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What I’m Reading
Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Report: Americans have 28 percent more mobile apps in 2012
If it feels like you not only have more apps on your iPhone, but that you’re spending more time in those apps, then you should congratulate yourself on being as savvy as pollster Nielsen. According to a report from the organization, the number of apps on the average smartphone increased from 32 to 41 — a jump of 28 percent — over the past year.
As you can see from the Nielsen infographic at the top of this post, the percentage of time spent by smartphone owners in apps rather than on the web has also climbed. The average smartphone user spends only about 19 percent of his or her time on the web; the rest of the time, native apps are being used.
The one other fascinating tidbit on the chart shows that the number of smartphone owners in the US has climbed from 38 million in 2011 to 84 million in 2012 — that’s a jump of 121 percent in just one calendar year.
[via Engadget]
Report: Americans have 28 percent more mobile apps in 2012 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Report: LTE Connections To Hit 90 Million By Year’s End, 1 Billion By 2017
By now, we’re pretty familiar with the term 4G LTE. But that in and of itself is somewhat surprising. It took 12 years for GSM wireless technology to reach one billion connections, and WCDMA took 11 years. But LTE will hit the same mark in just seven years of existence, according to a new report by Strategy Analytics.
If you’re not familiar with the term, a brief explanation would be that LTE (or Long Term Evolution) is a fourth-generation wireless standard that provides users with faster data speeds, all the while making more efficient use of a carrier’s wireless spectrum.
We’ve already seen a plethora of LTE devices hit the U.S. market, and now that the technology is established in major markets like Korea, Japan, and the U.S., the growth trajectory for LTE will only continue to rise. Strategy Analytics expects over 90 million LTE connections to be activated before the end of 2012, and that figure should reach the 1 billion mark by 2017. This is far and away the fastest implementation of new wireless technology to date.
At the same time, however, previous technologies were born into a world with far fewer overall connections. LTE launched with over 6 billion connections in existence in the world, whereas CDMA was first revealed at a time when less than 1 billion connections had been activated.
“The race is on for mobile operators to reduce cost per GB to match the rate at which revenue per GB is falling,” said director of service provider analysis Sue Rudd, in a prepared statement. “LTE is one of the key tools to deliver this improvement, with the early volume in LTE devices an encouraging sign for operators looking to maximize return on their LTE investments.”
To her point, we certainly wouldn’t mind a reduction in data costs, considering that we’re more data hungry than ever and unlimited data has basically been nixed across the boards.
Recording police with your smartphone is a Constitutional right, says DoJ
Shooting photos or video of police officers is a Constitutionally protected right, says the U.S. Department of Justice.
How Many Daily Downloads Does It Take To Reach The Top Of The App Store? [Updated]
It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is probably the single most important app discovery mechanism for most iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to rank in the top 25? Mobile app store analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answers just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free iPhone apps and 3,530 for paid iPhone apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes significantly fewer downloads, with games unsurprisingly being the most competitive category. It takes 25,300 daily downloads to rank in the gaming top 25 for free apps and 2,280 downloads for paid apps.
For free apps, other competitive categories include ‘entertainment’ (6,700 daily downloads), ‘social networking’ (5,800), ‘lifestyle’ (3,900) and ‘music’ (3,900). Interestingly, in the paid app charts photography apps rank just behind games and entertainment apps. Still, it currently only takes about 270 daily downloads to rank in the photography top 25 for paid apps.
These numbers, of course, are always changing and this just represent a snapshot of what Distimo found when it compiled this data last month.
Update: We just talked to one source with a lot of experience in building mobile apps and who also currently runs a top App Store app. According to this source, Distimo’s numbers are too low and may just represent data from a relatively small number of apps. Keep that in mind as you read Distimo’s data.
Given the popularity of games on iOS, Distimo also took a closer look at the various gaming subcategories. Here, arcade and action games lead the pack:
This is the first time Distimo is releasing a detailed set of these numbers. It’s worth noting, though, that at the end of 2011, the company reported that it still took about 45,000 daily downloads to rank in the top 25 of most popular free apps. Since then, though, Apple has been working hard to shut down various scams and bots that automatically downloaded apps and allowed developers to rank in Apple’s charts without having a real user base (then, once you are in the top 25, of course, real users will automatically find you, of course). Judging from Distimo’s latest data, these efforts are starting to pay off and will hopefully make life a little bit easier for legit developers.