Games Top the Charts in the iPhone and Android App Markets

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 2

While it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the past week^†, but the category continued to have a disproportionate share of the Top 100 charts, accounting for 52% of the Top Grossing, 56% of the Top Paid, and 50% of the Top Free apps:

Since most Book apps are actually individual e-books, the Gaming category would have a hard time keeping up with the ever increasing number of Books. Once publishers figured out how to turn their titles into iPhone apps, the number of Book apps started growing faster than Games. Nevertheless Games continue to rule the Top 100 charts.

A similar story is playing out on the Android platform: the most popular Android apps are primarily Games. (In the Android taxonomy, most Books are in the Reference category.)

Returning to the top iPhone apps, the price of the Top Grossing apps stabilized somewhat last week. Except for the top decile (rank 1 through 10) for which the median price was about $7, the median price across the other deciles was around $5.

Over the last week, the Top Paid Games were slightly more expensive than apps that made the overall Top 100 Paid list. iPhone Game developers will tell you that (visually) compelling and engaging iPhone Games are far from trivial to design and market^††. So it's no surprise that the creators of the most popular Games are starting to charge a little more for their software.

(†) Data for this post was for the week ending 11/1/2009.
(††) First, designing for such a small screen poses a major challenge. Secondly, the sheer number of Game apps (close to 20K last week) makes it hard to create something that turns into a long-running top-seller.

Who's Winning the Smartphone Wars?

by Raven Zachary | @ravenme | comments: 7

The short answer - Microsoft and Nokia are slipping, RIM and Apple are gaining. It's too early to tell with Google. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Last week, UK-based analyst firm Canalys, released its findings on smartphone market share based on Q2 2009 unit shipments (see "Smart phones defy slowdown"). Before sharing Canalys' findings, there are two important points to understand:

• How market share is defined is based on the numnber of units shipped during a particular period of time, not the number of active users of a specific smartphone platform, which is the installed base. These are commonly misunderstood terms. To determine the share that any particular smartphone platform has of worldwide active smartphone users would require aggregation of data from all of the mobile network operators. Good luck with that.
• The results of these reports are not reflective of how well a company is actually doing in terms of profit (see "A Visualized Look At The Estimated Revenues Of The Top Cell Phone Manufacturers" as an example).

Canalys covers a number of topics in their latest smartphone research, but the one topic are I want to focus on is "Global smart phone market by OS". Which companies are shipping the largest number of plastic phones into the world is less interesting to most of us than which mobile operating systems are winning. Dell vs. HP is not as compelling as Microsoft vs. Apple, in the personal computer market. LG, Fujitsu, and Samsung, three successful handset manufacturers, generally are not fully part of the smartphone conversation as they have historically licensed smartphone operating systems from companies such as Microsoft (this trend is changing to include more diverse licensing partners and increased in-house OS development).

Symbian (Nokia) accounts for half of the smartphones shipped in Q2 2009, followed by RIM, Apple, and Microsoft. Compared to the same quarter in 2008, Symbian and Microsoft are losing smartphone market share, and RIM and Apple are gaining significantly. Apple's growth percentage over the prior year is artifically inflated due to contraints in availability of the original iPhone just prior to the release of the iPhone 3G in Q3 2008. Minus that event, it would have been closer to RIM's annual growth percentage.

Even though Nokia has a 50% smartphone market share right now with Symbian, I think they are the most vulnerable of all the major players covered by Canalys. Symbian is a mobile operating system struggling to be modern with a developer ecosystem that seems to be far more fractured and unmotivated when compared to the excitement I see regularly from Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry developers. Microsoft's Windows CE and its variants have been in the market since 1996, and on smartphones for nearly a decade, yet has not been able to effectively remain competitive recently. And while Android has shipped on just over a million smartphones during the quarter, that's still impressive considering the small number of devices that it's currently available on, especially due to the number of pre-announced devices that wil be coming over the next few quarters.

