Horace Dediu made some calculations and plotted all of the data on a chart over at his Asymco blog:

Source: Asymco

Based on these latest numbers, Dediu calculated how much iTunes users spend per year on different types of media. He says it’s “about $9/yr on Software, $2/yr on books, $16/yr on apps $12/yr on music and $4/yr on video.”

On one hand, this chart backs up something we already know: that iOS apps — via a growing number of iPhone and iPad users — has been driving those iTunes account signups. As new subscribers arrive, the category of spending seeing the most growth is apps, at $16 per user, per year. In 2008, when the App Store opened, users were only spending about $4 per year apiece on apps; that number has quadrupled in almost six years.

But what’s interesting is that even though Apple says there have been 1 billion TV episodes downloaded and 380 million movies, that number spent per user is still relatively small, hovering around $4 per user, per year. (That’s about the price of one movie download on iTunes, btw.) And that’s even with the advent and growth of the Apple TV.

Ebooks are still the smallest category, and also Apple’s newest. However, the fact that so little — just $2 per user, per year — is spent on them in iTunes makes Apple’s recent claim that it has 20 percent of the ebook market seem a bit questionable.

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Everything about the look of iOS 7 has been tweaked or massively changed. Textures, colors, menus, buttons, navigation arrows, keyboards, dials, icons, everything will need to be updated to blend seamlessly with Apple’s new chosen design. Apple isn’t forcing this, but it’s in all developers’ best interest: because when you put an iOS 6-designed app next to an iOS 7-ready one, the difference will be incredibly stark — and not in a good way.

As Entropy says:

Remember what non-retina enabled Apps looked like when the iPhone 4 was released? Well, this has the potential to be worse – much worse. And remember when many people said that iPhone-only Apps would look “just fine” on the iPad when blown up to 2X scale. Yeah, that argument didn’t last long.

Simply put, pre-iOS 7 Apps running on the new OS stick out like a sore thumb - looking aged, clunky, and well…just ancient.

The deadline for this upgrade isn’t specific, but Apple says the official iOS 7 release will be sometime this fall.

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So you don’t make the same error, here’s a primer on what you should expect from the in-app purchases you make on your Apple devices. First thing to know, there are four types: non-replenishable, replenishable, subscriptions and auto-renewing subscriptions.

Non-replenishable in-app purchases

The most common type of in-app purchase that I have encountered in non-game apps are the non-replenishable kind.This includes purchases that enable features within an application.  Some developers opt to distribute one app for free, then enable more features for a price. These only need to be purchased once and can be transfered to multiple devices, provided they all are authorized with the same iTunes account. This type of in-app purchase will survive a new iPhone purchase and will be there for you when you restore a device from a backup of your OS.

The one drawback is that this in-app purchase category does not transfer between app stores.  If you buy an app on both the iOS and Mac app stores — say, ByWord, like I did — and pay to unlock a new feature on one platform, that in-app purchase will not transfer over to the other platform. I have ByWord on my Mac and on iOS. I just recently noticed that the premium publishing upgrade I paid for in the iOS version on my iPhone, it does not transfer to the OS X version of the app on my Mac the way it did for my iPad.

Replenishable in-app purchases

Then there are the replenishable in-app purchases. These are most commonly found in games and can be purchased multiple times. One popular example is smurfberries, a replenishible in-app purchase that caused some controversy with parents when they first arrived in the App Store via the Smurfs Village game. With this type of item you pay for in a game, you may think that it is a non-replenishible in-app purchase and it would transfer between devices, but you never know for sure. (Smurfberries don’t.) Most of the time you find out when it is too late too: after you have already transfered over to a new device you just bought, or you have already reset the device and restored from a backup.

This happened to me recently when installing Dude Perfect on a second device.  I thought that the in-app purchase that enabled the level editor was the kind of in-app purchase you only have to buy once, so I was shocked to discover after purchasing it first on my iPhone, that I had to pay for it again when I tried to access the feature on my iPad. Not cool, dudes.

