As a follow up to yesterday’s post on US providers, I thought that I would take a look at the Canadian landscape as well. Canada has many more small providers with SaskTel, Fido, Virgin, Wind, and MTS all around 3% each.
The data for this chart comes from downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated in the month of January.
The above chart shows the breakdown of wireless carriers in the United States. There has been a drop in the percent of users on Verizon Wireless since last summer, but saw very little change in the distribution of the other carriers.
The data for this chart comes from downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated in the month of January.
The above chart shows the adoption of each version of the BlackBerry PlayBook each month as seen from downloads of the game Pixelated. Unlike the slow OS adoption on BlackBerry smartphones, the graph shows much steeper slopes for adoption of each new OS version for the PlayBook.
January saw an amazing 99.1% of users running OS 1.0.8 (or higher). These numbers should give us a feel for the adoption of OS 2.0 when it is released later this month. In short there will be no reason to support anything earlier then OS 2.0 pretty much as soon as it is released.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular PlayBook strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of June 2011 through the end of January 2012.
For the first time in a few months there has been some meaningful movement in this graph. The use of OS 7 is up to 13.9% while use of OS 6 has also improved after being flat since last October.
The percentage of users on OS 5.0 or higher has increased by more then two percent and is now up to 94.5% of all devices. Last January only 79.6% of users were running an OS at 5.0 or higher. With the percentage of active users on 4.x dwindling the recent update to the Binary Clock app only supported OS 5.0 and higher, and many other apps will probably be taking that approach in the near future as well.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of January 2011 through the end of January 2012.
While the BlackBerry Torch 9800 is the most popular touchscreen devices with 48.7% marketshare, the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 is clearly catching up as the most popular of the BlackBerry 7 devices. Also it looks as if I was right in regards to the production of the 9380 and 9790 being a waste of RIM’s time, and unneeded fragmentation.
Looking at the distribution of screen resolution on BlackBerry touchscreens shows why supporting the 9790 is not a priority for any developers. Accounting for just 0.88% of all touchscreen devices it is far to unique with no reason to purchases it instead of the Bold 9900. The Curve 9380 however can easily be supported due to its many similarities with the Torch 9800 and Storm series. In fact its 480×360 screen resolution is present in over half of all touchscreen BlackBerrys in the wild.
These stats are based on December downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated.
A first look at the benefits of localization back in October, found little evidence that there was that much to gain from adding the feature. Regardless support for Pixelated Plus (and its free sibling Pixelated) was expanded from English only to support a total of five languages with the release of version 3.0.
In the below charts percentages are shown from October (the month before the release of version 3.0) and December (the month after the release of version 3.0). All downloads and sales on the PlayBook were excluded from these stats. All languages that are not currently supported are lumped into the ‘Other’ category. First a look at downloads of the free game Pixelated in October and December.
English and Spanish are by far the most popular languages. After adding support for more languages there is a bit of an increase in the percentage of users with Spanish as their primary language, but a bit of a decrease among speakers of Dutch, while French and Portuguese are mostly flat.
The next charts show purchases of Pixelated Plus from October and December.
This chart shows an increase of percent of purchases made by users of Spanish and French. Even more interesting is that the increase seen here is larger then the size of the increase seen in the free version of Pixelated. Sales to users speaking Dutch, however, are down (similar to what was seen in the top graph).
So perhaps there are some advantages to localization. But the results are (at best) mixed. Still it is important to remember that not users have English as their preferred language.
Thanks to the reach of BlackBerry AppWorld, Pixelated is now in 31 more counties then McDonald’s.
Last month Pixelated was downloaded in 150 different countries ranging from Albania to Zambia.
The above chart shows the breakdown (as of last month) of PlayBook OS versions currently in use. As was the case in September, the vast majority of users are running the latest OS.
Because I feel that it is unreasonable to expect end users to be running a beta version of the software, users of OS 2.0 (and other unreleased versions) were included in the group of OS 1.0.8 users. The percent of people running the beta was in the low single digits.
