Medialets

Here we are a little over a week since the launch of the first Android-powered phone, the G1. As of Monday, Android Market has been open to developers to distribute their applications as they wish. We’ve made some more observations on how the Android Market is evolving, and we’re eager to share them with you. 

Highlights

(1) 167 Apps have been downloaded between between 667,000 and 2.9 Million times.

(2) Downloads are being driven by 41 apps, which account for between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads.

(3) Two applications, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather channel generated the most downloads (50,000 - 250,000).

(4) Although download ranges can be very large, growth on the low-end was still nearly 80% during the first week.

(5) 5 Categories account for 61% of all apps.

(6) The number of apps has nearly tripled since launch, led by the Games, Tools and Productivity categories.

Applications By Category

Android Market applications totaled 167 as of 10/29.  The top 5 Categories with the most apps accounted for 61% of all titles: Tools, Games, Lifestyle, Multimedia, and Productivity.

Title growth has nearly tripled since launch, as the chart below shows.  Three categories - Tools, Games and Productivity led the growth, representing just over 50% of the 105 apps added since last week.

Downloads

Android Market provides download data in ranges or “bins.”  While it’s better than having no information at all (e.g. Apple’s App Store) it gets a bit unwieldy within the top 2 bins, 10,000 - 50,000, and 50,000 - 250,000, where the top end is 5x larger than the bottom end, and the variance can be up to 200,000.  In the chart above, we’ve looked at the trend of total downloads from both ends of the ranges given, and growth seems pretty healthy on both ends.  Apps downloaded from the end of the Market’s first day until 10/29 grew at a rate anywhere between 80% on the low end to potentially 97% on the upside.

The table below gives detail on the distribution of downloads, which are driven by 41 apps in the two highest bins. Taking the low/high ranges into consideration, these 41 apps comprise anywhere between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads

Within these 41 apps, two of them, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather Channel generated the highest number of downloads (50,000 - 250,000).  The remaining 39 are in the 10,000 - 50,000 range - we displayed the “Top 5″ in the table below, which were determined by  the most recent average of user ratings.  

We’ll keep you posted as data continues to roll in.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear your comments and ideas as our ecosystem continues to evolve.  Reach out to us at connect at medialets dot com and add us on Twitter at @medialets.

Google’s Android Market has been officially live for 24 hours. Here are some early observations and comparisons with the iPhone App Store’s first 24 hours.

There are myriad similarities between iPhone and Android users:

• They like to play games, shop, and know what music they are listening to,
• They are curious about the weather, and
• They generally share the same interests as iPhone users 

During the first 24 hours of Android Market, 62 apps were available to consumers, all free.  This is less than 10% of the number of apps we saw at the launch of Apple’s App Store. Although Apple allowed both free and paid applications to be distributed when the App Store launched, paid downloads for Android will not be available until Q1 2009.

Observation #1 - The average application has 7,800+ downloads.

Android Market is providing some detail on downloads per application -  in contrast to Apple’s embargo of this information after the first 15 hours of launching their App Store.  Rather than displaying exact figures, Android phones show download ranges for a given application, with the smallest range we observed being 100-500 and the largest 10,000-50,000. Given those ranges, roughly 206,000 to 770,000 downloads occurred within the first 24 hours of launch. The weighted average of midpoints is 7,850 downloads/app, just north of the middle of the 5,000 - 10,000 range.

Observation #2  - Nine apps made it to the 10,000 - 50,000 downloads range.

If we use ratings and number of reviews to differentiate, unlike the iPhone platform, games are not in the top three.  Of the nine apps in this range, only three are games.  ShopSavvy is at the top of the list factoring in ratings and number of reviews, followed by The Weather Channel, and Shazam, an app that helps people identify a song they are listening to.  During the early hours of the iPhone App Store, while Apple was still publishing download data, only two apps broke the 10,000 download mark - Remote and AIM.  Remote, the leading app, was downloaded ~16,000 times. Although the ranges for the top Android apps are similar, it is still too early  to assert with confidence that a trajectory similar to Apple’s App Store is occurring.  Other factors over time need to be considered, including the total number of apps in the market.

Observation #3 - 24 hours into the launch, it appears that either Android users are generally interested in the same types of application functionality as iPhone users, or possibly, that Android developers are generally interested in creating the same types of apps as iPhone developers.

We compared our observations of the iPhone App Store 24 hours after launch with Android Market, and found that once we normalized the names of categories between the two platforms, the categories have similar distributions of applications. We had to make some assumptions and groupings to make our best apples-to-androids comparison and noted those in the table below the chart.

As always, we love hearing from anyone who is interested in learning more about, or sharing their experiences about this new platform. Feel free to contact us at connect at www.medialets.com or follow us on twitter at @medialets.

