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 iPad is coming tomorrow and we have full support for it today.

Earlier today we’ve started to track the following top iPad lists:

• Top 100 Overall (free + paid)
• Top Grossing
• Top 100 Games (free + paid)

As of midnight 4/4 we’re also tracking all ipad app categories. And as of 4/5 we’re also tracking all games sub-categories!



Good luck iPad developers.

360iDev is a great conference for iPhone developers. This year we’ll be in full attendance. But we won’t only be attending, we’ll also be in charge of Tuesday night’s party. “The” party.

Activity of the night — Sumo wrestling for an iPad!

That’s right, sumo wrestling! Because what’s a good party without some humorous violence? We’ll have it all – sumo suits, a big wrestling ring, a referee (to keep things kosher), and even an announcer to keep the good times rolling.

To make this even better, the grand prize for the ultimate sumo will be a brand new iPad.

Like beer?

We need your help picking out which beer to serve at the party. Vote for your favorite beer on our iDev iBeer iPoll – check out this blog post for more detail.

As you may or may not know, appFigures is sponsoring 360iDev in April. It’s a great iPhone development conference in San Jose, and as sponsors we get to throw a really wild party on April 13th. The problem is that for a really wild party you need the right beer.

We’ve been kicking ideas around the office and can’t come to any sort of agreement, suggestions run from Arrogant Bastard Ale and Corona to Steel Reserve and paint thinner with flour. We figure if we can’t come to any sort of consensus, we should let our users and the conference attendees decide, and what better way to do this than through the internet-magic of twitter?

So here’s the deal: between today, March 23rd and April 1st tweet @appFigures with your beer suggestion and tag it with #ibeeripoll

We’ll take the top 5 most tweeted and retweeted beers and bring them along to the party, so get excited and may the best beer win.

Here are some suggestions (click to tweet your vote):

Earlier this morning we started noticing sporadic inability to access the App Store to get ranks data. So we started looking around and got our answer from the usual suspect – iTunes.

This informative windows popped up whenever we attempted to view some game categories:

This doesn’t seem to happen with all categories, just some and not all the time…

We’ll continue to keep an eye on the store with the hopes of it returning to normal soon.

What’s a major upgrade, you ask? Well, it’s one-half improvements under the hood to make your reports and experience even faster and one-half new features.

Let’s take a look:

Shiny Design

It’s been almost a full year since appFigures was born; so saying “this site’s design is so last year” was right on the mark. The result is a new look and feel for the site (and eventually this blog), that mixes a clean UI with the functionality you’re already used to.

P.S – We’ve been getting a whole lot of praise from our members about the new design over the last few hours and just wanted to say thanks!

Importing Monthly Free and Financial Reports

One of the most requested features by our users was supporting financial reports. We listened and now that’s part of appFigures.

Financial reports can be easily used in all reports throughout the platform and just like daily and weekly reports, they’ll be auto imported and stored in your archive.

PYMT File Support

Starting August 2009, Apple has started publishing PYMT files, which give developers information about current money transfers. The amounts are identical to the ones reported in the financial reports, the only difference is that a PYMT file shows actual payments heading your way.

We’re now auto importing them as well, and will email you a quick heads up when a new PYMT is available for your account. Think of it as a convenient payment alert.

Redesigned Country Report

Wouldn’t you like to see the geographical distribution of your sales? After all, it’s a big world and there are now 90 App Stores selling apps. We sure wanted to see it in an intuitive way, and a map came to save the day. Check it out!

Easy exporting capability

Another big user-requested feature was the ability to export data. We agree, and now you can export your by date, or by country reports to a tab separated file which can be opened by any spreadsheet application.

Timezone Support

Not everyone works on Eastern Standard Time. So, now you can change your timezone so that ranks accurately reflect your local time.

Sorting of data tables

We’ve made the reports UI even more flexible by making all data tables in all reports sortable. Click the header to sort by the column or the brave-at-heart can hold down shift and click to multisort.

A faster events management area

Events are a great way of tracking things that happen in the “real-world” by adding annotations to your charts. In the new appFigures we’ve brought them front and center and made the UI easier and faster.

For the past few months, our developers have been hard at work on all these goodies.  As you may have already seen, we finally rolled it out late last night, so make sure to check it out and let us know what you think!

Apple has recently opened new App Stores in 13 countries, pushing the total number of App Stores to a staggering 90.

Starting today, ranks and reviews from all new App Stores will be tracked and reported.

The new App Stores include the following countries and are already in full swing:

• Armenia
• Botswana
• Bulgaria
• Jordan
• Kenya
• Macedonia
• Madagascar
• Mali
• Mauritius
• Niger
• Senegal
• Tunisia
• Uganda

Earlier today we’ve discovered that Apple has published some incomplete daily and/or weekly reports for 2/14 and 2/8 – 2/14 to iTunes Connect. It seems that these reports have since been removed from iTunes Connect and are being republished. Not all reports were incomplete, so you may not be affected by this. If the daily/weekly report you’ve received earlier today looks incorrect this is probably the reason.

To ensure data accuracy we’ve removed all automatically imported daily and weekly reports and restarted the import again. We’ve also re-sent both daily and weekly email reports with “Updated” in the subject so you can differentiate between the current and possibly incomplete ones.

Members with auto import turned off can re-import these reports by removing them from the archive and then uploading them directly or starting a sync with iTunes Connect.

We’ll continue to import throughout the day to catch reports that have not been republished.

Feel free to contact us directly if you have any other questions or need further assistance.

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.