Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google announced that it had hit 48B downloads of apps on the Google Play Store. During the same keynote, the counter on Apple’s site ticked over to 50B App Store downloads.

But there has been some question about how exactly the two companies tabulate their numbers.

Let’s just skip over the coincidence of announcements for the moment and take a closer look at what those companies actually mean when they announce however many billions of apps downloaded.

A couple of days ago, a great post by Benedict Evans charted the momentum of both the Google Play and App Store markets. He used the figures publicly released by both Apple and Google to see how the relative rates of the stores compare.

Here’s the chart comparing the downloads so far:

But Evans also noted that he wasn’t sure how Google counted those downloads, so he wasn’t sure if they were comparable to Apple’s unique downloads.

So we reached out to both Apple and Google on the matter and you can consider this the canonical answer to that question.

Both Apple and Google tabulate unique downloads of apps per user account. This means that they count only one download of an app no matter how many devices that you install that app on after you purchase it. Neither company counts updates in its app download numbers. These are purely single downloads from their stores.

Pre-installed apps

Both companies told me that they do not count pre-installed apps among their numbers.

Many Android devices come with apps pre-installed that can also be downloaded via the Google Play store, but those do not count towards Play Store downloads. Only apps downloaded from the Play Store with a user account are counted.

Apple’s situation is a bit different as the stock apps of iOS devices are not downloadable from the App Store. Other apps like iBooks, or suite items like Pages, Numbers or iPhoto do count as unique downloads because downloading them is an optional choice made by a user. Apple began promoting a set of ‘free’ Apple apps on the first launch of its App Store for new users beginning with iOS 6. All of those would be counted.

Google says that it is currently seeing download rates of approximately 2.5B downloads a month.

Of note, Apple says that the 50 billionth app downloaded was an offering from net savvy rock band OK Go.

iTunes has received a small yet noteworthy update in the form of version 11.0.3 on both the Mac and PC, featuring a new MiniPlayer, the ability to view album art while in the Songs view, and a condensed view of multi-disc albums for those that still use CDs.

Apple shares that the new MiniPlayer includes a “beautiful new view” which displays the album artwork related to whatever song you’re playing. The MiniPlayer also now includes a song progress bar.

In addition to the above updates, Apple details that this version offers “performance improvements when searching and sorting large iTunes libraries” — surely a welcome change.

For the full change-log, look no further than below.

Top Image Credit: Lindsey Turner

Apple on Wednesday passed the 50 billion App Store download mark, according to the countdown marker on its site. As per tradition, the company is celebrating the milestone with multiple prizes, including a $10,000 gift card awarded to the customer who downloaded the 50 billionth and 50 more $500 gift cards to the next few individuals.

Apple last reported that it had hit 40 billion downloads in January of this year. That means the company saw some 10 billion downloads in just over four months, or about 78.1 million per day.

At that rate, it will see 70 billion app downloads before the end of 2013, meaning it will have added 30 billion this year alone. Given that the number of downloads is accelerating, however, we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple held a second countdown, for the 75 billion mark, in time for the holiday season this year.

Apple held a similar countdown in March 2012, when it hit 25 billion downloads. It’s fair to say that in 2014, Apple will be celebrating a 12-digit figure.

Yet Apple may not be the first to get there. Google also today shared its own figures for Google Play app downloads, and the company is gaining on Apple’s App Store: 48 billion downloaded so far, at a rate of 2.5 billion app installs per month.

Given that Google Play showed up on the scene long after the App Store, and assuming it is still growing faster than its main competitor, number one and number two will soon swap spots. In fact, it’s likely this will happen before 2014, and may even occur before the fall’s iPhone update.

Top Image Credit: Phil Aaronson / Flickr

Today two interesting, if not defining financial milestones were achieved by technology giants Google and Apple. Apple fell under the $400 billion dollar mark in normal trading hours, and Google passed the $300 billion notch [Data: Google Finance].

The two shifts over big-number-moments comes during the day in which Google held its I/O event keynote, that covered a great many of its product categories. The markets sent Google up, and Apple down. Other market cohorts such as Microsoft had moderate days, with that firm rising 0.8% in normal trading.

Apple, once by far the most valuable technology company, has fallen sharply from former highs. Its 52 week high is $705. The stock current trades at $424. That decline came over the course of the last nine months.