We would love to see you there! We’ve heard from our friends Matt Drance and Michael Jurewitz at Apple that the event in our hometown of New York is already at capacity, but you can sign up to be on the waitlist.  Here’s the complete list of their destinations: 

Be sure to sign up ASAP, and leave us a comment if you’re planning on attending!

Great news out of Cupertino today for Apple iPhone developers worldwide: Apple has dropped its NDA. 

Prior to today, the NDA, which must be agreed to before the SDK can be downloaded, had prevented programmers from discussing the finer points of their code and had forbidden developers from discussing the SDK and the applications that are built upon it.

Apple’s Nondisclosure Agreement, which has caused plenty of heartache for iPhone developers, also has prevented many experts from sharing their experiences, asking questions, and providing guidance.  

Here at Medialets, we pride ourselves on being a hub for innovation and insights into this new platform, but have not been allowed to share much of the data and learnings we have accumulated over the past 81 days.

Over the next few days, we will be compiling some of our best practices and code examples onto developer.medialets.com/forum.  We are also organizing some workshops for developers in NYC and SF who are looking to create great apps and successful businesses around the platform.

Please feel free to reach out to us at any time with your ideas, comments, suggestions and questions. Reach us at  connect at medialets dot com or follow us on Twitter at @medialets.  Happy coding!

It is our pleasure to announce our beta program for the Android platform!  

As the leading analytics provider for the iPhone, we, more than anyone else deeply understand how to help developers make the most of their audience. We’re passionate about user experience, understand both the needs of developers and the needs of advertisers, and bridge the gap between the market and marketers in a way that allows developers stay focused on writing great applications. The market has clearly shown that to consumers free is better (http://metrics.medialets.com/charts/apps-by-price) and through the insights our analytics provide to our ad platform, we make it easy and sustainable for developers to continue to innovate and give their apps away.

The world of mobile changed when Apple introduced the App Store. Historically, developers have had to contend with lengthy, often expensive negotiations and certification procedures with carriers to bring their applications to market, and more often than not, the challenges of working in that environment have limited the number and quality of developers willing to undertake the effort.  With the App Store, the process has been reduced to a simple submission and review cycle. Combining that with centralized discovery, distribution and payments for applications has led to a new model for mobile app developers that significantly opens up the possibility of building sustainable - even venture scale - businesses around mobile applications.  But the App Store is just the beginning. Google was quick to recognize the power of this distribution model and earlier this year announced their own App Marketplace, which like Apple’s App Store, bypasses carriers and lets developers market directly to consumers through the Marketplace.

We’ve built the leading solution for analytics on the iPhone and now we’re bringing it to Android because we believe in Android as a platform and our customers have asked us to support it. The opportunity for mobile developers just grew significantly today as the addressable base of users expanded to include the entire future Android subscriber base.

Why does this matter to the market?:

We believe that the emerging opportunity for mobile developers today is nothing less than the early opportunity for developers of desktop software. The key differences today are that users are more demanding, the platforms are more sophisticated and the market is significantly more competitive. Developers who factor our analytics into their applications have a dramatic, competitive advantage over other developers working without the deep insights our platform can provide. Nobody launches a significant Web property today without a solid analytics package, and neither should mobile application developers.

Our mission is to provide the best possible experience for three major groups: developers, their customers, and advertisers. The more that developers and advertisers know about the types of things users want out of mobile applications, the more effective an ad can be.

We work every day to help developers make the right decisions about where and how to spend their time and money. The better a developer understands their audience, the better an app they will write. Better applications mean stronger connections with customers and stronger connections lead to more opportunities to create maximum revenue potential for their application .

We’ve presented a single view for developers to monitor their applications across both the iPhone and Android platforms. This allows them to track relative performance in either and both markets, gives insights on where and how to spend marketing dollars and significantly simplifies the process of managing their release cycles. Combining our analytics with the update notifications provided by the App Store and App Marketplace gives our developers a key advantage over others in the market and enables them to get onto tighter, more focused release cycles to specifically meet the needs of their current and future users.

Android is the second platform in the new world of carrier-free mobile application distribution, and it also happens to support the development of highly engaging and useful applications. It’s not only valuable to consumers as a standalone offering, it also continues to raise the bar for every other mobile platform vendor to deliver more compelling offerings. Consumers, whether or not they buy an Android phone, will benefit from this competition.

Mobile operators not selling the iPhone today need strong, competitive offerings to convince consumers to buy something other than the iPhone. Much like we’ve seen historically on game consoles, many future mobile phone purchases will likely be influenced by the applications available for the platform. Android and the App Marketplace give carriers a potentially viable alternative to the explosive application market for the iPhone, and with the might of Google behind the platform, we may see development activity that equals or even surpasses that of iPhone developers.

We invite you to sign up for the beta at www.medialets.com/android and always, please reach out to us at any time at connect @ medialets dot com.  We look forward to hearing about the apps you’re building!