One-time subscriptions

There is a similar distinction when it comes to subscriptions purchased through Apple. There are basic subscriptions that expire after a period of time, like purchasing a single issue of a magazine, which is really just a one-month subscription. And then there are auto-renewing subscriptions that keep on going until you cancel them.  I now manage many of my magazine subscriptions via my iTunes account. Individual one-time subscriptions cannot be transfered or synced to another device, whereas auto-renewing subscriptions can. With subscriptions you tend to know ahead of time what you are getting into, though. Especially when it is an auto-renewing subscription.

Auto-renewing subscriptions

The one type of in-app purchase that really stands out from the rest is the auto-renewing subscription. If you are using an iOS device, open the App Store, go to the Featured tab, and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. Tap on the Apple ID button to view your account information. Here you will see a button that will allow you to manage all of the auto-renewing subscriptions that you have already purchased. This is also how you cancel your subscription. You can also access and manage your auto-renewing subscriptions from your Mac by using iTunes. Just choose the Store menu and click on the View My Account menu item.

Keeping track of in-app purchases

Like auto-renewing subscriptions, it would be convenient to see a listing of all of my non-replenishable in-app purchases. Apple already allows me to see my complete purchase history for music, videos, books and apps. Why not add non-replenishable in-app purchases to the list as well? Only then would one be able to truly know what they are getting themselves into when making an in-app purchase.

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“This effort represents the very best example of a public/private partnership,” Rick Richter, who was the president of Simon & Schuster’s children’s division before founding Ruckus, said in a statement. “[It] shows real initiative on the part of CPTV to satisfy the needs of their audience and, importantly, to engage them through their smartphones and tablets.”

As with Ruckus’s existing app, parents can track their children’s reading through the CPTV app and can buy new books through it. Users can also donate to Connecticut Public Television directly through the app. And CPTV is licensing the technology used to build the CPTV-branded app to other public television stations that want to do something similar.

Ruckus hopes to offer this developer service to other content companies that need a way to share their content through an app as well. That’s not limited to children’s content: Rather, Ruckus hopes that the general capabilities of its app — including the digital storefront, in-app purchases, content management system and email engagement — will be useful to lots of content companies. CPTV plans to roll out an app for  general audiences, using Ruckus technology, later this year.

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Originally developed for the Department of Defense, acoustic shockwave bearing estimation was designed to help soldiers locate snipers. The technology takes advantage of the properties associated with gunfire – the initial flash of the muzzle blast and the shockwaves that follow. The supersonic speeds and whizzes of bullets can be tracked with microphones and a really precise clock hooked up to a microprocessor. These sensor nodes communicate with smartphones via Bluetooth; data from a few differently placed sensor nodes are required to triangulate the location of the gunshots.

The sniper location system was built into combat helmets, but the research team has now updated it for smartphones with funding from DARPA. Some nodes are still required, so civilian use may not be practical. But the researchers think security details or police squad cars could make use of the smartphone version.

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Research into optimal keyboard layouts is as old as QWERTY itself, a legacy inherited from 19th century typewriters. Thumb typing with QWERTY is notoriously inefficient on touchscreen tablets and phones. Starting from the basics — how a touchscreen device is held in one’s hands — an international team of researchers drew on user behavioral data and computational models to develop the new layout. The lead investigator, Antti Oulasvirta of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, will officially unveil this research at CHI2013 on May 1.

Theoretically, the model predicts that users should be able to reach 49 words per minute with KALQ, and because the study’s subjects were non-native English speakers, typing speed could conceivably be even better in natives. KALQ was designed so the most commonly used letters are clustered, which means the travel distances are short and both hands work roughly equally and alternately. Most of the vowels are positioned near the space bar and are handled by the right thumb, while the left thumb takes care of most of the consonants and most of the first letters of words. For lefties, the orientation can be reversed, and the key size can even be scaled for different hand sizes.

For KALQ to work, tablets should ideally be gripped horizontally, with the corners cradled in the valley at the base of the thumbs. On a 7-inch tablet (the researchers used the Samsung Galaxy Tab), test subjects had the fastest movements times and best thumb mobility with this configuration, though the grip gave them access to less tablet surface area overall.

