Everyone is having a Black Friday promotion these days and we wanted to have one too. So in the holiday spirit of Thanksgiving, we’ve decided to show how thankful we are to you, our members, and have our own Black Friday promotion. Here it is:

The first 100 new or existing members to upgrade to the Premium plan on Friday between 12:01 AM and 11:59 PM (EST) will receive a 50% off coupon for 2 months.

There’s no fine print or special terms. If you’re one of the lucky upgraders the coupon will be added to your account automatically within 24 hours.

So hurry up and upgrade while you can…

Happy Holidays.

Earlier today we discovered that Apple has made several changes to iTunes Connect. These changes were all done “behind the scenes” so you won’t notice them when you login directly. They were however, big enough to confuse our importer which caused all sync operations to display “All reports are up to date” even when they were not.

Our dev team went to work and has rolled out an update that restores import and sync functionality. If Auto Import is turned on for your account your reports are being imported right now with email-reports to follow.

Emoji are fun, colorful, and really easy to get on your iPhone (if you haven’t already  read this article). That’s why they are being used in more and more app reviews on the App Store. That’s all nice and well but wait, emoji are not available outside the iPhone, right? Not any more!

While reading some new reviews we realized that without seeing those yellow smileys, red hearts, and hand gestures, some reviews lost some of their meaning (and some rare and amazingly hilarious ones lost theirs all together). So we set out to bring emoji over to appFigures. And so we did!

We’ve rolled out an updated earlier today that brings full support for all 470 available emoji symbols in reviews. The update also makes reading reviews faster, adds paging support, and displays ratings and average stars by app store. Quite a cool update overall.

We’ve decided to rename the Unlimited plan to Premium plan. The new name will appear on all future invoices.

The plan itself has not changed and still offers the same great features as before.

We’re excited, nay, delighted to bring you the new and improved appFigures version 1.2!

v1.2 brings a stronger and faster reporting engine, nifty new features, and UI improvements to make your appFigures experience smoother than ever before.

What’s new:

Improved integration for In-App purchases
In-App purchase items are now available in your app selection lists, allowing you to select them all, compare some, compare different items from various apps… You get the idea, it’s really flexible.

Ranks vs. Sales
Easily visualize the correlation between ranks and sales by overlaying the two.

Stronger Ranks report
We’ve redesigned the core of the ranks report to be faster and support wider date ranges in both hourly and daily modes.

Improved reporting engine
All reports have been re-engineered from the ground up to load faster and be more responsive. While that seems minor it’s a pretty big update.

“Sticky” report options
All chart options are “sticky” and will follow you across sessions, browsers, and even computers. Non-sticky settings can always be defined by going to Settings > Defaults.

Better support for mobile Safari
All charts have been redesigned to display properly in Safari on iPhones and iPods.

Resizable app selection lists
Ever wanted to resize the app selection drop down list to fit your apps? Now you can! App lists across all reports can be resized.

If you run into kinks, or are unable to access any of the new features, please contact us directly. We’re always here for you!

Earlier this morning we discovered that the feed we use to track app store ranks has been modified by Apple just slightly but enough to confuse our ranks updater. Due to this “fun” fact ranks have been MIA since last night at 9pm est.

We’ve reworked our ranks updater to understand the updated format and rolled out the update at 7am est. Ranks for 7am are available now.

After being frozen for more than 24 hours, App Stores across the globe are starting to show signs of life. At around 1pm est we started to detect rank changes in most app stores. Unfortunately that’s not very good news.

While some apps rallied, the trend we observed is for paid apps to either decrease in rank dramatically or drop of completely. This was observed in many app stores around the world, US included. While free apps moved as well there is no clear pattern, which at this point is good news.

With the weekend approaching fast, and paid apps declining without cause, this can spell bad news for developers of all sizes. So once again we’re left crossing our fingers and hoping for good…

How’s your app doing?

Yes it is!

Frozen in time, the App Store has not changed in over 24 hours one bit. Our hourly rank updates show that with the exception of 12 and 6pm (est) yesterday, all app ranks remained the same. Those two updates balanced out the ranks so technically there were no changes at all. Kind of strange, wouldn’t you say?

Our guess is that the App Store we see now is coming from an older cached snapshot while Apple takes the time to make necessary repairs that will prevent future upside-down incidents like the one that happened the night before.

With the weekend being the better part of the week (revenue-wise) for most developers,  a frozen App Store will be sure to have a major revenue impact for developers. Heading into the weekend, we can do no more than cross our fingers and hope that Apple finishes the needed repairs and unfreezes the App Store.

Stuck up high? down low? or nowhere at all? Feel free to share your frozen experience by commenting.

appFigures will not be accessible tonight, Wednesday 11/4/09 starting at 9PM for approximately one hour for scheduled maintenance. During this maintenance window we will be making improvements to our infrastructure as well as updating to version 1.2 (more on v1.2 in the next post).

Please plan for this downtime. We apologize for any inconvenience the downtime may cause.