Though the two firm’s valuations are narrowing, that doesn’t meant that Google’s earnings are set to overtake Apple’s. Apple trades at a valuation that is roughly a third higher of Google’s, and its PE ratio is just 37% as large. So, for every dollar of profit, Google is valued more richly; this indicates that the market expects Google to grow more quickly.

After a record string of quarters that became year’s, Apple’s revenue for the most recent quarter declined on a year-over-year basis. The slowing growth of the firm has knocked nine-figures off of its valuation.

Google had a good day today, not just in the market, but also at its own developer conference. Applause was strong throughout, and the demonstrated tech was impressive.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is going on perhaps one of the most expensive coffee runs ever. His CharityBuzz auction has just ended and the winning bid was $610,000. To put that into perspective, the auction said the value was estimated at $50,000. It’s not immediately known who the winner is.

The auction just closed and the last bid was $610,000, although if you go to the CharityBuzz page, it has removed the amount bit and just marks the auction as “closed”. There were 86 bids placed.

Last April, Cook participated in a charity auction to help raise funds for the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights. Bidders were competing for a chance to have coffee with Cook for up to an hour and is able to bring a companion.

Within hours after the auction went live on April 24, it quickly skyrocketed from a starting point of $50,000 to $110,000. It’s not that hard to believe that several weeks later, it wound up exceeding $600,000.

CharityBuzz, which operates primarily out of New York City, has hosted numerous auctions to help raise money for non-profits and those organizations seeking to do good. It has other one-on-one meetings with notable individuals like John McEnroe, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, designer Tim Gunn, and Henry Winkler.

More to follow.

Photo credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer the most secure browser available? It depends who you ask. The latest study published by security research firm NSS Labs says that indeed Microsoft bests Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Opera when it comes to blocking malware downloads.

NSS tested Microsoft’s IE10, Google’s Chrome 25 and 26, Mozilla Firefox 19, Apple’s Safari 5, and Opera 12 to see which of the big five are best at protecting users against socially engineered malware. The reason two versions of Google’s browser were tested is likely because it was updated during the testing period.

The firm conducted the study over a period of 28 days between March 13, 2013 and April 9, 2013. Each browser was tested with all available updates installed on identical virtual machines running Windows 8, and NSS Labs warns that the same conclusions cannot be made for a Windows 7 machine without performing the same tests.

754 active and malicious URLs were used to perform 550 test runs by the five browsers resulting in over 18,000 test cases per browser. Testing was repeated every six hours until the target URL was no longer active. NSS Labs says it removed samples that did not pass the validation criteria, including false positives and adware. Ultimately, only 913 URL test cases passed the post-validation process, and the company says each sample payload was validated internally.

Here are the results:

As you can see, IE10 dominated the other browsers with a block rate of 99.96 percent. Google Chrome’s malware download protection improved significantly, rising from 70 percent in NSS Labs’ October 2012 comparative test to more than 83 percent. Rounding out the top five were Safari, Firefox and Opera with overall block rates of 10.16 percent, 9.92 percent, and 1.87 percent respectively.

“Both Google’s Download Protection and Microsoft’s App Rep allow users to override browser protecting, however, Google relies on this less reliable protection mechanism nearly four times as often as does Microsoft,” Randy Abrams, Research Director at NSS Labs, said in a statement. “The net result is that IE 10 users are offered superior protection over Chrome users with one quarter the risk of making a bad download decision. Firefox, Safari, and Opera users are afforded little protection at all by their browsers.”

For more information, you can check out the full 18-page report for yourself: Browser Security Comparative Analysis – Socially Engineered Malware Blocking 2013 (PDF).

See also – IE10 doubles market share thanks to Windows 7 debut, pushing IE9 below 20% as Firefox gains and Chrome loses

Top Image credit: George Crux

Facebook on Monday updated its native iOS app with new photo viewer options, improvements to Places and Events on the iPhone, as well as the new News Feed. You can grab the latest version now from Apple’s App Store.

When viewing a photo, you can now directly save and share it (previously you could only Like, comment on, or tag friends in it). You can also now directly set a photo as your profile picture, though you’ll probably (and hopefully) be using this option a little less frequently than the others.

The next two updates are specifically for the iPhone. Facebook says it has improved Places editing when you’re checking in on Apple’s flagship device and improved the load times for Events. The former will only be useful for those who check in often but faster Events is likely a much-wanted improvement for all.

