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In the last two years the shutdown started pretty much on schedule. This year however, iTunes Connect didn’t go down on the 22nd but waited until the 23rd, and as of the 24th, is still up with reports for some.

At this time we, along most other developers, can no longer login to iTunes Connect, which is why syncing has been disabled on the site.

If you are one of the few who still can, download your report and then upload it into your appFigures account.

P.S. If you’ve received an email earlier saying “We were unable to login to your iTunes Connect account” this is the reason. It can safely be ignored.

In case you haven’t seen Apple’s most recent email to developers, tomorrow (Thursday 9/29) iTunes Connect will be down for one hour between 10 and 11AM PDT.

iTunes Connect went through similar maintenance exactly a year ago (oddly enough, the first day of the Jewish new year) which led to a complete overhaul of its reporting system. We’re not sure what tomorrow’s maintenance will entail but we’ll be armed and ready in case any change, big or small, takes place.

Over the last few days some of our members have told us that they’re not seeing new Android data. We looked into it and can confirm that Google hasn’t published new download data since Tuesday, September 13. Pretty strange, we know.

We don’t know what the source of the silence is, but we’re keeping an eye on it and will share new information when we have it.

The new regions are now available in the Payments report.

Two things you’ll want to know:

1. Because Apple opened the new regions mid-month, revenues for the early portion of the month use the old country regions. So, for example, your transactions that took place early in the month in Norway will appear in the Europe financial report, while the transactions that occurred later in the month will fall in the Norway report.
2. Financial reports for the month of July have been released later and more sporadically than usual. Some reports were available two weeks ago, some earlier in the week, and some today.

Let’s look at the total number of devs making apps in each category. Among the devs who made a top ranked iPhone app in May, 2011, on average…

• 311 devs are responsible for the top 400 Free apps
• 281 devs are responsible for the top 400 Paid apps
• 259 devs are responsible for the top 400 Grossing apps

To visualize this, we’ve created a Venn diagram so you can see exactly how many developers there are in each category and in the overlap between categories.

It’s probably a good time to point out that when we say “developers” or “devs,” we include publishers. On Average, 22% of the top grossing devs make more than one top-grossing app. Most of these developers have 2-5 top grossing apps. A select few have more than 10 top grossing apps at any time, but there are a couple of consistent rockstars: Electronic Arts averaged 25 top-grossing apps at any given time in May, and GameLoft averaged 12. When it comes to the big guns, this data confirms our expectations.

Among the devs in each category there is some overlap—some devs have made one app that’s ranked in the free or paid category and is also a top grossing app. Other devs are in the overlap because they’ve made multiple apps, each app ranked in a unique category.

Let’s take a closer look at the 259 devs making top-grossing apps (or, if you’re like us, let’s take a closer look at the blue bubble:):

Looking only at the devs making free top grossing apps, if we add 13% to 20% to get the full percentage of devs making free apps, we get 33%. Doing the same thing for devs making paid top grossing apps, 40% plus 20% gives us 60%. Since 20% of these devs made free and paid apps, that leaves a whopping 27% of devs who made top grossing apps that are not ranked in the top 400 free or paid categories.

Of course, we’re left wondering: who are these 27% of devs with apps that manage to make a lot of revenue without ever hitting the top free or paid charts? What kind of app pulls in enough revenue to make it into the top grossing category, but isn’t popular enough to make into free and paid categories? We’ll be covering this very issue in one of our upcoming posts.

To keep up with the latest info follow us @appfigures or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Like the charts? Download the media package

In the month of May in the U.S. App Store, 69% of the 400 top grossing apps were paid apps. The other 31% were free apps.

Among the 100 top grossing apps, you’ll see that free apps start catching up to paid apps.  41% of top grossing apps are free, 59% are paid.

This might come as a surprise to anyone using freemium games’ in-app purchases to finance the world’s largest virtual zoo or most tricked-out restaurant. But hold your horses (or lions or burgers) because free apps do start to surpass paid apps within the 25 top grossing—51% of these apps are free, 49% are paid. So among the highest grossing apps, the freemium model is making as much or more than the paid model.

Here’s a breakdown of those three tiers of top grossing:

The freemium model appears to be a viable means of making revenue. Not only this, there are limitations to how profitable a paid app can be. Even if a paid app is extremely popular, the large majority of apps are dirt cheap. Most of the paid apps in all three of these tiers are priced at 99¢. The second most popular price is $2.99. In the top 25 grossing tier, 55% of the paid apps are 99¢ and 18% of them are priced at $2.99.

Here’s a look at the pricing breakdown in these top grossing tiers:

We’re on the lookout for insightful App Store stats, so to keep up with the latest intel check our blog, follow us on twitter, or subscribe to our RSS feed.

What’s going on with the iTunes servers?

While investigating the ranks issue we also noticed that app reviews are just as messed up. They seem to disappear randomly and then show up again (You can see this for yourself by browsing through iTunes). We can only assume that Apple is performing some unannounced maintenance on their servers, and hope that they’ll be back to normal soon.

When will this issue clear up?

We can’t say for sure since the issue is on Apple’s side. We’re keeping an eye on the situation and will post updates as soon as we have more information.

Tracking Mac App Store ranks has brought up some interesting numbers regarding the distribution of apps. What kind of apps have found their way into the Mac App Store? Check it out:

We’ve dubbed them Ghost Reviews!!!

And we’re not the only ones putting 2 and 2 together. The community is full of similar stories from other developers.

What’s going on?

Though we can’t say for sure, it appears that reviews are being saved by Apple without a version associated with them. When iTunes reads those reviews it gets “confused” and does not display them at all. We, on the other hand, don’t withhold the information and display these “ghost reviews” with no version information (and also give them a befitting name!)

Will these reviews ever appear in iTunes? Will they update to include the applicable app version? Only time will tell. For now, share your experience on our community so we can all track this situation.