Amitay.us

Startup School, Big Brother, and Moving On

daniel@amitay.us — 2011-11-01T09:00:00-04:00

I spent this past weekend in San Francisco attending YCombinator’s Startup School. There was awesome list of speakers including the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, and Paul Graham--not to mention the impressive people in attendance that I had the fortune of meeting.

Big Brother Removed From App Store

daniel@amitay.us — 2011-06-14T17:30:00-04:00

UPDATE (06/15/11 10:25am): Call from Apple.

Got a call from Apple last night regarding the removal of Big Brother from the App Store. Apparrently, Apple believed that I was “surreptitiously harvesting user passwords.” I have sent in a new update without the analytics in question, as well as appealing on the grounds that:

- Data in question was specific to my app, and not the iPhone.
- Data in question was anonymous and had no identifying markers.
- Data in question was for the purpose of improving effectiveness of future updates.

If users are choosing 1234 as their passcodes in mass, then my app by extension becomes less effective. This anonymous data helps me improve future versions.

Most Common iPhone Passcodes

daniel@amitay.us — 2011-06-13T09:00:00-04:00

UPDATE (06/14/11 5:30pm): Big Brother Removed From App Store

In my last update to Big Brother Camera Security (Free), I added some code to record common user passcodes (completely anonymous, of course). Because Big Brother’s passcode setup screen and lock screen are nearly identical to those of the actual iPhone passcode lock, I figured that the collected information would roughly correlate with actual iPhone passcodes.

In essence, this post is an homage to the well known Most Common Passwords on the Internet articles. Different articles pull from different sources, so naturally aren’t the same, but still demonstrate certain trends. Similar trends are evident in the data I present below.

To kick things off, out of 204,508 recorded passcodes, the top ten most common were...

Detailed iPhone App IPA Statistics

daniel@amitay.us — 2011-05-09T08:00:00-04:00

I did some data mining related to my iHasApp API project recently. Specifically, on the Top 2000 Free iPhone apps (a whopping 25.28 GB of compressed data, and 1.5% of all available free apps).

By analyzing the app’s iTunesMetadata.plist and Info.plist, you can learn a few things that aren’t available anywhere else. For example (note that my dataset is for Free apps), did you know that:

92% of apps are below the cellular download limit: 20MB;
Nearly 10% of apps are built using the obsolete iOS 2 & 3;
31% of apps don’t multitask, 11 months after iOS 4.0;
Only 27% support URL Schemes (inter-app communication);
18% of URL Schemes are for the Facebook iOS SDK;
70% of apps disable the automatic iPhone icon gloss;

For more detailed information from my data mining, as well as a histogram at the end, see below. There is accompanying information for those who are curious as to how I attained said information. Just google the term next to each section heading.

Big Brother Enters Top 25 Overall

daniel@amitay.us — 2011-05-02T16:30:00-04:00

Woo! Big Brother Camera Security (Free) entered the Top 25 Free Overall today. This comes just a few days after I released an update for version 1.5--a version which seems to have brought fortune in many forms.

Personal iOS App Milestones

daniel@amitay.us — 2011-03-23T08:00:00-04:00

I use Flurry Analytics to analyze the use of my personally released iPhone apps. I was recently required to renew my annual iOS Developer registration, and realized that I have been on the iTunes App Store for a little over a year (an achievement for me: I rarely stick with anything for that long). That 365-day milestone passed without my noticing, yet when I checked my Flurry Analytics, I noticed some relatively new and relatively large statistics which each act as individual milestones:

Big Brother has been used over one million times by over one hundred thousand users.
Punch ‘Em! has taken over two hundred thousand screenshots.
Geekologie has a user retention rate of over 50%.
ShareCal... uh, has performed OK.

In light of my desire to celebrate a personal achievement and increased inquiries to disclose some numerical data, I’ve decided to share some of the statistics regarding my current (four) released iPhone apps. Charts below:

How To Detect Installed iOS Apps

daniel@amitay.us — 2011-02-16T08:00:00-05:00

Bump (and others) recently pushed out an update for their iPhone app which allows users to detect their installed apps, and then share recommendations. As with the rest of the application, this new feature is awesome; if not because it will yet again save people time, then because it can detect what apps you have installed.

Many people have noted that this seems a little bit beyond what Apple would allow an app to know. Bump did, however, somewhat describe what they do behind the scenes. In this post, I’ll be describing how this functionality works, why it is awesome and important, and how regular iOS developers (little ones like me) can implement it themselves or use my new API: iHasApp.

Piracy Doubled My App Sales

daniel@amitay.us — 2011-01-17T08:00:00-05:00

There are lots of articles floating around analyzing the effects and implications of iPhone app piracy. Two of the most relevant questions for app developers (regarding piracy) are:
- How many app users are pirates? SmellsLikeDonkey says 70% - iCombat says 80%
- Can pirates be converted to sales? Pinch Media says 0.43% - SmellsLikeDonkey says 0%
Bottom line, developers are interested in how much revenue they are losing due to app piracy. This post is my attempt to throw a slightly distasteful idea into the mix: pirates are helping me make more money.
(Note: Certainly does not scale with size. Any Top 100 App will not receive any benefit from piracy)

2011 Killed My iAd Fill Rate

daniel@amitay.us — 2011-01-10T08:00:00-05:00

As a relatively new and independent iPhone developer, I know that my apps don’t have amazing sales or revenue (although I do believe that I manage to beat the median and mean). Yet despite my lack of stardom, I still see relatively stable sales and revenue figures over the course of normal sales days, barring Christmas and rare articles on iOS blogs. But when the new year came around, my iAd numbers made a resolution to lose weight.

All data is from my Big Brother Camera Security (Free) iPhone app, with well over 100k requests per ad network--Admob and iAds--over the period described below. I have removed any monetary information.