GetJar adds recommendation engine to Apps Store
GetJar has purchased Infrinity, a company that developed a “recommendation engine” based on users past purchases and preferences.
Infrinity founder and CTO, Anand Venkataraman, will join GetJar through the
acquisition as the Vice President of Discovery Technologies.
Accroding to Ilja Laurs, GetJar CEO, with hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from, the app store experience can be very overwhelming for consumers. With Anand’s leadership and the technology of Infrinity, GetJar will make noticeable advancements to its app store usability and improve app discovery.
In March 2011, GetJar released its quarterly App Meter survey, which gauges preferences and attitudes of mobile phone users.
According to the survey, only 25% admitted to using app stores for discovering the latest apps. Mobile app discovery continues to be one of the biggest problems in the evolving mobile applications market. GetJar’s use of Infrinity’s technology will provide new features that improve discovery to a critical number of publishers worldwide, continuing Infrinity’s goal of making discovery a two-way street.
Infrinity was founded by Anand Venkataraman and Dave Smiddy in July 2010. The company’s goal was to help mobile publishers and app users most effectively discover each other, providing powerful predictive insights for niche and mass-market mobile audiences. Infrinity created online tools to provide detailed campaign metrics for content portfolios.
Samsung Apps hit 100 mn download mark (Korea)
Samsung has announced that its own Apps Store has passed over 100 million apps download mark since its service began with the Samsung Wave smartphone in June 2010.
The company set up the Samsung Apps website to offer people software applications aimed at TVs and mobile devices such as Facebook and Twitter. According to the company, the website gauged 10 million downloads three months after the website launched and 100 million in 10 months. Over 13,000 applications are now available on the marketplace.
The most downloaded apps on the platform include Magic Torch, Need for Speed Shift and Asphalt 5. Transportation and navigation apps – such as London Traffic and Ndrive France – are also popular downloads.
The most popular apps also reflect cultural characteristics; recipe and wine apps are popular in France, Germans love football related apps and Italians are fans of film information apps. France had the highest number of downloads, followed by Germany and Spain.
These three countries accounted for 40% of all downloads made from the store.
GetJar bans Opera Mini on Apps Store for T&C violations
GetJar, an independent App Store has announced that it has banned one of the biggest selling apps from its platform.
Opera Software had used GetJar to promote its mobile web browsers, but broke GetJar’s terms and conditions after it recently launched its own Apps Store in competition to GetJar.
The Opera Mini browser had racked up more the 30 million downloads on Getjar over the last several years and was one of the most popular apps in the browser category.
In a statement, the company confirmed that Opera had been banned for T&C violations. It later confirmed the reasons in a letter that was sent to its apps developers.
Patrick Mork, CMO GetJar confirmed that the simple problem is that Opera mini decided to include a competing app store in its browser.
He added that although they don’t have any issue with this in principle, in practice it means that consumers might start using this app store instead of visiting GetJar to get their favorites apps. This robs GetJar of traffic and therefore, of the advertising necessary to keep their service free for the more than 25 million consumers that use GetJar.
Apple offers subscription plans through its App Store
Apple has announced that it will permit Apps developers to start charging recurring subscription fees through its Apps Store.
The move came after a trial with News Corp.’s “The Daily” app for the downloadable newspaper.
As per the scheme, if a customer buys the App first, then later signs up for a subscription through the Apple platform, Apple will take a 30% slice of the renewal fee. It’s a move which will cause friction with publishers who had hoped to push subscription fees to their platforms, where the credit card processing costs would be a fraction of that being charged by Apple.
Although publishers will be able to sell subscriptions to Apps on their own websites, they won’t be allowed to promote that within the App or link to their website from the App.
According to Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, their philosophy is simple – when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30% share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100% and Apple earns nothing. All the company requires is, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app.
Finally, Apple will also require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app, which will prevent them from passing on the higher processing fee to the customers.
Apple removes WikiLeaks apps from Apps Store
Apple has dropped an unofficial Wikileaks based application from its Apps Store without offering an explanation to the author.
The app was selling a copy of the current WikiLeaks content, which is available free from their website, although the WikiLeaks website does permit reproduction of its content.
There is puzzlement regarding why Apple decided to block the application, which had only been approved last week, and why the company only communicated to the developer that it was removed, but declined to give reasons for the same.
The websites of companies considered to have dropped support for WikiLeaks have come under denial of service (DDOS) attacks from script-kiddies running simple computer softwares at home to overload websites with false requests. Considering the potential risk to Apple’s website businesses, a decision to drop the application – even though it is an unofficial clone – is unlikely to have been taken lightly.
