Earlier today we started receiving complaints from some members claiming new apps that do not belong to them “magically” appeared in their appFigures account.

We immediately started looking for the root cause and after much searching discovered the new apps were added because they were present in new financial reports Apple has just published for the month of August. This is something worth repeating – Apple has published financial reports that include apps + sales data that belongs to other developers.

We still don’t know how many members were affected by this issue. If you have apps that do not belong to you in your appFigures account please contact us directly.

We’ve sent a note to Apple to confirm but they haven’t replied yet. We’ll post their reply if/when it is received.

Feel free to leave a comment about your situation.

When we first opened up appFigures to the public we knew we wanted to create a place for our members to be able to talk to us directly as well as interact with others freely and about anything. That’s the day our twitter-like community was born.

Just last week we surpassed 2,500 posts. We call that an achievement!

So we wanted to thank all of you for being a part of the community, for the feedback, and for helping other members when they have questions.

If you’ve visited the community recently you’ve probably noticed the addition of gravatars to posts. That’s the first improvement of many we’ll be adding to the community over the next few months. Our goal is to make it the ultimate place for developers to discuss everything iPhone and ipad (and appfigures, too).

P.S – If you’re curious about gravatars check out www.gravatar.com

We’ve noticed that a lot of developers are confused when it comes to understanding Apple’s payment system, and with reason. And while Apple has been very clear that daily/weekly reports should not be used for financial purposes, they never explained why.

We bring you the explanation!

Before we go into the actual explanation keep in mind that financial reports follow a fiscal calendar that is different from the normal calendar. You can see Apple’s fiscal calendar for 2010 here.

So here’s the big difference:

Daily/weekly reports record downloads as they happen, while financial reports record credit card transactions as they clear with the bank.

This means that downloads that occur at the end of the fiscal month will be reported in the daily report but not in the financial report, and it can go either way depending on the previous fiscal month.
With that in mind let’s look at actual numbers.

Here’s real data for the fiscal month of Aug. 09 (8/2 – 8/29).

Here’s a comparison of estimated vs. actual profit for the data above:

Profit (from daily): $7,739.90
Actual Payment: $7,767.00
Difference: $32.90
Last 3 days: $30.80

* These results may be a bit skewed because the app was featured early in the month.

Conclusions:

1. Credit card charges may take more than a day to clear.
2. There’s a delay between when a download occurs to when it is posted.
3. Because of 1 and 2, downloads that took place over the last 3-6 days of the fiscal month may not count towards that month’s payment.
4. This results in a difference in profit of the total of the last 3 – 6 days of the month

Feel free to share your story by commenting.

The appFigures platform is growing, and so it our team.

We’re on the lookout for a talented web developer in the New York City area to join us. Click here for more details.

We couldn’t help but notice our community being all a-twitter about huge, unexpected rank changes in the last two days. We thought we’d break out the old calculator and examine it a little bit.

As you know, appFigures tracks top-200 ranks in App Stores around the world. We took this data and looked at each app’s changes by comparing the hourly change of each app and taking the largest hourly move per day.  We added up all the apps that had a big change > 50 (up or down) and compared those numbers to the same days of last week. The goal was to get a picture of high-magnitude changes in rank, the sort that would seem unexpected. The numbers spoke and told us that something was not right.

Tuesday was slower than usual…

Wednesday, and Thursday were crazy!

Let’s get numeric:

During a normal day, 5.77% of apps experience an hourly rank change of more than 50 places (up or down). On Wednesday, that number shot up to over 70%, indicating that it was a particularly volatile day in terms of high-magnitude hourly moves. Thursday experienced similar churn, with nearly 50% of apps experiencing these high-magnitude changes.

Here’s an overview of the last 30 days on the App Store. Look at that NBA-level jump…

Daily % of apps that moved 50 or more places in one hour.

And here’s a direct comparison to last week:

Apps that moved 50 or more positions in one hour.

Then we dove a little deeper into the nature of the changes, taking not only hourly rank movements of 50+, but breaking them down into four groups: 0-50, 51-100, 101-150, and 151+ places.  On normal days, 94% of apps see no hourly rank change greater than 50 places. A bit less than 2% see a shift of 51-100 places, and the same for 101-150 and 150+. On Wednesday and Thursday, only about 40% of stayed within 50 places, with around 20% seeing a change of 51-100, and likewise for 101-150 and 150+ places. Take a look at the breakdown:

This is what a normal day on the App Store looks like

Maximum change in rank for 1/25-2/1

This is what Wednesday and Thursday looked like

Maximum change in rank for 2/3-2/4.

We were puzzled as to why the big movers were distributed relatively uniformly (in that the percent moving 51-100 places ~ 101-150 places ~ 150+ places), rather than showing a more normal distribution, but that’s for another day.

Another peculiarity we found on 2/3 and 2/4 was the average highest hourly rank change per app. That number was consistent around -8 places up until 2/2. On Wednesday and Thursday it jumped dramatically to around +25 places each day. So, though the app store has shown big swings on those two days, an app’s biggest hourly swing is on average 25 places up.

Well that’s it for now, we’ll have some more analysis coming soon.

As most of you already know, iTunes Connect will be out of commission from Wednesday, December 23rd, until Monday, the 28th.

During iTunes Connect’s down time sales reports will be imported and emailed as usual. Unfortunately both iTunes Connect as well as Piano reporting have been closed and so reports can no longer be imported. It was good while it lasted…

Importing should resume on Tuesday, 12/29th.

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.

Last week we announced that members will soon be able to select which apps to track with appFigures. By selecting to track only the apps you want you will reduce clutter and avoid paying for apps you don’t want tracked.

This post explains how our billing system works and how to select apps to track. (Portions of this post will also be available in the updated F.A.Q as well soon).

Read the rest of this entry »