Apple, in partnership with the Press Association, have decided to publish charts on a weekly basis showing the most popular free and paid for apps for the iPad and the iPhone in the UK.
These charts will be created using information from the British App Store based on downloads over the previous seven days. Each chart will take the form of a top 10 and will give the full name of each app that have been downloaded the most over the past week.
The very first set of these charts were published for the week that ended 20th November and showed that people are still interested in paid for apps as well as those that are free to download.
These charts saw the paid for iPhone app Amazing Breaker by Dekovir Inc top that particular chart. Ming Liang Chien’s Hardest Game Ever topped the free iPhone chart, Apple’s own Pages topped the paid iPad chart and the free iPad app that topped the free chart was BskyB’s Sky Movies.
However there were no figures to show how many times each app had been downloaded.
iPad App Trends
There are two main trends that seem to stand out from these figures – one is that Apple are still making money on their own internally developed apps. 4 out of the top 10 in the paid iPad apps have been created and developed by Apple which is an impressive figure.
The second trend is that more and more people in the UK want apps that allow them to watch TV. In fact the chart for the top ten free iPad apps shows that the ITV Player app, the Demand 5 app and 4oD Catch Up apps are all in demand.
More Publicity for the App Store
Many people, such as developers were wondering why Apple were creating these charts as anyone can access them on the App Store and in much more detail. However these charts are only reflective of the past few hours and not available for the past week.
The reason for Apple releasing these charts could be due to the fact that when the media picked up on charts like this it helps to cement and enhance the reputation of a store such as the App Store. Clearly this is something that Apple are interested in and their move to publish their charts could see Research in Motion (BlackBerry) and Android (Google) and Microsoft (Windows Phone) following suit in the future.
