awesome!" "Saaaaweeeeeett!"
But the longer, more thoughtful — and more useful — reviews were less kind. The main complaints seemed to be that it was too expensive ($9.99), too easy (lacking an "extreme" level), and that some of the advanced features, such as multi-user play over Bluetooth, didn't work as advertised.
The big problem, however, is that the program is 15 months too late.
Shake. Load. Kaboom. $600+/day.
Most iPhone apps lose money, but some freebies — like Shotgun — rake in the cash
Source: Mobclix
As an app, Shotgun Free doesn't do much. Give it a shake and it makes the sound of a shell being chambered. Tilt it up sharply and the gun fires with a bang as loud as an Apple (AAPL) iPhone can make — which isn't terribly loud.
But the app is popular. It's been downloaded nearly 4 million times since it was launched in early March. An average of 60,000 to 70,000 people have been using it daily ever since.
More to the point, the small ads that run across the bottom of screen are displayed 200,000 to 300,000 times a day, which is how Shotgun Free ended up as case study No. 1 in a white paper issued this week by MobClix, the Palo Alto start-up that acts as a middleman between Shotgun's developer — Inedible Software — and the advertisers who pay them $3 per 1,000 ad impressions. That works out to $600 to $900 a day.
There are eight case studies in the MobClix report, and a lesson for mobile developers in each of them.
85,500 iPhone apps, 2 billion downloads
Source: Apple Inc.
Steve Jobs likes to wait for nice round numbers before he announces his milestones, and on Monday Apple (AAPL) hit a big one: the 85,000 apps in the iPhone App Store have now been downloaded more than 2 billion times — a number Jobs described as "staggering."
"The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate," he said in a prepared statement, pointing out that more than half a billion apps were downloaded in Apple's fourth fiscal quarter alone.
He's right about the acceleration, but judging from the slope of the curve above, it's not quite as dramatic as he makes it sound.
It took Apple 74 days to rack up these half billion downloads, and 82 days to get the previous half billion.
Put another way, users were downloading apps at the rate of 6.1 million a day between April 23 (when the App Store hit 1 billion) and July 14 (when it hit 1.5 billion), and the rate of 6.7 million a day between July 15 and Sept. 26, a 10% increase.
Impressive, but given how many customers Apple has added in the past quarter, maybe not staggering.
Among the other numbers Apple announced Monday: More
Apple approved 1,394 apps on Friday
Someone must have lit a fire under Apple's (AAPL) App Store review staff last week.
Having drifted along for much of September, approving as few as 58 new apps on a single day, the staff green lighted "an avalance of apps" on Friday according to AppShopper.com. A total of 1,394 new applications were approved that day, 302 of them games.
AppShopper doesn't say whether Friday's haul set a new record, although that seems likely. The previous high over the previous two months was 947, set on July 30.
As of Tuesday morning, there were 81,161 active applications available on the U.S. portion of the App Store, according to 148Apps.biz. New apps are coming in at the average rate of 296 a day, according to that site, down from a peak of 356 in June.
According to Apple's Aug. 21 letter to the FCC, new apps and updates pour into the store at the rate of 8,500 per week, where they are reviewed at least twice by a staff of 40 full-time reviewers.
If Apple hasn't staffed up since then, Friday must have been a very busy day indeed.
"We had heard Apple had had quite a back log of approvals," wrote AppShopper's arn, "so hopefully, they have cleared the queue for now."
Below the fold: AppShopper's full chart and what it reveals about the review staff's work habits.
What did Apple and Google talk about for three weeks in July?
Apple's Schiller and Google's Eustace
In the letter to the FCC that Google (GOOG) released Friday — the one that flatly contradicts the story Apple (AAPL) told the government — there's an interesting timeline of events.
At the heart of the case, for those who haven't been following every twist and turn, is an application called Google Voice that Google had been trying since June to get onto the iPhone App Store. Google says that Apple rejected the app. Apple says it never did.
This would be funny, as Brian Caulfield puts it, if the Feds weren't involved.
What interests me today is the three weeks following the telephone call in which, according to Google's newly un-redacted letter, Apple's top marketing executive — Phil Schiller — told Google's senior engineering guy — Alan Eustace — that Apple was rejecting Google Voice because it duplicated the iPhone's dialing function. Here's the sequence of events, as Google has it:
Apple's Animal Farm
I'm sorry, Microsoft. On behalf of Silicon Valley, I’m sorry.
We cursed you, mocked you, labeled you the Evil Empire. Your crime: trying to control the technology world. Sure, we had reason to be upset. During the dawning of the PC era, the Windows operating system made you the most powerful company in tech, and it went to your head.
Your detractors say you intimidated PC makers, crushed Netscape, and tried to turn the web into an extension of the Windows platform. As it turns out, local darling Apple (AAPL) probably would have done the same thing. More