Surprisingly absent in this data are other Linux-based mobile operating systems, which must fall into the ambiguous "Others" category, along with mobile operating systems, such as Palm Pre. The fragmentation of the various Linux mobile operating system efforts, including handset manufacturer specific implementations, is doing more harm than good right now in terms of market share growth.

Four short links: 31 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Web traffic, web design, hacker spaces, and feature spaces:

1. iPhone and Android Make Up 50% of Google's SmartPhone Traffic Worldwide -- Matt Gross found this interesting tidbit in a TechCrunchIT story.
2. Refining Data Tables -- Luke Wroblewski gives some seriously good tips for designing usable tables in web pages. After forms, data tables are likely the next most ubiquitous interface element designers create when constructing Web applications. Users often need to add, edit, delete, search for, and browse through lists of people, places, or things within Web applications. As a result, the design of tables plays a crucial role in such an application’s overall usefulness and usability. But just like the design of forms, there’s more than one way to design tabular data. (via migurski's delicious stream)
3. Hacker Spaces (Wired) -- "It's almost a Fight Club for nerds," says Nick Bilton of his hacker space, NYC Resistor in Brooklyn, New York. is the must-have quote, but the guts of the article is "In our society there's a real dearth of community," Altman says. "The internet is a way for people to key in to that need, but it's so inadequate. [At hacker spaces], people get a little taste of that community and they just want more."
4. Related Document Discovery Without Algebra -- latent semantic analysis has some scary math, but If the feature space (e.g. the terms/concepts associated to your documents) is small enough, and you make sure synonymy is not a problem, you can do without algebra. One such case is that of your blog postings and their tags. Includes Ruby code. (via joshua's delicious stream)

Palm's Third Act

by Raven Zachary | @ravenme | comments: 12

2009 marks another year when Macworld and CES are scheduled for the same week. It'll be a great week for product announcements, but it'll also be a week of information overload. RSS feeds will overflow with gadget coverage. For those of us covering technology, it presents some logistical challenges, too. Which conference to attend? I'll be at Macworld again this year, but with Steve Jobs passing on the keynote slot, it's tempting to head to Las Vegas for CES during the second half of the week. Why? Big news is expected from Palm on January 8th.

The last major announcement from Palm was the Foleo in May 2007, a device that was cancelled only a few months later. While the device itself was a failure, the concept was not. Netbooks are quickly becoming a sizeable market with universal appeal. Palm's experience with the Foleo has left much of the tech press skeptical of Palm's coming announcement. Personally, I think this is going to be one of Palm's most important announcements in its history, following its two prior acts - the rise of the Palm PDA in the mid to late 1990s and the company's transition to smartphones after the acquisition of Handspring in 2003. A hit will resurrect the company. A flop will likely lead to its demise.

This is an interesting time for Palm. On December 22, the company announced that it had secured $100 million in an equity investment from Elevation Partners, just four days after a disappointing Q2 FY09 earnings announcement with a substantial net loss for the quater. Palm's CEO Ed Colligan called this an "undeniably difficult period." Indeed. With so much of the smartphone narrative and consumer excitement focused on iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android, Palm has largely been left out.

The far more intriguing Colligan quote from the Q2 FY09 earnings release concerns Palm's upcoming announcement - "We are on track to deliver a breakthrough new platform and products that will bring a truly differentiated smartphone experience to our customers and reestablish Palm as a leading innovator in the mobile industry."

Breakthough new platform...
Truly differentiated smartphone experience...
Reastablish Palm as a leading innovator in the mobile industry...

Sure, press releases are full of language like that, but if you're Palm, you can't make these statements with the smartphone market conditions the way they are and expect to be taken seriously ever again unless there is some shred of truth in these words.

I think Palm has a chance. Not a very good chance, but a chance here and I think it's unfair to be dismissive until we know exactly what Palm has to show us. For Palm to change the smartphone market dynamics at such a critical time, the company needs a hit on January 8th. Anything less than that will turn its third act into its final act.