Based on this tablet gripping strategy, the researchers used computational techniques to determine the optimal key assignments. Their model of thumb movements was trained on millions of English-language tweets that originated from mobile devices. The end result, KALQ, minimizes movement times, and worked even better when users were trained to move their thumbs simultaneously and anticipate moves by hovering the thumb over the next letter.

Novice tablet users reached typing speeds that eclipsed those achievable with QWERTY after about 10 hours of training, and continued to improve, reaching 37 words per minute. This is the fastest thumb typing speed ever reported, according to Oulasvirta and colleagues, and is 19 percent faster than typing speeds found in previous studies. The end result represents a 34 percent improvement over baseline QWERTY performance in this study’s subjects.

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As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post on the new features, Twitter has given third-party apps the ability to add “deep links” to content inside a tweet, so that — for example — if a user includes a link to a photo from Path or Flickr and someone reading that tweet has the Path app or the Flickr app installed on their device, clicking the link launches that app and takes them directly to the content (a link to a download page for the app can also be included).

Twitter can help with app discovery

The benefits of these new features are clear, as Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures (one of Twitter’s backers) and others have noted. For services like Path, one of the hardest problems is discovery — in other words, letting people know it exists, and also making it easy for users to find interesting content within the app. Twitter’s new Card features provide a potential solution for both of those problems, and since the social network has an active-user base of close to 250 million, it could give some services a substantial boost.

Really excited to integrate the new @twitter cards into @circa. This will be a game changer for app distribution.

—
Matt Galligan (@mg) April 03, 2013

The downside of this approach should also be obvious, however, especially if you notice that among Twitter’s partners for these new features there are names like Path and Flickr, but no Instagram. Why isn’t the largest photo-sharing service included? Because it is owned by Facebook, and Twitter cut off the app’s access to a key feature last year — namely, the ability for users to find Twitter friends who also use the service — and Instagram subsequently removed Card support. The company also cut off Tumblr’s access to the same feature, even though Tumblr was an early partner on the Cards rollout.

This is the fundamental difference between Twitter’s current approach to being a platform and its previous approach. In the early days of the service, up until mid-2011, Twitter seemed happy to be at the center of a more or less open ecosystem — one which allowed virtually anyone to make use of the company’s APIs to display or make use of tweets. Many services and apps (including Instagram) grew by piggy-backing on the network in this way.

Then came what one Twitter investor has called a “holy s*** moment”: Bill Gross — founder of what was then called Uber Media — started buying up Twitter clients (including an attempt to buy Tweetdeck, which Twitter ultimately acquired) and appeared to be preparing to launch his own network, one that would make use of tweets combined with a third-party advertising model.

Twitter’s control is a double-edged sword

These moves by Gross and others posed a clear threat to Twitter’s ability to monetize its growing user base — something that was becoming more and more crucial given the multibillion-dollar market value the company had developed after several rounds of financing. So the company started tightening the screws around its network: restricting access to the API, changing what were display “guidelines” into “requirements,” and generally exerting much more control over who got access to the company’s data.

Such decisions caused a firestorm of controversy in the third-party developer community, with some complaining that Twitter had “killed” their businesses. Now, the company is clearly trying to repair some of that damaged goodwill by offering third-party apps and services preferential access to the network, and features like Card deep links — replacing the open ecosystem approach with one that is more a velvet rope: only official partners allowed.

This approach makes sense for Twitter, since it needs to generate revenue from its network, and presumably intends (or theoretically could) collect fees from partners for the additional features they are getting with Twitter Cards, which can also include music links and other content. And as noted above, it makes sense for apps and services like Path to cut a deal in order to get more reach — but just like building integration into Facebook or Apple or any other controlled ecosystem, developers should be aware this is a double-edged sword.

In other words, such an arrangement will likely look like a win-win so long as Twitter thinks you are beneficial to its network. The minute it sees you as competition, it will suddenly become lose-lose — and whatever you have invested in that ecosystem will vanish.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Ljupo Smokovski and Flickr user Rosauro Ochoa

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On Wednesday, the FT rolled out a new version of its iPad offering that lets readers toggle between a live version of the website and a static view that resembles the morning newspaper. The new “app” also allows readers to clip articles to read later and features a personalized reading history and financial portfolio.

