Survey

Nintendo wants to know how much Super Mario Run should cost

Japanese video games giant Nintendo is surveying Super Mario Run players via email about various aspects of the game, MacRumors reported Thursday. The company wants to know how much players would be willing to pay for a premium experience like Super Mario Run and if they would be interested in playing a sequel. The ten-minute survey was sent via email to a subset of Super Mario Run players who have linked the game with their My Nintendo account.

Apple ranks highest in customer satisfaction survey for its soon-to-be discontinued wireless routers

Call it awkward, or call it ironic, but a recent J.D. Power wireless router satisfaction report put Apple at the top, with a score of 876, followed by ASUS (860), D-Link (856) and TP-Link (854). This report obviously comes at an interesting time as the company was rumored this month to be disbanding its router unit and stop developing AirPort wireless routers. 

Apple removed nearly 50,000 apps from App Store in October

The Great App Store Purge, announced in September, has resulted in the removal of nearly 47,300 outdated, abandoned or non-functioning iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps from the App Store in October.

That's a 238 percent increase versus the previous month and about 3.4 times more than the average month for the App Store prior to the Great Purge, according to data from research firm Sensor Tower shared by TechCrunch.

One out of five iPhone users in the U.S. have Limit Ad Tracking turned on

Survey conducted by mobile app marketing platform Adjust says one-fifth of total iPhone users in the U.S. have opted to prevent in-app ads from being targeted at them directly. About eighteen million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in the country have used the Limit Ad Tracking feature to explicitly opt out of targeted advertising, according to the report.

Early App Store Search Ads adopters seeing $0.40 CPA and 49.4 percent conversion

Announced in June of this year, first ads started cropping up in search results on the App Store beginning October 5. Aside from a few launch hiccups, App Store search advertisements seem to be performing pretty well in their early days.

A new study by mobile data intelligence firm Mobile Action—based on a random and anonymous sampling of 77 Search Ads campaigns—has determined that the average Conversion Rate (CR) is 49.4 percent while Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) sits around $0.40.

Search Ads, the survey concludes, is “the biggest opportunity in app marketing right now.”

More people are interested in buying AirPods than Apple Watch Series 2

According to a new survey of more than a thousand customers in the United States, conducted by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and cited in today's BusinessInsider article, a whopping twelve percent of respondents are interested in buying Apple's $159 wireless AirPods earbuds when they go on sale next month, resulting in an incremental $3 billion in revenue.

In fact, more respondents said they planned to purchase the AirPods than the new Apple Watch Series 2 (eight percent).

Last month, revenue from U.S. sales of wireless headphones surpassed that of wired ones

If you need the definite proof that Apple's rumored decision to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack from the next iPhone is based on some actual real-world numbers, here's one. According to the latest stats for the month of June, published Thursday by research firm NPD, revenue from sales of wireless headphones in the United States during the month of June beat that of their wired counterparts. Revenue from wireless headphones accounted for 54 percent of U.S. dollar sales and 17 percent of unit sales in the headphone category.

Survey highlights the top 3 quibbles developers are having with Mac App Store

Apple is shaking up the App Store, but what about its OS X counterpart? Sure, the new subscription terms extend to iOS, tvOS and OS X apps, but what's Apple going to do, if anything, in order to make the Mac App Store a more attractive venue for Mac software distribution?

We should find out what's next for the Mac App Store next week at WWDC. In the meantime, here's what developers are disliking about it, based on a DevMate survey which polled about 700 Mac developers.

iOS continues bleeding share to Android as smartphone market slows considerably

Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends Report is a treasure trove of surveys and predictions on the global trends concerning our industry. I found out this morning that half of the searches will be either through images or speech by 2020 and that Siri was handling more than one billion requests per week through speech as of June 2015.

I've now compiled the report's most interesting tidbits regarding Internet usage around the world, the iOS vs. Android battle and more.

Thank you, Siri: mobile voice assistant usage is rising at a rapid clip

After perusing a massive 238-slide deck that is Mary Meeker's new 2016 Internet Trends Report this morning, a slide has captured my attention that summarizes the trend toward voice searches and digital assistants. It says that in five years time at least half of all searches will be either through images or speech, which is fascinating.

What I find even more remarkable is the fact that Siri alone handled more than one billion requests per week through speech as of June 2015.

Apple edges out Samsung in American Customer Satisfaction Index

Apple has managed to edge out Samsung in this year's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the nation's cross-industry measure of customer satisfaction. The Cupertino firm has beaten the Galaxy maker by just one percentage point when it comes to smartphone customer satisfaction.

The report, which released Wednesday, reveals that in 2016 Apple scored 81 out of 100 while Samsung stayed where it was the year before at 80.

A year before, both firms scored 80 out of 100 for customer satisfaction.

Study suggests that one in ten iOS users listens to Apple Music

Roughly one in ten iOS users is listening to Apple Music, according to a new research study conducted by MusicWatch. The company, which provides consumer research for the music industry, collected data from the surveys of 5,000 U.S. consumers, aged 13 and older.

According to the research, a little over three quarters (77%) of iOS users in the United States are aware of Apple Music. Only 11%, however, of the group surveyed said they are actually using the service, and 48% of those who have tried it out said they are no longer using it.