The billionth download in the App Store
If you keep up with Apple-related news, you’re bound to know that Apple is approaching 1 billion downloads at the App Store, and will be giving 13.000 USD worth of gifts to whomever either downloads the billionth app, or sends a form right after the 999.999.999th app has been downloaded.
So, the question is: when will that be?
Turns out the counter can help us have a certain strategy.
I decided to take a look at how the counter uses its data after reading an interesting post over at the MacRumors.com fora.
First, one should know that the counter displayed on the aforementioned contest page at Apple.com is a JavaScript counter that fetches its data from a .txt file, countdown.txt.
How is this useful? Knowing where it gets its data means that we can know what is the “hard” data. Basically, the counter isn’t “live”.
Here’s the data I collected:
11-APR-2009 21:00:00|938030517|275391
11-APR-2009 22:00:00|938271179|240662
11-APR-2009 23:00:00|938477072|205893 (8.43 AM in Brussels, 11.43 PM in CA [California, Apple's area])
7.40 (22.40 CA): 938477900
7.57 (22.57 CA): 938548000
7.57 (22.57 CA): 938503000 // => variation!
8.00 (23.00 CA): 938511841
8.40 (23.40 CA): 938673000
8.45 (23.45 CA): 938693000
8.46 (23:46 CA): 938638000 // => variation!
8.50 (23:50 CA): 938649000
9.00 (00:00 CA): 938682965
As you can see, the data from 11 PM was added at around 11.43 PM, and the counter data was adjusted at 11.46 PM.
The data of the countdown.txt file can be summarised as follows:
Date – Time – Number Sold – Delta
The last number, which I call “delta”, seems to represent the number of applications bought between 10 PM and 11 PM (as 938271179 + 205893 = 938477072).
The interesting thing is that the counter then uses the delta to calculate what it’s supposed to be at the following hour, i.e. 12 PM in this case. Thus, at 12 PM San Francisco time, it displayed 938682965 (I have just checked).
Therefore, the countdown.txt file is updated approximately 40 minutes after the hour, and the delta is then used to adjust the counter, though that can apparently take up to 15 minutes (see the examples of counter data between 10 and 11 PM, where the change occurred at 10.57 PM).
How can this be of use?
Well, it can be useful to take a look at the fluctuation of data, as collected by MacRumors.com member omahajim and posted at GoogleDocs, and see what is the average during certain hours over a few days. The idea is that you can then determine whether at a given hour, the “delta” found in countdown.txt will be close to reality or not (based on previous days – during hours where it’s night on the American continent, fewer apps are downloaded), and that will especially be useful during the last hour of the countdown.
One should note, however, that there is a good chance that, during the last hour of the countdown, the number of downloads will surge after a certain point (read: after 999.999.500, there could be something crazy like 5000 downloads a second).
Nevertheless, this might be of use to someone who hopes to win the mega (and only) prize of “a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro”.
I know I’d love to win it, but there’s a good chance the countdown will end while I’m asleep, so I figured that it would do me no harm to reveal such data.
If by a strange twist of fate you do win after reading this, may I ask for the Time Capsule or a couple of App Store purchases?