20 Million Recommendations Served, plus Q2 Top Apps
20 million
That's right - 20,000,000 served! Given the popularity of the Apptizr V2 release, our app became the top Productivity app in the App Store back in June. The surge of new users has resulted in a surge of app recommendations made. We're very excited about getting to 20 million recommendations so quickly, and we hope to continue this trajectory.
We haven't shared the top apps on Apptizr in a while, so we took a look at Q2 of this year (April through June). Some things are similar, while there are definitely some changes as well.
Taking a look at the top downloaded free apps in Q2, you'll notice lots of familiar names. One thing we've noticed over the last couple of quarters is the fact that some popular apps stand the test of time and have been constantly popular - Facebook, Pandora, Google, Google Earth, Shazam, Movies all fall in this category. There are always a couple of new comers to the list - this quarter the top of the chart was the new comer "Are you left brained or right brained?"
The Paid list was a bit surprising this quarter, since the Top 10 are all games. Games have always been popular on the App Store, but this was the first time it dominates every spot in the Top 10. Another interesting trend is that more of the apps are priced at $0.99, which is consistent with the general trend on the App Store.
For the full report, you can check out the following presentation posted on SlideShare. It also contains the Top 10 most liked apps that are free and paid. Please let us know if you have any other thoughts.
Apptizr V2 is the Number 1 App in Productivity!
1st place
Thanks to all of our users who downloaded Apptizr V2 and told their friends about it - we are now the number 1 free app in the Productivity category in the App Store! We are actually number 1 in 10 different countries (including US, UK, and Canada) and top 10 in more than 50 countries. Please continue to share the word on Apptizr so we can help more people discover great iPhone apps.
Apptizr V2 Just Approved – 6 Ways to Discover Apps
We're very excited to announce that Apptizr version 2.0 just got approved by Apple. This upgrade contains some major improvements. Specifically, in additional to the recommendation engine, you can now discover apps through 5 other ways. V2.0 also features newly redesigned user interface with a home screen for you to easily navigate to all of the main functionality quickly.
These are the 6 ways to discover apps now on Apptizr:
1. Recommended: Apptizr uses our proprietary algorithm to bring you the best apps that match your tastes. Apptizr learns more about your preferences over time as you tell us whether you like, dislike, or already own various apps you see. Apptizr also evaluates the applications for quality and only recommends the best apps in each category to you.
2. Live Feed: See what the rest of the Apptizr community likes or owns. Discover apps you may not otherwise think you would be interested in. Add friends or follow top users and see what apps they like or own.
3. Browse Apps: Browse for top apps based on topic. Starting with the App Store categories, pick topic you are interested in to see matching apps. You can continue to browse for apps in related topics.
4. Hottest Apps: See what apps are moving up the App Store rankings the fastest. Learn about the hottest apps before they make it to the Top 25 list.
5. Top Apps: See what apps are the top ranked apps in the App Store. Filter by free or paid apps or by category.
6. On Sale: See what apps are on sale (reduced price or paid becoming free). Sort by recency, popularity, or discount amount.
In addition to the 6 ways to discover apps, Apptizr V2 also offers a bunch of other cool features:
* My Apps - keeps track of all of the apps you own and like
* My Tastes - tell Apptizr explicitly what categories and sub-categories of apps you like for our recommendation engine
* Friends - see what your friends like and own via Facebook integration or Bump if you see someone in person
* Similar Apps - found an app you like? see what apps are similar
* Sale Alerts - get notified when an app you like goes on sale
* App Sharing - easily share any app with a friend via email, Facebook, or Twitter
Here's a 5 minute on YouTube uf you want to see it in action. Alternatively, you can get it now from the App Store.
10 Million Recommendations Served, Some Insights for App Developers
Wow! That's a lot of zeros... We're pretty excited to announce that we have now served up more than 10,000,000 app recommendation on Apptizr. Here is our official press release about this. We want to thank all of our loyal users for using Apptizr to discover great iPhone apps.
Having served up all of those recommendations and seeing what apps our users like, dislike, or own/download has given us some great data to play with. We decided to look through this user data plus the data we have from the App Store to gain some insights. This should be particularly interesting to iPhone app developers or publishers.
What we found was that not all categories are equal. Some categories are more popular with developers/publishers, others are more popular with iPhone/ iPod Touch users. The most popular categories among developers based on the apps in the App Store are Books, Games, and Entertainment.
However, even though Books is now the most dominant category in the App Store, it is not particularly popular among Apptizr users. Kevin Tofel from GigaOm wrote a great post about this today. Even though Books represents 18% of apps in the App Store, it only accounts for 3% of the user downloads. Games on the other hand, constitutes 16% of apps in the App Store, but a leading 29% of downloads. Other categories with high downloads are Entertainment and Productivity apps.
As our existing users know, you can browse through apps by category or topic, as well as browse for Hottest Apps, Top Ranked apps, or apps On Sale on Apptizr. We are able to look at the popularity of categories browsed by our users as another indicator of which categories have the highest demand from iPhone users. Based on this criteria, Utilities, Games, Entertainment, and Productivity came out on top.
