App Store App Data Analysis - Need Developer Help

UPDATE: We just added a blog post that has a lot of the information we've gathered but we could use more help from developers. Please feel free to use any and all data that we have and let us know if you've managed to find any results. Post can be accessed here: http://www.joysticklabs.com/the-quest-for-the-missing-app-data

Hello Everyone,

My name is Samir and I'm working with Joystick Labs, (joysticklabs.com), a seed-stage accelerator for video game entrepreneurs. We focus mostly on identifying, funding, and mentoring mobile and social video game entrepreneurs especially in the iOS market. We're trying to do some market research to get a better picture of general app sales and data, the one thing that is glaringly missing from the App Store.

We have an ambitious project in mind that could be incredibly useful for developers both already in the space and potential ones and we could use all the data we can find. Basically we want to find a way to compute the number of downloads (and, by extension, the revenue) of apps in the app store based on the information available in the app store and on websites. Although iTunes Connect and other software lets you track individual data, it's impossible to see trends and figure out if it's worth it to go into the space.

We wanted to use information like "Time in Market", "Time in Top 25," "Number of Ratings," to figure out ways to estimate the number of downloads for a given app. We'll use some data TechCrunch released mid last year as well as information we can get from developers willing to share their information. Based on this data and simple regression models, we could extrapolate downloads per day, ratings per download, downloads per rank, and other important information (like revenues) for apps that don't have information available. Hopefully it could be useful for developers and other users thinking about getting into the space. Of course, this data could be anonymized and simply used as individual data points to get a more accurate model.

In any case, we need the support of developers to make this project a reality. Does this seem like something developers would want to take part in? I believe this topic may have been broached but it is incredibly difficult to search for it (I see an app in the workings). Please feel free to contact us or just reply to this post. We're excited at the potential and it would be great to have your support.

Hopefully next week, we'll be adding more to our blog about our process and perhaps give a little bit of data based on the information we've got. Right now there's only a couple of us working on the project so stay with us as we progress.

Best,

Samir
Joystick Labs