Android Marketplace booming

The Android platform is fast becoming the biggest in the world, it has now been activated on over 250 million devices worldwide. That’s up 50 million since November 2010.
Meanwhile, the Android Marketplace has managed to fly past its 11 billionth download. Apple’s App Store, which is around three months older, passed its 18 billionth download in December 2011. Most downloaded apps are free. Estimates suggest just 10% of apps downloaded are paid for but this is rising as apps become more sophisticated and useful and people are willing to pay for them.

Facebook’s planet of social apps

Facebook has announced many new types of post descriptions (verbs). For example, previously people just ‘Liked’ something. Now they can share with their network that they ‘Bought’ something or ‘Read’ something or that they ‘Want’ something.
Facebook also recently announced 60 more Timeline applications that will now let users publish information to Facebook automatically. Most of the apps are newer versions of online and mobile apps like Foodily, Goodreads and Slacker.
Facebook wants its users to share all the data of their lives and wants thousands more apps to have the automatic share function. A user’s Facebook Timeline will then become a living stream of information that is updated automatically – for example – whenever that user buys a concert ticket, books a holiday or reads a recipe.
‘Our vision for Timeline and our vision for the application platform is whatever you love and whatever story you want to tell, you can add that to your Timeline,’ said Carl Sjogreen, director of product management for Facebook.

iPad app allows kids to publish books

This is cute, a new free iPad app that allows kids to create and physically publish their own books. Scribble Press is a chain of three stores in the US (California) that wants to go global with its product.
Using the iPad app, kids can choose various templates before they advance to designing their own books from scratch. The printed books ordered through the Scribble Press iPad app will cost $9.95 plus postage in the US.

Three billion iPad apps downloaded since 2010

If further proof was needed that the iPad is transforming the publishing (books, magazines, games, video) industry, it came with new ABI research that shows three billion iPad apps have been downloaded since it first launched in 2010. This represents nearly 20% of all iOS (Apple native app) downloads.
“The iPhone took as long as two years before being able to achieve this level of downloads, while the iPad made it within nearly a year and a half. In comparison, Android tablets only have around 440 million downloads thus far,” states ABI.
While there are just 120,000+ apps specifically for the iPad, iPad users can expect a deluge of new, high quality apps for the iPad in the next two years.
Publishers, on the other hand, can be comforted by the fact that iPad users are willing to pay for good quality apps, whether they be books, games or web services. It is also easier for publishers to sell in-app advertising thanks to the size of the iPad screen.

The first great app orgy of consumption

The last month of 2011 was, for the app sector, the most astonishing time it has ever witnessed. According to analytics form Flurry, 1.2 billion apps were downloaded in the last week of December alone, as people unwrapped millions of iPhones, Androids, iPads and Android tablets all over the world during Christmas.
The US gobbled up half of the downloads, followed by China and the UK. The UK had 81 million downloads followed by Canada (41 million), Germany (40 million) and France (40 million).
“Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one billion download barrier per week will become more commonplace,” said the company’s blog.
It is estimated nearly seven million Android devices and iPhones were activated on Christmas Day 2011 alone. Now that’s smart.

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