Jeff Grossman

This post is mostly a rebuttal to this one.

Even though there are tons of rumors surrounding it, the iPhone nano does not make sense.  The biggest arguments for an iPhone nano are that the current iPhone is too expensive and too big.  Let me address both of those arguments:

The expensive part of the iPhone (by far) is the contract, not the cost of the device.  The iPhone plans start at $70/month, and that is for only 450 anytime minutes and no text messages.  My guess is most people at least add a minimal texting plan.  But even on the low end, at $70/month, the contract costs $1,680 over its 2 year life.

That also does not consider the huge taxes and fees that are placed on cell phone bills, which can raise  the cost to over $1,848 even at a conservative 10% tax (I believe the tax for me in NY is somewhere between 15-20%).  Does a $199 or $299 iPhone really sound expensive next to a $1,848 contract?  Especially if you came from a $30/month regular cell phone plan because there was no required $30/month data plan.  Does saving the $100 on the device to get a $99 iPhone nano really save you that much money (no — you save less than 5% over the course of 2 years).

If Apple could somehow convince AT&T to sell an iPhone nano with a $40/month contract, then my entire response changes completely.  However, I do not see this happening (but it would be great if I was wrong).

What about the argument that the iPhone is too big?  I personally think the iPhone is a great size, but that was until I compared it to the 2nd generation iPod touch.  I still think the height and width is wonderful, but I feel the iPhone would be even better if it was thinner (which will happen over time).  However, an iPhone nano is not just going to be a thinner iPhone (that would be the 3rd generation iPhone).  An iPhone nano would have to be smaller in either the height or width of the device (or both).  This leaves two choices for the screen resolution: increase pixel density to keep the same 320×480 resolution in a smaller screen, or reduce the screen resolution.  Both are possibilities, but the former makes lots of buttons on the screen too small (typing would be made even harder if the keys were smaller), and the latter will break almost all applications in the App Store (although the non-game applications would probably be able to have their code modified to work with different resolutions in just a few hours).

If anyone has thought out reasons for why an iPhone nano makes sense, please let me know.  Just realize a thought out response would need to include the design decisions Apple would have to make (screen size, screen resolution, what features are added and missing from the iPhone, etc).

As a followup to yesterday’s post with some initial download numbers for Currency, I thought I could share some more numbers that people may find interesting.

Above is a chart of all of the downloads of the application by region for the month of November (the 10.2% section represents the 32 countries/regions that separately are each less than 1% of users).  Obviously the largest number of installs (about 1/3) come from the United States, but it should also be noted that some international users have US iTunes Store accounts instead of accounts in their own region (either because accounts in their region is not available, or more likely, so they can purchase US content not available in their local stores).

To get a better understanding of the locations of my users, I can look at my statistics from Pinch Media.  Pinch reports that only 25.3% of my users reside in the US, and 10.2%, 8.3%, and 7.2% reside in the UK, Japan, and Australia, respectively.  Apple reports 32.3% (US), 7.5% (UK), 8.8% (Japan), and 8.0% (Australia).  There is a considerable difference between the numbers for US users, and a smaller, but still noticeable difference for countries with fewer users.

Another statistic (courtesy of the stats provided by Pinch) is that 83% of my users (so far in the month of December) are using an iPhone, while only 17% use an iPod touch (and 75.7% of iPod touch users are using OS 2.2, while 24.3% use either OS 2.1 or OS 2.0 — my guess is that it is either for jailbreak reasons or they do not know that there is an OS update, probably because they do not receive the text message from AT&T that iPhone users do).  I find this number a little bit surprising, as I would have thought Apple would have sold more iPod touches than these numbers imply (it’s possible that my application does not provide a good enough random sample, and if anyone else with a popular application has more data to contribute, please let me know).

Something that was just pointed out to me while I was writing this article is that iPod touch users are probably less inclined to have a currency converter application and much more likely to have games (since the iPod touch is more or less solely an entertainment device, and the iPhone is an entertainment device, but is also a communicator and potential business device as well).  It would be great if a game developer with access to device statistics would be willing to share their numbers.

I have some more ideas for posts that I can make in the future (in addition to the ideas that I posted yesterday).  Be sure to check back (or better subscribe to the RSS feed and follow me @jeffrey903 on twitter).

I’m going to share the download numbers for Currency for the past 13 weeks (well, for the US, UK, Japan, and Australia — there are too many regions to fit on one chart).  This chart is also only for new downloads, not updates.

Unfortunately, Currency has not been in the top 100 free apps in the US app store for quite some time (I’m actually not sure when it fell out), so I do not have data to compare it against to to see how the download numbers change in regards to position in the app store (I may have that data for another app that I develop, but since I am not the owner, I cannot share that information at this time).

(The 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 stars represent the releases of the respective updates of the application).  You can clearly see a bump in installs after the 1.2 release, but not after the 1.3 or 1.4 releases.  I assume that sometime in between those releases Apple stopped bumping up apps in the lists for releasing updates (as a result of some developers releasing updates that didn’t really do anything just so they could keep getting that bump).

Obviously the US has the largest number of downloads (although the app is available in all markets and all 18 languages that the iPhone supports).  However, I am a little surprised at the fluctuation between the downloads for the UK, Japan, and Australia.  I would have guessed that one market would have been on top (and my guess would have been the UK — turns out I was wrong for 10 of the past 13 weeks).  If anyone has been keeping track of international app store top 100 rankings, please send the data my way so I can make additional comparisons.

Even though I just completed a statistics & probability course, I’m not really sure what to make of these numbers, other than just to read them for how they are (to be fair to me, the course was mostly about probability and random variables, not statistics).  I’m not too surprised that my numbers have declined in past 13 weeks (although they seem to be a bit on the rise now).  I’m hoping that lots of people get new an iPhone or iPod touch for Christmas/Hanukkah and that will increase the installs of all of the 10,000+ applications on the App Store.

If you have any more requests for download numbers, I am fairly willing to share them, so just post a comment or @jeffrey903 me on Twitter.

Also, some potential ideas for future blog posts:

• The potential “holiday bump” (unfortunately iTunes Connect will be closed from 12/24 until 12/28, so that post will probably come closer to New Year’s or MacWorld)
• Free with Advertising vs. Paid without Advertising (or both) debate (and why I decided to only do free with advertising)
• Getting Apple to promote your app (for some reason Apple likes Currency, and I don’t have to do anything to get them to include the icon in their retail store windows, iPhone Your Life, or other website pages, but I deeply appreciate it)
• Some little iPhone development tricks (how I do the rounded corner, alternating background UITableView that Stocks also uses)
• Info about Currency 1.5 (probably coming early 2009, since I still have a little bit left to do and then Apple will be closing up shop soon until 2009 anyway)
• Anything else that gets suggested and I find interesting

This is probably my fourth blog or so.  The problem is that I never get past about 2 posts.  However, I’m going to try to really make this blog work this time.

I am the developer of two iPhone applications: Movies (by Flixster) and Currency.  Both are free, so be sure to check them out.

I anticipate that most of my posts will be about developing iPhone applications – what I currently am working on, ideas for future applications, and hopefully some interesting download statistics (which people may enjoy considering Movies is currently a top 25 app — however, as per my contract with Flixster, I am  not allowed to share these statistics without their permission).