We turned one month old last week, and as our present to you, we’ve redesigned our sites!  Now, Medialets.com, Medialytics.com and App Store Metrics will be under one unified navigation, plus we’ve created some new sections to make it easier to find content and added many new pages describing our offerings in greater detail. Medialets is still shiny and new, so why redesign now?  Well, we spend most of our days talking and listening to you, our customers and developers, and we discovered a few things based on these conversations.

As a company, we believe that the advertisers and developers who work with us have a significant strategic advantage over their competitors because we offer an integrated and comprehensive solution, spanning analytics, monetization and distribution across the Medialets ad network.  Medialets and Medialytics empowers our customers to have a deep understanding of user behavior and activity, what is popular in their apps, what campaigns have the most traction with end users in order to make informed decisions and take action accordingly based on this information.  The Medialytics dashboard is the central point for customization of event tracking, reporting and campaign configuration, so we wanted to unify the look and feel across our entire range of web products including Medialytics and App Store Metrics to reflect the experience of working with Medialytics.

More importantly, it was very clear to us based on our discussions with you that many of our customers and fans were not aware of the full extent of our product range and offerings.  We are thrilled about the response to our App Store Metrics application, and every day, we hear from top developers, brand marketers, and iPhone users alike that they visit our site many times a day to observe the changes in ranking and check out the newest applications added to the App Store.  These users, however, may not have known about our industry leading native app advertising capabilities.  Similarly, many of our current customers were not aware of the rich features of our App Store Metrics, such as searching by app developer/company, and our RSS feeds providing real time updates of the top free apps, top paid apps, new apps and updated apps.

We’ve added a few sections to Medialets.com to help you find the information you’re looking for.  We’ve broken down the For App Developers and For Advertisers/Agencies into discreet sections encompassing our offerings for each based on your feedback, and created a section called Ecosystem to provide a holistic overview of the industry at large.  We’ve also added an easy-to-navigate Media Relations section displaying our latest media coverage and press releases and providing a snapshot of the current state of Medialets in general.

We’re anxiously awaiting your thoughts on our new site!  You know how to reach us - connect [at] medialets [dot] com and on Twitter (@medialets).  Thanks so much for your ongoing support and kind words.  We can’t wait to start working with you.

Earlier today I put it out there for anyone motivated enough to calculate it using some of the volume data that Apple published earlier today.

It’s been on my mind all day (which people have told me says something…I guess) so I went ahead and did it.  But there is a “health warning” regarding the consumption of this information.  Its not revenue - its really a price * volume proxy - lots of assumptions, but again, done in the spirit of transparency.

We start with our earlier premise that in the absence of download volume, we would use the number of reviews written for an app as a proxy for relative volume comparisons.  As of 7/13, written reviews for paid-for apps outnumbered those for free apps by about 25% (that’s about a 55/45 ratio). So:

If there were 10 Million downloads, then using the ratio above, we’re left with about  4,450,000 for paid-for apps.

Next, we know that there were 2,623 reviews written for paid-for apps. Dividing this into the number of reviews that an app received gives us the “share” of reviews for an app - which translates to our proxy for share of volume.  Multiply this by 4,450,000, and again by the price to get an estimate of relative financial position vs. other apps (I don’t feel it’s qualified enough to be called revenue yet).

So, if Super Monkey Ball has 290 reviews, the following happens:

290 = 11.1% of paid-for reviews.  11.1% * 4,450,000 * $9.99 = $4.9M.

There, I did it.

But remember, this is not revenue!  It’s a way to gain more insight into how pricing and demand affect the relative financial performance of an app.  Here is a table of a few I’ve done for you.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this.

Who doesn’t love a good old fashioned camping trip, even if it *is* in the concrete jungle of NYC?  Hundreds of our fellow iPhone lovers braved heat, humidity, and a few attention-seeking hecklers to get their hands on the coveted device right at 8am.  To celebrate the developers we love so much, we brought our favorite part of camping to the 5th Avenue Apple Store: s’mores!

We passed out over 200 Medialets s’more kits, each containing bamboo-skewered jet puffed marshmallows, rich dark chocolate bars, graham crackers, a tealight candle and matches.  The response was fabulous!  iPhone fans all around were roasting jumbo marshmellows while they waited.  Special thanks to our friends at CNET/CBS Justin Yu and Wilson Tang for making the day so memorable and making us laugh.  
Also, to Chrissie Brodigan, Tony Bacigalupo, Brett Petersel, Michael Gruen, David Riordan and DeeDee Stanbury, we cannot thank you enough for your support in making this event possible.  Thank you so much!

Photos courtesy of Tony Bacigalupo’s Flickr. 

Eric being interviewed on CNET

Eric’s business card

Greg Gregarious Narain from Blue Whale Labs and Adam Hirsch from Mashable