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's amazing, incredible Phil Schiller
Phil Schiller. Photo: Apple Inc.
The day after Apple's (AAPL) "It's only rock and roll" event, Erik Sherman asked on CBS's BNET why the media missed the strategic importance of the gaming announcements that were made that day.
He has a point. Apple spent nearly a third of the hour-plus long presentation talking about the iPod touch — the "funnest iPod ever" — and how it stacks up against handheld game machines made by the likes of Sony (SNE) and Nintendo.
Yet the attention of the press seemed to be on everything else: the return of Steve Jobs, the video camera on the iPod nano, the camera missing from the iPod touch.
I went back and reviewed the podcast video of the event and I think I've found the reason: Phil Schiller.
Did Steve Jobs spin the NY Times?
Jobs. Photo: Apple Inc.
When David Pogue, the New York Times' chief technology columnist, sat down with Steve Jobs after his "It's only rock and roll" keynote Wednesday, Pogue's first question was the one, as he put it, the "blogosphere’s been buzzing about": Why did Apple (AAPL) put a video camera on the iPod nano but not — as widely expected — on the iPod touch?
Jobs reiterated what Phil Schiller, his marketing vice president, had said earlier on stage: that Apple was pitching the iPod touch as a game machine — the "funnest iPod ever." Adding a camera would have made that game machine less affordable.
In Jobs' words:
“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.” (link)
But according to AppleInsider's Kasper Jade, citing unnamed sources familiar with Apple's decision making process, that's simple not true. "While AppleInsider appreciates the company co-founder's play at damage control," writes Jade, "it's a tough sell." More
Live: Apple iPod event, 9/9/09, San Francisco
The view from inside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photo: Jon Fortt.
Will we get new iPods with video recording? Will Steve Jobs show or won't he? Refresh this page during the event for live updates. It all begins at 10 a.m. PT, 1 p.m. ET. The presentation is about to begin.
Steve Jobs walks out on stage to a standing ovation. He clearly appreciates the reception. He still looks quite gaunt — much like he did before he took his leave. Applause lasts a good 45 seconds.
He says he has the liver of a person in his or her mid-20s who died in a car crash and donated organs. He asks everyone to consider organ donation. He thanks the Apple community, and Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple executive team.
Steve Jobs announces sales of 30 million iPhones. More
Apple slashes iPod prices up to $120
Image: Apple Inc.
In an early-morning teaser, Apple (AAPL) has chopped $20 to $120 off the prices of most of its iPod line.
The new prices were posted only hours before a special music event at which Apple is expected to replace most if not all of its existing iPods with new models loaded with more memory and added functions, such as a camera.
Among the cuts:
- 8 GB iPod touch reduced to $189 from $229 ($40 off)
- 32 GB iPod touch reduced to $279 from $399 ($120 off)
- 16 GB iPod nano reduced to $149 from $199 ($50 off)
- 120 GB iPod classic reduced to $229 from $249 ($20 off)
The new prices are posted, without comparisons to the old, on Apple's online store. Only the iPod shuffle appears to be unaffected. It still $79 for 4 GB.
Today's event is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. Pacific (1 p.m. Eastern) at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
UPDATE below with price changes announced at the event:
Where in the world are those 18.6 million iPod touches?
Apple (AAPL), for reasons known only to itself, does not report the number of iPod touches it has sold.
But it lets you do the math, and on Tuesday COO Tim Cook casually mentioned, in response to a question about the App Store, that the total installed base of iPhones (26.4 million) plus iPod touches (X) is now 45 million.
So where are those 18.6 million iPod touches?
Nearly 12 million are in the United States, according to a report on the geographical distribution of Apple mobile devices issued Thursday morning by AdMob, the leading mobile ad platform. That makes sense, given that Americans buy the lion's share of all Apple handsets, and the company has been particularly aggressive about marketing the iPod touch to U.S. students in its back-to-school computer sales.
But if you look at AdMob's region-by-region breakdown, the iPod touch is surprisingly popular overseas.
New iPhone is no threat to the Flip camcorder
With the launch of the Flip video camera in May 2007, the camcorder market has never been the same. Flip brought video creation and sharing to the masses, which meant even more footage of cats riding skateboards. (We can't thank them enough for that.)
Consumers embraced the convenience, simplicity, portability, and affordability of Flip's "point and shoot" video camera. It has few buttons, records video on an internal chip, and uploads footage to a computer through a USB key that "flips" out of the camera. Software loaded on the device transfers clips seamlessly to the Web. Models start at $150.
Soon the device was grabbing market share from Sony (SNE) and JVC — more than two million of the cameras have been sold — and earlier this year networking giant Cisco (CSCO) snapped up Flip maker Pure Digital for $590 million.
But there's a new rival on the scene: Apple iPhone 3GS, introduced in early June, boasts a video capture function. And some technophiles are asking if Flip's days as the No. 1 pocket video recorder are numbered. More
iPhone share of U.S. smartphone traffic hits 69%
See the blue slice in the pie chart at right? It represents the iPhone's share of U.S. smartphone traffic on the network maintained by AdMob, one of the companies that run those little ads that appear on the screen of your mobile phone.
We've been watching that slice grow over the past few months. In February it covered 51% of the pie. By April it had grown to 59%. And by Thursday morning, when AdMob released the May edition of its U.S. smartphone pie, Apple's (AAPL) share had grown to 69% — a 10 point increase in one month.
Some caveats are in order. This is just one company's view of the mobile Web — albeit the view of world's largest supplier of mobile ads, serving 6.3 billion banner and text ads per month. And it's only a snapshot of the smartphones on the U.S. portion of the AdMob network — although 47.6% of AdMob's traffic comes from the U.S. and 37.3% of that comes from smartphones.
Still, what it suggests is that Apple's domination of the smartphone market — the only part of the cellphone market that has continued to grow in the face of the recession, according to Gartner Research — is accelerating.
How tough this makes it for the competition is even clearer when you look at AdMob's report on the total U.S. handset market — one that includes smartphones, so-called feature phones and devices that aren't phones at all, like the iPod touch. Apple's share of this market, viewed through AdMob requests, is 45.1%, having grown 10.4% between April and May. Most of the other players in the field — including Research in Motion (RIMM), Samsung, Motorola (MOT) and Palm (PALM) — are showing negative growth. We'll be watching next month to see if Palm's share grows once AdMob starts to get data from the Pre.
Below the fold: AdMob's worldwide data, in which Apple's share (31.4%) and share change (5.2%) are smaller, but the pattern is basically the same. You can see the full report here.
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