A very important news for application developers and not only related to a possible change in the AppStore application display system. Until now, Apple displays the most downloaded applications on the first places in the AppStore, without distinguishing between the number of uses/deletions/etc. Well, for a few days it seems that things have changed and Apple would take into account the way an application is used. More precisely, when Apple displays an application in the top of the best free applications, the listing of the application takes into account not only the number of actual downloads of the application, but also how often it is used or the number of downloads vs. the number of people who deleted it after first use. The change became evident after the Facebook application became the first in the top of the free applications, this after more than a year it was ranked only in the first 10-20 applications.
"We've been noticing changes in the Top Free rankings for at least three days now," said Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, which serves 80,000 applications with its analytics product. "From our point of view, Apple is absolutely considering more than just downloads, which we believe is the right direction to go to measure true popularity of an app." Other pay-per-install networks tell us they've been detecting these changes too.
The president of the advertising company Flurry, which offers ads for almost 80.000 applications for iOS and collects data on users and the way the applications are used, claims that Apple has made some changes and the charts will have a completely different classification from now on. I for one think that a classification by the number of downloads and uses is much better from all points of view because it gives us the opportunity to see the true value of an application. If the application is downloaded only based on a description and a few pictures and then it is deleted because in reality it does not work as it should, then that application has nothing to look for in the top.
The situation is also observed in AppStore Romania, where Facebook is in first place and Yahoo Messenger in second place, these being 2 of the most used applications by the public in Romania. Things are changing and changing for the better.