The full Facebook 6.1 for iOS changelog is as follows:

• Photo viewer button lets you save, share or make profile picture.
• Improved places editing when checking in on iPhone.
• Events load faster on iPhone.

Interestingly, iOS users are reporting that this Facebook update has a beta-like icon. Furthermore, those who have downloaded the latest version of the app are seeing the new News Feed. Given that this isn’t in the changelog, we think the two may be related.

Either way, we have confirmed that both are showing up for us on the iPhone and the iPad.

Here’s the beta icon:

Here’s the new News Feed:

We have contacted Facebook for more information. We will update this article if we hear back.

Update: Facebook pushed out another update to remove the beta icon.

Top Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

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Daft Punk’s highly anticipated new release Random Access Memory is now streaming live on iTunes. I’ve only been listening for a few minutes and it’s already fantastic. Apple has been live streaming albums from a variety of artist for a couple of years now on big releases.

The streaming offering, which is accessible only from the artist page, not the album page, comes just as a leaked copy of the album (not linking!) hit the Web in the early hours of the morning. The stream is available via iTunes on a computer or iPad and is being offered to everyone, even those who haven’t pre-ordered.

You can fast-forward and rewind the stream, but it’s presented as a full 1 hour 14 minute track, rather than separate items.

Thanks to Federico Viticci for noticing the stream. Note: if you don’t see the ‘listen for free’ option, click on the artists name at the top to get to the artist overview page.

Obviously, offering a stream of the album on a day when it leaks is one way to perhaps counter illegal downloads and drive traffic to pre-orders instead.

Daft Punk on iTunes

“I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium.” – Federico Fellini

As Apple’s App Store nears its five year anniversary, a new kind of storyteller is rising in importance: The App Director. This isn’t an official title, but it’s definitely a state of mind and an important trend to take note of as we enter the app ecosystem’s pupae stage.

Apple’s App Store has been around for almost 5 years. In that time, we’ve seen some pretty incredible breakout work from both indie developers and from big companies.

But being a breakout hit on the App Store is getting harder as the store fills with more polished content. An ‘oversight’ role, with input in design, functionality and even some dips into code is becoming more prominent and I think more important. As projects increase in maturity, complexity and profile, it seems that having a person with design and functionality sensibilities who can take on a higher vantage point will lead to more success.

I’ve been talking to a lot of folks about the idea of an ‘App Director’ role and its prominence in successful studios and projects. The concept is bigger than that of a project manager, who’s really about assigning tasks, but it’s also not the indie app developer and designer who’s doing it all themselves. I think of the App Director as more of an auteur because they’re realizing a vision like the director of a film. They may not wield the camera or the sound boom, but they’re still making their vision real.

An App Director may have the technical knowledge or even raw talent to do both design and coding work, but they might not necessarily do either.

This isn’t to diminish those with coding/design/business savvy that work on small 1-2 person teams, but I think that those projects will exist alongside bigger ideas that need a producer or director to make them work.

I’ve been talking to some people who I think are in those roles and some who are crafting a new breed of tool that could be uniquely useful to these kinds of ‘directors’ in helping them to realize their vision.

Explain yourself

Chris Harris is the Head of Mobile at the OTHER media, a UK design and development house. Among other things, they’re responsible for Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe, which was recently featured in an Apple iPad ad and won numerous multimedia awards and the Times Atlas, one of Apple’s best apps of 2012.

Harris says that it’s not always easy explaining exactly what it is he does.

“Whenever someone asks me what I do, I use the line: ‘I’m an App Director. It’s like a Film Director, but for Apps’,” he says. “It’s a little contrived, but in a world full of computer jargon and strange buzz words I’ve never once had to re-explain my role.”

The title of an ‘App Director’ does more than just make it easier to answer awkward questions though. Harris says that it also helps him to establish his role as a peer when dealing with clients. Despite the term used for clients, Harris still says that he prefers to think of the role as somewhat more of a producer than a director.

“I have to deal with incredibly complex corporate politics, feature request lists and strong personalities. You tend to need all the help you can get,” he says.

Defining your role as a director taps into a long tradition of film and television, helping to quickly communicate that you’re not a silent partner in the app design game, you’re also someone with a vision that you’ll execute using the tools you have. In the case of apps that can be equally talented programmers and designers working with you. But the overall vision is one that a director is going to execute according to their own tastes.

“I can only speak for myself,” says Harris, “but I really feel that what I do is art. There are many ways to solve interface design problems but, like a film director, an App director will have a particular style that you seek out and employ them for.

