For the first time since the introduction of carrier billing in AppWorld, the percentage of users making use of carrier billing was down from the previous month. For the month of October, carrier billing accounted for 38.6% of all purchases.
In the United States 72.7% of all AT&T and T-Mobile customers choose to purchase their apps via carrier billing. This number is larger then the 38.6% of all purchases due to the many carrier that still do not support this option.
This data is generated from the dollar amount of purchases of all Ebscer applications over the given months.
Carrier billing is rapidly increasing in popularity, with September seeing 41.3% of all sales made through carrier billing. However this number includes sales to customers in carriers that do not support carrier billing, as well as sales to PlayBook owners who don’t even have a carrier.
In the United States, carrier billing is supported by AT&T and T-Mobile. In the month of October, when customers on these two carriers purchased an application, they opted to pay via carrier billing 72.7% of the time. It’s not only that it is nice to have the option, but that it is preferred over credit cards and PayPal combined.
This data is generated from the dollar amount of purchases of all Ebscer applications over the given months.
I have made a few estimates of the sales of the BlackBerry PlayBook before. Assuming that 255,000 had been sold by June 14th, and that 504,000 had been sold as of September 16th. After looking at the most recent data I calculate that RIM has sold around 700,000 tablets as of November 15th.
This shows BlackBerry tablets selling at a rate of about 100k a month recently. Sales rebounded unexpectedly in October despite the lack of a timely OS update. Numbers for November, however, are on track to be down once again.
As before this estimation is based off of the number of downloads of the free game Pixelated. While this calculation does rely on a number of assumptions, given that Pixelated has remained one of the most downloaded apps for the PlayBook, I feel that I have better numbers then most to base this estimate upon.
The BlackBerry OS distribution is largely unchanged from last month. Use of OS 6.0+ increased 2.1% to 42.3% of the market, while use of OS7 increased slightly to 8.3% of all users.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of October 2010 through the end of October 2011.
Use of carrier billing has increased for the 14th straight month. September saw the use of carrier billing increase to 41.3% of all sales. September also saw a significant number of app sales on the PlayBook which does not support carrier billing, so if you were to look at just smartphone app sales the percentage would be even higher.
This data is generated from the dollar amount of purchases of all Ebscer applications over the given months.
Overall sales of the BlackBerry PlayBook have been a bit disappointing. However that does not imply that it is a device that should be ignored. Support for this tablet was added to Version 2.0 of Xploding Boxes in mid September. Bolstered by having a spot in the top 25 free apps (peaked at #8, currently at #22), and by being featured in the carrousel, the game got a good amount of downloads on the device. More importantly though is that it significantly outperformed the BlackBerry phones when it came to users upgrading to the full version of the game. Over the past month, the PlayBook accounted for 5.13% of all downloads of Xploding Boxes, and 9.55% of all purchases of the app. So while the PlayBook makes up a relatively small part of the BlackBerry market, when it comes to purchases, the PlayBook outperforms its market share by almost a factor of two.
Version 2.0 of Xploding Boxes added support for Spanish, so now almost a month later I figured that it would be worth a look to see how much of an improvement (if any) that this additional feature had on customer adoption of the product.
These first two charts show the break down by language for downloads, and purchases of version 1.6 of Xploding Boxes from July 23rd through September 8th. At this point Xploding Boxes was only available in English. None of the languages in the “other” category are close in size to Spanish, for a more detailed look at the languages in the first chart see this post from early September.
While English is by far the most dominant language for downloads, it is even more dominant when it comes to purchases of the full game. While part of this is probably due to correlations between language and income (and payment options), I supposed that part of it was also due to the game requiring you to play (and upgrade) in English.
So support for Spanish was added to version 2.0 of the game. The below chart shows the break down by language for downloads, and purchases of version 2.0 of Xploding Boxes from September 16th, through October 13th.
Despite expectations that support for Spanish would result in more downloads and purchases by those who speak the language, the data actually shows the trend going the other way. One possible explanation for this is that version 2.0 also added support for the BlackBerry Tablet, which has seen most of its sales in English speaking countries. However given how few tablets have been sold this does not explain away the lack of growth from Spanish users. As such the only conclusion that I can come to is that the benefits of localization are minimal.
Boosted by a single month 5% increase in the use of OS7, and a 2% increase in the use of OS6, the percentage of users with a minimum OS of 5.0 has exceed 90% for the first time. Meanwhile the use of OS 7 is up to 7.7% after just two months, while last year it took OS6 4 months just to get to 7.2%.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of September 2010 through the end of September 2011.
It has now been a full year since BlackBerry added carrier billing as an option, and it has continued to increase in popularity every month. Carrier billing now accounts for over 38% of all purchases through AppWorld.
This data is generated from the dollar amount of purchases of all Ebscer applications over the given months.
The PlayBook is seeing very good rates of OS upgrades, with 96% of all users currently running the newest version of the OS. As a developer this is a good trend to see because it implies that less work will need to go towards supporting older versions of the operating system. (For example the 3% of users still running OS 1.0.3 do not have access to in-app purchases).
In the past this has been an issue for RIM. As of just this past month 12.7% of BlackBerry smartphone users were still on OS 4.6 which was released over three years ago now. Historically RIM has had even more trouble getting users to upgrade existing devices. However, by removing the wireless carriers from the process, and including an simpler, and easier way to upgrade on the PlayBook, RIM does not seem to be having these problems anymore.
Last Thursday RIM announced that they have shipped 700,000 PlayBooks as of August 27th. However for developers the more important question is how many of those were actually sold? Based on my calculations the answer is that they have actually sold through most of these with 504,000 PlayBooks sold as of September 16th.
This estimation is based off of the number of downloads of the free game Pixelated. While this calculation does rely on a number of assumptions, given that Pixelated has remained one of the most downloaded apps for the PlayBook, I feel that I have better numbers then most to base this estimate upon.
I have tweaked the formula used to make this estimation, to one that is more conservative then the one I have used in the past. Under the new formula the June 14th estimate would have been revised down to 255,000 tablets sold.
The above chart shows the language being used by users who have downloaded Xploding Boxes since the release of version 1.6 of the game. Currently the game is only available in English, which presumably has some effect on the chart.
This past month included the release of the BlackBerry OS 7.0 (shown on the chart in Yellow). While the 2.41% market share that the new OS showed in August is rather small, as a point of comparison it is more the double the 1.08% market share that OS 6.0 had in August 2010.
OS 6+ meanwhile is now on just over one third of all devices with its marketshare up to 33.4% of in market BlackBerry devices.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of August 2010 through the end of August 2011.
BlackBerry OS usage in July was mostly unchanged from last month. Use of OS 6 was up to 29.9% while use of OS 5 or higher was up to 87%.
I would expect a big bump in both of these numbers next month, as they begin to be propped up by the sale of OS 7 devices.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data is from the beginning of July 2010 through the end of July 2011.
The use of carrier billing continues to grow at a rapid pace. Use of this option has increased every single month after it was introduced, and in June accounted for 31.7% of all purchases.
This data is generated from the dollar amount of purchases of all Ebscer applications over the given month.
