staff: Now you can do more than just reblog when you find something you love on Tumblr for iPhone and iPad. Share posts via Twitter, Facebook, and more Save stuff for later using Instapaper and Pocket Email an entire post with our beautiful new template Close photos by flinging up or down! GIFs animate while you scroll* Search your Following list (it’s now alphabetized and grouped by first letter!) Download the update *iPad 2, 3 and 4, iPad Mini, iPod Touch 5th Generation, iPhone 4S and 5 only Love this update. Mostly for the Instapaper integration, which is where I do most of my reading. Tumblr just keeps getting better and better for me.
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staff:

Now you can do more than just reblog when you find something you love on Tumblr for iPhone and iPad.

  • Share posts via Twitter, Facebook, and more
  • Save stuff for later using Instapaper and Pocket
  • Email an entire post with our beautiful new template
  • Close photos by flinging up or down!
  • GIFs animate while you scroll*
  • Search your Following list (it’s now alphabetized and grouped by first letter!)

Download the update

*iPad 2, 3 and 4, iPad Mini, iPod Touch 5th Generation, iPhone 4S and 5 only

Love this update. Mostly for the Instapaper integration, which is where I do most of my reading.

Tumblr just keeps getting better and better for me.

App downloads hit record 1.76 billion over holiday week

Remember when I said if you’re an app developer you absolutely need to be active during the holidays?

Here’s Flurry on mobile app downloads over the holiday week:

- App downloads increased to 1.76 billion, up from 1.2 billion a year ago
- 65 percent over the weekly baseline
- 50 million iOS and Android devices activated
- For the first time daily tablet activations eclipsed daily smartphone activations


Also: Thanksgiving Mobile Traffic Surges 48%

News Flash: Apple And Google App Markets Still Booming

Lots of good nuggets in here. But none of this should be surprising. The app economy is still showing monstrous YoY growth with no signs of slowing down any time soon.

Here are the highlights:

• Google Play showed tremendous growth during the past four months, with an aggregated growth in daily revenue of 43% across 20 of the largest countries, while the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad grew by 21% in daily revenue in the same period.

• Even though the growth in revenues in Google Play in the last four months is close to that of the Apple App Store in 2012, the growth in daily revenues in the Apple App Store was higher than the total daily revenues in Google Play when comparing absolute daily revenue values.

• Looking at the worldwide download volumes, the app store opportunity is large. On a typical day in November 2012, the revenues in the Apple App Store exceeded $15M USD, while in Google Play the revenues are just below $3.5M USD in 20 of the largest countries in both app stores.

• Seven applications were responsible for 10% of the revenues in November 2012 in the Apple App Store for iPhone, which is significantly lower number of applications than in January 2012. Moreover, in the Apple App Store for iPad, six applications were responsible for 10% of the revenues, while in Google Play this figure was four.

• The proportion of revenue that derived from in-apps increased from 53% to 69% in 2012. However, in 2012 there were still some publishers who were very successful with a paid-only strategy. Moreover, 35% of the revenue from the top 10 publishers was derived from one-off fees in 2012.>

Full report is available for download here.

It takes 54,000 downloads to reach the top 10 of the free iPhone app charts

According to figures released today in App Annie’s August index, it currently takes more than 13,000 downloads a day to break into the top 100 on the free iPhone app charts, and 54,000 to reach the top 10.

As the iTunes App Store and Google Play stores grow, it’s going to take more and more downloads to stand out above the crowd.

Also: The State of the Mobile App Stores Economy

How App Marketing on iOS will change: the transition from UDID to Advertising Identifier

I wrote a post last week about how iOS 6 and Apple’s IFA affects mobile app developers. Turns out that Apple has since changed the name (for the better) from identifierForAdvertising or IFA to simply “Advertising Identifier”. Suppose the acronym will be AI. Or maybe everyone will just say “Advertising Id’s.”

This week Fiksu did a great webinar and presentation for app developers on “How App Marketing On iOS Will Change.” The whole deck is worth reading but here are the two slides that stuck out to me:

The transition from UDID to Advertising ID’s will take some time. First the ad networks have to update their SDKs to include Ad Id’s. Then publishers need to allow for the passing and integrate the new network SDKs into their apps. And finally users need to upgrade to iOS 6 and update all their apps.

But the good news is that iOS 6 adoption is happening very fast. Apparently faster than any iOS update to date. Maybe it’s because people want to try the new Apple Maps app and complain about it.

The other good news is that Apple is making the implementation very easy. Instead of developers passing the UDID they can pass the Advertising ID in its place. Or more accurately, pass both in the interim.

It’s good to see companies like Fiksu talking about this more. It’s an important topic for app developers.

I’m just glad to see we’re well on our way.

How iOS 6 and Apple’s IFA affects mobile advertising and app developers

MoPub had a great post on Friday about how iOS 6 and Apple’s identifierForAdvertising (IFA) will affect mobile advertising.

For some background, since the early days of iOS, app developer advertisers have used the Unique Device Identifier (UDID) to track app installs from their ad network (AdMob, Millenial Media, iAds, etc.) and publisher partners. UDIDs are a way for advertisers to accurately attribute which partner that user came from. For many app developers, the UDID is crucial because they can effectively measure their ad spends and optimize to their best performing partners based on their Cost-Per-Install, or CPI.

The vast majority of app developers are now using UDID, even though back in March Apple started rejecting apps that were using a UDID. Turns out it was only a few apps and then Apple turned a blind eye, so developers continued using them.

The problem with UDID is that it’s not the best solution for privacy reasons. See, the UDID is tied to the device itself (hence the name) so it cannot be changed or reset by users. As privacy advocates argue, the more these UDIDs get passed around, the more data points could be gathered to potentially tie them to personally identifiable information.

(Note: Pandora does not use UDIDs due to privacy and legal concerns.)

The good news for users and privacy advocates is that Apple is now acting. As MoPub points out, Apple has finally created a new standard, identifierForAdvertising (IFA), with an opt-out mechanism:

“With the GM build of iOS6 released yesterday, our engineers discovered that there is now an opt-out mechanism for the IFA that’s controlled in the user settings. The option is called “Limit Advertising,” and enabling this allows the user to avoid any potential re-targeting or audience-targeted advertising buys. This is a huge step forward for user privacy and we are thrilled that Apple has included it in the platform in this release. Similar to how a browser offers the ability to clear cookies and reject third-party cookies, this makes the IFA a fully privacy compliant mechanism for powering a lot of the sophisticated advertising approaches we see proliferating in desktop.”

This is huge news for app developers and the entire mobile app advertising ecosystem.

I hope that other networks and publishers act quickly and adopt the IFA. Certainly there will be a transition period as users upgrade to iOS 6, but hopefully in the near future the entire mobile industry will use IFAs as the standard and we can drop UDIDs once and for all.