The App Store breaks records, Rovio experiments with genres, 9GAG takes on games - and other news of the week for a mobile developer

Apple App Store Records: Half a Billion Dollars in the First Week of the Year

In the first week of January , 2 new records from Apple were set . During this period, users spent about half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases on the App Store. And on the first day of 2015, record daily revenue was reached in the history of the App Store.

These achievements followed the record year of 2014, during which the turnover on the accounts grew by 50 percent, and the developers' revenue from the sale of applications exceeded $ 10 billion.
')
To date, the total developer income from the sale of applications is $ 25 billion.

Considering the growth dynamics of the main mobile stores, next year only Apple itself can beat this record.

We meet the new prices in the Russian App Store

Apple has changed prices in a number of countries, including Russia. More specifically, they made rounding to "beautiful numbers", and prices are now calculated at an average rate of 59 rubles. On average, we can talk about a slight decrease in prices as a result of such rounding. Alternative prices also appeared: 69, 129, 199, 249 and 299 rubles.

Apple ordered to return money to Europeans

Now a user without any questions or comments can cancel his purchase of music, books or applications and get money back, but at the same time save this content on his device. Apple can only delete content from the account history, that is, download it from another device or download it again.

The company cannot ban people from using this content, and all this is due to a new European Community directive. Probably, the problem will be solved in the next iOS updates.

Google also sticks to the letter of the law. So, the movie and music subscription can be returned within two weeks, books and purchased music - within seven days, and applications - only within two hours from the moment of purchase.

Google Play banned the use of user comments

Google updated the Play Store guidelines, adding a new rule stating that user reviews should not be included in the description of the application. The bottom line is that unscrupulous developers add reviews to the description, which contain the names of competitors' applications. Item added to the section "Abuse of keywords."

Rumors about the iPhone 6s Mini

Apple Insider is sharing information that this year iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus and iPhone 6s Mini with a 4-inch screen may be presented to us!

Yes, Apple has shown that it can adequately compete among the flagship "spades", but immediately remembered the audience, which is not so happy with the screens, which "step over" all reasonable limits, and appreciate this new product. It remains to hope that the price of the Mini will be less than a simple 6-ki, but will not yield to him in the gland.

Seriously! 9GAG now makes games

The most popular entertainment portal decided to come to grips with igproizvodstvom. The first project was the Redhead Redemption game released jointly with the Touchten Games studio, a remake of the pretty popular Cute Kill.

Ray Chan, co-founder of 9GAG, claims that it was wiser to rebrand the finished game than to create a new one from scratch. To get Red Killer Redemption from Cute Kill, she was provided with additional weapons, new levels and Gaggy NPC cat, focusing more on gameplay and sociality than on memes, which are popular among 9GAG visitors.

As of January 13, 2015, the android version of the game already has a rating of 4.6 and more than half a million downloads. In January, waiting for release on the iPhone!

Rovio continues to look for himself

Despite the abundance of games released, Rovio is still the company of one game. And, apparently, this does not suit them, experiments with new genres are continuing .

The basis of the new game taken the usual confrontation between birds and pigs. Bubble game: we explode balls of the same color, trying to get to the shelter of pigs. Simple and straightforward. Decorated in the best traditions of games with an abundance of levels - the map on which we are advancing, competing with friends.

The performance is excellent, the game is tactilely pleasant, but time will show whether it will have commercial success. It is worthwhile to clarify, we are talking about “commercial success” in the scale of Rovio. Obviously, with so much traffic that Rovio has, the game will pay off, and within the indie studio it would be an undoubted success.
We collect popcorn and look at the development of events!


************************************************** ************************************************** *****************************************
If you liked the material and you had time to evaluate the professionalism of the authors of this blog - there is an opportunity to join them. The KamaGames Studio website has a list of vacancies and information about our company. Let's do mobile games together!