Data comes from December 2011 downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated.
The above chart shows the country of PlayBook users based on downloads of the game Pixelated in the month of December. The game was downloaded in 122 different countries during the month, but more then half of the downloads came from Canada.
The top 10 countries were (in order) Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, Australia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Argentina.
There may be some sampling errors due to regional popularity of the game Pixelated, or the fact that the game is only available in English, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese. Also because data was only used from the month of December, these numbers may be affected by regional promotions and discounts during this time frame.
December showed an uptick in usage of OS 7.0 which is now up to 11.4 percent. This growth however, mostly came at the expense of users of OS 6.0 which saw little to no growth. There was also no significant growth in the use of OS 5.0 in the past month.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of December 2010 through the end of December 2011.
There seems to be a belief that there is a spike in downloads and purchases of apps on Christmas, due to people receiving devices as gifts. However the data fails to back up this theory. Downloads shot up for free games, but there was no change at all for paid games, or any other apps. After selling apps for a few years now I expected this, but now I have the charts to prove it.
First downloads for the free game Pixelated in December 2010, and 2011 are charted below. While downloads do shoot up on Christmas day, the increase doesn’t actually exceed where the download rate happened to be earlier in the month. Additionally in both years, the peak actually comes on the day after Christmas.
Despite this small increase there is no corresponding increase in purchases of Pixelated Plus. Neither is there any significant increase in the number of launches of the game. The next chart shows the requests to the ad server each day in December. This value continues to be as steady as ever.
Next looking at my other popular apps, there is still no spike in sales. The free date tracking/sharing app Twinkle shows no increase at all. In fact downloads hit their monthly low on Christmas day.
Downloads of Xploding Boxes follow a similar pattern as we saw with Pixelated. In short there is a modest spike in downloads, and no corresponding increase in purchases of the full version of the game.
So while Christmas day may be slightly above average in terms of downloads, it certainly is not as off the charts crazy as it is sometimes made out to be.
Use of carrier billing slipped for the second month in a row, down to 37.2% of purchases in November. Despite the decline this is still the preferred method to buy apps for those that have the option.
This data is generated from the dollar amount of purchases of all Ebscer applications over the given months.
Twinkle is an app that allows you to set and keep track of upcoming and past events, and share them with your friends. The app is free and contains a small advertisement that can be removed through an in-app purchase.
Because fetching the advertisement requires a request to a server, we can look at ad requests in order to get a look at approximate how often Twinkle is being used. While the app was released about a year and a half ago, the last few months worth of ad requests are shown in the chart below.
Version 3.0 of Twinkle added the ability to share events with your friends over BBM. Based on the above graph can you see when this update was released?
The existence of the BBM API has fundamentally changed the nature of this app. It has gone from a simple date tracker with calendar integration, to a complete social experience. While you can still choose to not make use of the app’s social features, it appears that most people are. Version 3.3 of Twinkle (coming soon) will expand these social features ever further with OS7 devices also able to share Twinkle events over Twitter, FaceBook, and Email. The typical usage of this app has completely changed from just five months ago.
I have been estimating BlackBerry PlayBook sales for a while now based off of downloads of Pixelated. However because Pixelated was updated to version 3.0 at the same time that the PlayBook went on sale for $199 the data for the last half month is a bit muddled.
However the end of November was also the end of RIM’s quarter, and we do know that they have shipped 850,000 PlayBooks so far. Given that the PlayBook is universally out of stock everywhere at the turn of the month we can conclude that they have sold through the vast majority of what was shipped, so about 840,000 so far.
This plus the existing monthly data gives us the chart shown above for monthly PlayBook sales. In short it shows that the sale price has resulted in many more PlayBook’s being sold, but not astronomically high numbers either. It will be interesting to see where the PlayBook’s sales (and price) are in the coming months.
The BlackBerry OS distribution is pretty much unchanged from last month with use of OS 7 up just half a percentage point to 8.8% of the overall market.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of November 2010 through the end of November 2011.