You can view and download the full report here. The report also contains data about the Top 10 apps downloaded and liked by Apptizr users in Q1 2010. I've also uploaded it to SlideShare for easier sharing. Please feel free to share this with iPhone app developers or anyone you think will find it interesting. As always, we would love to hear feedback on what you think of this data/ analysis.
Recommend an App via Facebook “Like” button
Facebook announced their "Like" button today at the F8 conference that will enable an open and social web. Mark Zuckerberg predicts there will be more than 1 billion "like" buttons by the end of the day today. To help our friends at Facebook achieve this goal - we've added these buttons to Apptizr on all of our app details pages (that's almost 200K pages) - in the form of "Recommend" buttons.
Join in on the fun and start sharing what apps you would recommend to your Facebook friends. You can get started by going through your "My Apps" list. Tell us what you think!
See the Best Deals on the App Store with Apptizr’s New On Sale Page
Many users have requested this feature so we're glad to be rolling this out - you can now use Apptizr to find the best deals in the App Store with our new On Sale page. You can filter the list by category (default is all categories), and you can sort the list by app ratings (highest rated on top, which is the default), by discount % (to find the biggest bargains), and by recency (see which apps went on sale most recently).
We currently update this list daily and go back a full week so you can see all of the apps that went on sale in this past seven days. Hopefully you find this useful. As always, we appreciate whatever feedback you have for us.
The Sweepstakes Winners Are…
Thanks to everyone who participated in our iTunes Gift Card Sweepstakes. Lot of folks invited and followed their friends on Apptizr during this promotion. Many of our top users also captured many followers. We also received lots of feedback in our survey. Thanks so much everyone!
Now it's time to announce the winners of our sweepstakes. Drum roll please.... The grand prize winner of $100 in iTunes gift card goes to Ed Armstrong from St. Louis, MO. The winners of the $50 gift cards are:
Congratulations to all of our winners!
New Twitter Search Widget & Auto-Own
We've been working hard as usual, and we have some exciting new features to announce. First, we added Twitter Search Widgets to our app details pages so you can see the latest buzz on the app on Twitter before deciding whether to download the app or not. The widget shows you the search result on the name of app on Twitter, so you can see what everyone is saying.
Another feature we just launched is based on the result of your feedback. Many of you have mentioned that when you click on the "Get It" link to download an app, we should automatically move that app to "Owned" so you don't have to do it manually. We decided to implement this feature even though sometimes you end up not downloading or purchasing the app. In this case (which should not happen too often), you can simply remove the app from your Owned list. As always, please let us know your thoughts on these new features.
Hottest apps this past week & last chance to win $300 iTunes Gift Cards
We started tracking the App Store Top 300 rankings a little over a week ago, so you can see what the Hottest apps are in the App Store in terms of how quickly they are moving up the charts. Now that we have more than a week of data, we thought it would be fun to look at the top moving apps over the last 7 days. You can go to the Apptizr site for the full list of 50 hottest free and and paid apps - you can also change the time period from 1 day vs. 7 day as well as look at these lists by category.
Here are the hottest 5 free and paid apps based on how quickly they moved up the ranks in the last 7 days. A couple of observations: (1) There is actually a decent degree of turn over when you look at the list on a week by week basis (all ten of the apps listed below were not on the top 300 list a week ago); (2) Games is still the dominant category of popular apps. Any other thoughts?
Hottest Free Apps:
Hottest Paid Apps
BTW, today is February 28, which is the last day of our $300 iTunes Gift Card Sweepstakes. Get going today to get in some last minute entries into the Sweepstakes. You can enter by following friends or other Apptizr users, invite your friends, or by filling out our short user survey. We'll be announcing the winners of the Sweepstakes in a week or so on this blog.
Over 5 Million App Recommendations Served & Top Apps from January
Believe it or not, Apptizr has now served over 5 million personalized app recommendations to our users! It's been a fun ride and we really appreciate all of the support and feedback our users have given us. To celebrate this occasion, we thought we would take a moment to look back, and share some data on what we've learned from our users.
Since we know when our users tell us they like an app recommendation, we thought it would be fun to look at the most liked apps from last month. This is the resulting top 10 list for free apps vs. paid apps. Starting with the free apps, I did find the popularity of music apps a bit surprising (2 of top 3). It was also surprising the lack of games among the top 10, although you'll see that they are among the most highly downloaded.
Here's the top 10 list among paid apps which were most liked by Apptizr users in January. A bit more games, but lots of Productivity apps. I guess people are happy to pay for some productivity improvements.
Lastly, we looked at when our users actually clicked on the download button to try to install these apps. Not surprisingly all of these are free apps, with games being a top category.
Please feel free to share these lists with folks who will find them interesting. To make it easier to share, I've posted this as a presentation on Slideshare. As always, thoughts or feedback on the post would be welcome.