“I think that the role of an auteur presiding over app productions on which entire companies could stand or fall is entirely possible. The film industry has, by a process of over 100 years of evolution, arrived at a stable and somewhat repeatable method of creative delivery. I see no reason why our industry should arrive at anything different.”

Impending’s Phill Ryu sees the increased App Store competition as incentive to pool resources, rather than to attack code and design single-handedly. He believes that the stakes on the App Store and the sheer number of apps is going to lend strength to projects that have a strong vision and leadership role. Smaller teams may end up seeing more value in specialization and less in ‘soup-to-nuts’ beginning to end development by a single developer.

“In a very zoomed out way perhaps it’s smaller teams and indies starting to value more specialization and less “I’m going to do it all including the app icon,” he says. “Also the stakes have raised in the app store and the competition is brutal, so there’s probably some element of survival strategy in banding together versus everyone doing their own indie auteur project.”

The role is no easier to define for Ryu, even after involvement in a string of high-profile apps like The Heist and to-do app Clear. ”The position is kind of intangible and much harder to clearly describe than bringing on ‘x’ designer or whatever, and there’s some mistrust there,” he says.

And as the concept of the App Director has risen in popularity, so has the market for tools that help these directors to communicate in the proper languages for designers and coders.

Tools for a director

“It’s difficult using the current set of tools for 3D OpenGL projects since they predominantly deal with two dimensional screen based designs,” says Harris.

“I find that Paper by 53 is especially good at conveying a story board or conceptual design to a client. This, when combined with the Adonit Jot Pro stylus can get you some really professional looking results.”

Paper is great, especially for those directors who may already have some design taken, or at least the ability to render those designs well on an iPad. But there has also been a move towards bespoke tools for rapid prototyping, like the iPhone app POP.

We’ve covered POP before, and found it to be a brilliant execution on the RP model for app mockups. Sketch an idea on paper and shoot an image, and you’re presented with an image that you can add actions to and link to other images in your app’s flow. Hooking several images together can help you to whip together a somewhat crude but ‘live’ model for an app.

But what happens as the needs of a director get more complex and refined? How do you convey a vision with precision and specificity? That’s the question MartianCraft’s Rob Rhyne asked himself in 2009, when a group of potential investors and they wanted a tech demo.

“In 2009 I had a bunch of ideas, but I couldn’t get them going, so I used my programmer’s brain to build something to more easily demonstrate the idea of what I wanted to do,” says Rhyne. That was the genesis of Briefs 2, a Mac app and its Briefscase iOS viewer that is allowing people outside of the design field to create interactive ‘briefs’ or mockups. Those mockups can then be distributed to anyone using the free Briefscase.

Rhyne gave a talk at C4 about a framework that allowed people to script out an app mockup in a text file and ‘compile’ it on iOS. When he had trouble getting the app approved by Apple, he set it aside for two years. It wasn’t until WWDC last year when Rhyne ‘assigned’ the project to his own company MartianCraft, which he runs with Jeff LaMarche.

“It’s the easiest business paperwork I ever had to sign,” jokes Rhyne.

An Apple evangelist told Rhyne at the time that if it was ‘more like a document’ that was created by a Mac editor, then there was a good chance it would make it through.

In the end, the delay and the rejection made the app better, and Rhyne says that Apple was not only communicative but also helped them iron out some serious bugs once Briefs 2 was born. And it also made it a better app for its intended audience. “Designers are visual people, and I was building a framework for designers that required them to code,” says Rhyne.

“I really want to target Briefs not just at the pro designer, but also had the visionaries who have ideas, but not time for code or even design. it’s made for designers, but also for the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s really trying to facilitate communication between designers and developers, or, in another sense, anyone that has an idea.”

Briefs is a tool that lets someone with an idea mock them up and refine them over time. Starting with something that’s very ‘sketch-like’ in nature, but grows in polish and will even accommodate production-level artwork as the design gets finalized. Though Rhyne is a coder, he says that his role is significantly different these days.

“I feel like an impostor is some ways because I know the technical and design details,” he says, “but I’m not actually the one doing the “work”. After working on the videos we did for our app release, the idea of a “director” rang true for me…in a way, I’ve built a tool for myself, but also in a meta sense, it was my ‘direction’ that brought Briefs to fruition.”