“It’s a much superior second-generation web app based on the latest HMTL5 implementation out there,” said FT.com’s Managing Director, Rob Grimshaw, in a phone interview. He added that it’s only on the iPad for now, but will soon be available on other devices like the iPhone, the Chromebook and Android devices.

While the new version of the web app is nice enough aesthetically (you can see screenshots at right), its real significance remains on a symbolic level. In deciding to bolt Apple altogether last year, the FT took up a vanguard position in the web vs. app debate – standing for the position that improvements in HTML5 means native apps have become unnecessary. Other premium publishers, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have so far resisted the FT’s “all-in on web” approach and continue to design apps specifically for Apple and Android devices, and sell them through app stores. (We’ll be digging into the web vs. app debate with three influential publishers at paidContent Live later this month.)

The FT’s decision to quit the app stores meant it would no longer have to fork out a 30% commission to the likes of Apple, but also raised a risk that readers would fail to find the publisher on smartphones and tablets. Grimshaw says this”discoverability” concern is not an issue for major brands, and that the FT’s tablet traffic has actually risen 70% since leaving iTunes.

“If you are a big brand, why not use that? We don’t need Apple or anyone else to say what the FT is,” said Grimshaw.

He did acknowledge that collecting payments from mobile devices are still a challenge for publishers; unlike iTunes, which already has a user’s credit card on file, the web doesn’t offer a quick and easy way for people to pay. Grimshaw added, though, that a solution is coming soon.

“Players like Amazon are opening their payment plan more,” he said. “There’s Amazon, PayPal and one or two others. It’s problem that’s about to get solved.”

For now, Grimshaw says that 15-20 percent of new digital subscriptions are coming via a mobile device and that he expects that number to rise. Like its sister publication, The Economist, the FT has unbundled digital access from its print subscriptions and is offering a variety of price points: a premium online subscription is $8.49 a week while a standard one is $6.25 (Grimshaw says a third of subscribers buy premium); a print and digital subscription is $11.49 while print-only is $7.25.

The FT has become something of a poster child for the idea that news that a bright future in the digital era. It recently announced that it had “crossed over” with its audience, amassing more digital subscribers than print ones. But, as we’ve noted before, the Financial Times‘ distinct audience and product make it more of an outlier than a model that lots of other news publications can replicate.

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For skeptics, apps amount to a temporary — and increasingly unnecessary — technology. But this is hardly the only view. Many in the publishing
community still thinks apps will deliver on their initial potential to provide deep reader engagement and handsome ad revenues. Now, with the arrival of more tablets and smartphones than ever, the debate over apps becomes more acute: should publishers turn away and rely solely on HTML5 or instead double down on these new app opportunities?

These are some of the questions we’ll explore during “Are Apps or the Web the Future of Mobile Content?” one of many discussions that will take place during paidContent Live on April 17 in New York City. Our guests include Jason Pontin of MIT Technology Review, whose widely read 2012 essay made him a leading voice in the counter-revolution against app idealism. He will be joined by ESPN’s Ryan Spoon and Nick Alt of Vimeo – two mobile experts who offer other alternative app narratives.

Here are more of the topics we’lll be exploring during the panel (feel free to propose more in the comments below):

• Is the payoff worth the cost?: Apps are nice in theory but they cost a pretty penny to build and maintain – especially as the number of platforms grows. Is the return worth it? Or should publishers plow that money into other parts of their editorial operation?

• Platform proliferation: The initial promise of apps appeared brightest on Apple’s iPad. But now dozens of tablets, from the Galaxy to the Kindle Fire, are emerging – and consumers are finally picking them up. Do all these new screens present a new opportunity? Or another reason to escape apps once and for all?

• Nice app, where do I find it? Those who want to wash their hands of apps are faced with a powerful counter-argument: You need to be where your readers are. As the mobile market grows, are the app skeptics confident their readers will find them on the mobile web?

• Does sub-compact change the app game? The arrival of so-called sub-compact publishing offers a way to create light-weight and relatively inexpensive apps. Examples like Marco Arment’s The Magazine and The Awl also show how these new species of apps can deliver both a beautiful reading experience and an ongoing stream of subscription revenue. Do these offer an opportunity that the mobile web cannot?

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