top charts

The new Apple TV has been available for three days now, with response to the product generally strong with seemingly good sales, based off some talks with Apple Store employees. A big part of the appeal of Apple TV is the tvOS App Store. What you see above is Apple’s press image for the store: in reality the Top Charts and Categories are currently unaccessible. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has worked around this by accessing the web chart data directly, by spoofing the Apple TV headers when making the request. He has posted the Apple TV US Top Paid, Top Free and Top Grossing charts as of yesterday. There’s some interesting trends in the data ….

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeZhnEHOMzY]

What happens when your app gets featured on ABC’s Shark Tank, the TV show where rich investors listen to pitches from wannabe entrepreneurs looking to raise funds? For app developers Egos Ventures it means shooting up hundreds of spots on the App Store charts to become the top paid app in the store overnight. The developers behind the hands-free panorama app called Cycloramic were able to capture a $500k investment from two of the Sharks on last night’s episode. We spoke to the developer who appeared on the show last night, Bruno Francois, to find out a little about the experience and get some stats on downloads following the investment.
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According to a new report from research firm Fiksu, which regularly tracks changes to App Store charts, Apple might be experimenting with new algorithms for iTunes and App Store rankings that incorporate user ratings. Apple previously only used the number of downloads and how fast an app was being downloaded in order to rank apps for its top charts, but Fisku thinks it has recently started incorporating user rankings:

In late July, we first began to notice apps unexpectedly shifting position without a corresponding increase or decrease in downloads. Upon closer inspection, we discovered these position changes correlated with the apps’ ratings. As evidenced by the graph below, apps with ratings of 4 or more stars received a rank boost in late July and have maintained that rank throughout August. Poorly rated apps with less than 3 stars received the opposite treatment about two weeks later, dropping off precipitously in rank and staying that way. Average rated apps, between 3 and 4 stars, suffered a slight degradation in rank but have generally been less affected.

The report also notes that, in recent weeks, Apple appears to be updating App Store charts every three hours opposed to the 15 minute intervals it was using previously. Fisku speculates that the increase could be to help prevent manipulation of the app charts, noting that “three hours allows enough time to identify anomalies and remove apps before they suddenly appear at the top of the rankings.” 
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