App Directors and the App Store

At this point, the title of App Director isn’t formalized in many circles, but it’s beginning to be. I’ve been talking with developers, designers and others in the field and they’re getting more comfortable with the idea of being an ‘impresario’. In some ways this is still an evolution of a ‘project manager’, but it’s been fused with the idea of an independent developer without any mothership to answer to.

But it’s also more than that. The expectations of the App Store and its clientele are higher than ever. Great design, crisp code and a brilliant idea well executed are all needed to even hand in your ticket at the door to the game.

“I read this thing recently about how cultures that have gone through hard times tend to have much more ‘respecting the elders’ and supporting the extended family built in.” Ryu told me. “Basically when times are tough everything optimizes towards banding together and pooling resources, and giving up your selfish pursuits for the group’s survival.”

“There’s no safety net, or sense of idyllic play, like the early days of the app store and indies with big hits left and right,” he says.”Basically winter is coming… and I don’t even watch Game of Thrones.”

He apologizes for rambling but I feel that’s fairly astute. Even those outside of the development game are seeing that successes are coming harder for smaller apps. Yes, there will still be those crazy breakout hits from sole artists.

But it’s seeming increasingly likely that the best stuff on the App Store will be coming from storytellers, using the app as a medium.

Image Credit: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/Getty Images

The China Association of Consumer Protection Law, a subsidiary China Law Society, has accused Apple of tax evasion, intellectual property violations, and distribution of pornographic content in China.

According to a piece published in China’s The Mirror (hat tip Bill Bishop), the government-affiliated research group held a meeting yesterday that revealed findings from an investigation into possible illegal activities conducted by the California-based firm. At the meeting, it was announced that there was reason to suspect Apple had violated Chinese law by failing to pay legally-stipulated tariffs on software sold to Chinese consumers through the App Store.

Leaders of the research group argued that in China, apps are classified as “goods,” the same category as the hardware that Apple ships regularly from California to China, and that is subsequently subjected to inspections and tariffs upon its arrival. But since apps sold in the app store are distributed through the Internet, by not paying tariffs on said apps, Apple is in essence practicing tax evasion.

The group went on to argue that since Apple isn’t paying tariffs on the apps, it is, by default, pocketing money that ought be designated for tariffs, and therefore, by extension, is smuggling goods into China.

The group referred to Article 54 of Customs Law of the People’s Republic of China, which states that tariffs imposed on goods entering the country ought to be paid by the parties responsible for importing them, to support its point.

Following the accusation of tax evasion, the association went on to argue that Apple had also unlawfully sold and distributed reading materials, mentioning two major cases from last year that were only “the tip of the iceberg” (translation mine). And to round out the meeting, it also accused apple of selling pornographic content – a notable move, as online porn is officially banned in China (though this has been difficult to enforce, as one might expect).

I’m not a lawyer and have no knowledge of how taxes might be imposed on app purchases in the App Store. However, it would seem to me that the App Store operates more as a platform through which developers can sell their goods, rather than a distributor or an importer. Regardless, the deliberate and rather crude comparison to smuggling is a indicator that while these accusations appear to be about tariffs, they are really about politics.

This round of accusations is but the most recent in a string of unusual, state-sanctioned strikes at Apple. Early last month, the company pulled a bookstore app from the country’s App Store. Many were quick to point out that the software contained literature banned by Chinese authorities, and the removal thus signified Apple’s capitulation towards China and its censorship policies. Meanwhile, at the start of 2013, Apple found itself at the center of a controversy surrounding mishandling of warrantees in China’s retail Apple Stores. The resulting frenzy on television and Sina Weibo, blatantly carried out by the state media, led Tim Cook to issue an open letter of apology to Chinese consumers.

The motivations behind China’s mounting pressures on Apple remain unclear. Some have suggested that the Chinese government is bullying Apple in order to demonstrate that it won’t give well-established international firms unfair advantages over local ones. But if this were the case, China might be better served by directing those energies towards Google’s Android platform, as Apple’s iOS occupies only 8% market share among handheld devices in the nation.

We can keep in mind that these accusations, which were made by a government-affiliated research organization, haven’t yet amounted to legal action against Apple on behalf of the Chinese government proper. What’s important to note is that as Tim Cook continues to proclaim his commitment to the Chinese market (he intends to double the number of Apple Stores in China within two years, and the latest one might be ready by year’s end), the Chinese government may not be welcoming his company’s expansion with open arms.

Image Credit: PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images