Research reports forecasting future market sizes should always be taken with a grain of salt, but it occasionally helps to see the estimates of research organizations in order to gain some perspective on the current and upcoming trends for those markets.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at what research2guidance has to say about the worldwide smartphone application market, which it estimates will grow from $1.94 billion in 2009 to $15.65 billion by 2013.
Augmented reality app Layar hit the App Store in October 2009, only to be withdrawn by the eponymous Dutch developer of the program a month later due to repeated crashes reported by users.
It’s been quiet since, but an update for the app just popped up on my iPhone, with the concise and crystal clear description: “We’re back!”.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber wrote what I thought was a good response to my post about Apple’s App Store sexy app policy. While I noted that one of the reasons Apple’s policy was silly was because each iPhone contains two apps, iTunes and Safari (both made by Apple), that grant users access to content much worse than the kind of stuff now being banned from the App Store, he comes back to say that maybe the idea isn’t to remove this content from the iPhone itself, but rather just from the actual App Store.
My first reaction to this was the humorous thought that both iTunes and Safari would be banned from the App Store had they not been included by default on every iPhone. But that actually lead to a more interesting thought that a few other posts around the web back up today: Safari is the iPhone’s peephole.
When Jason Kincaid tried out the iPhone app online music streaming startup Grooveshark built and showed off in July 2009, he wrote that it was great but that he “wouldn’t expect this to pop up in the App Store any time soon”. He was right on both counts.
Grooveshark now says it has given up on its ambitions to get approved for the official App Store, claiming that Apple has been “ritually rejecting” the app for “primary selfish reasons”. We’ve heard that song before. 
Apple’s hypocrisy with regard to the App Store is something I know well. Several times last year I wrote about Apple allowing apps like “Asian Boobs” and upskirt apps into the App Store while rejecting things such as satirical apps that mocked public figures. It was ridiculous. So you might think I’d be happy that Apple is now rejecting and removing sexy apps from the App Store as well. But actually, the hypocrisy is much worse now.
Problem number one is that while Apple is removing most of these sexy apps from the App Store, it’s not removing all of them. So who gets to stay? Big publishers like Sports Illustrated and Playboy. In fact, not only is Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit 2010 app not being removed, it’s being featured in the App Store. Both it and the Playboy app clearly violate the new rules of the more prudish App Store, yet they get to stay. Why?
It took them four days, but Apple is finally explaining its surprise decision to remove nearly all “sexy” content from the App Store. Once again, the morsels of information come from Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller, who spoke with the New York Times for an article published earlier this evening. None of it is too surprising, but Schiller’s unconvincing explanation as to why some applications like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit app and Playboy will be allowed to remain on the store is sure to anger plenty of developers.
So why did Apple decide to pull these sexy apps?
“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see”
During Apple’s iPad event in January, CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple now had over 140,000 apps in the App Store (along with over 3 billion downloads). If the numbers by app analytics company Distimo are correct, that number is now past 150,000.
But the App Store is growing so big, so quickly that these milestones alone are hardly noteworthy anymore. But Distimo also offers up some nice data along with the milestone number. For example, of the 150,000 apps, some 75% are paid applications while only 25% are free. This is in stark contrast to the second largest app store, Android Market, where recent data suggests that over 60% of the app there are free.
Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple’s App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues. Since then, the complaints seem to have died down quite a bit, but Apple is still on the case.
The company has started sending out a survey to iPhone developers asking about their experience with the program. While the long survey covers a range of things, the majority of the questions are about the application review process, and developers’ overall happiness with the program.
French game developer Gameloft, listed on Euronext Paris, this afternoon shared its 2009 financial results with the world. The video game publisher achieved consolidated sales of €122.0 million – roughly $170 million – for 2009, up 11% compared to 2008.
The company also specified ‘iPhone revenue’, which presumably means its income from distribution of its games on both the iPhone and iPod Touch: in 2009, that number jumped 231% YOY to reach €17.6 million (approximately $25 million).
App store analytics company Distimo has released its December report on mobile apps, this time zooming in on the physical location of publishers in Google Android Market, and how the prices of their apps compares to those of developers in other countries.
Distimo found that publishers in the Euro zone (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain) tend to price their applications higher than those in the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Japan.
The average price of an Android app published by a developer in Europe is $4.42, which is 49% higher than publishers located in the United States ($2.96). For comparison, publishers in Japan price apps $2.28 on average, while the United Kingdom comes out at an average price of $3.31.
