Weather HD 2 is now available. It’s stuffed with gorgeous. Packed in stunning. And wrapped in beautiful.

It’s a ground-breaking new version that has been built from the grounds up to be more useful, and more beautiful. We focused on what was liked the most, and wanted the most, and tuned and perfected every bit.

Eye-Popping 3D Weather Maps.

With Weather HD 2, we wanted to create 3D Maps that are not only useful, but utterly gorgeous. To be able to do so, we built a 3D maps engine from the grounds up that in every sense of the word pushes the iPhone and the iPad to their limits in rendering out as beautiful of a 3D world as can be! With extremely fast loading time, beautiful animations, and very high detail, the 3D maps in Weather HD 2 outshine anything you have seen before. You can see on the 3D maps temperature, cloud coverage, and radar layers.

Quickview: Fast Forecast, Fast!

One of the great things about Weather HD was how beautifully it portrayed the weather. One disadvantage however was that navigating between cities was quite slow. A list could’ve been faster, but it would’ve looked ugly, so for Weather HD 2, we created Quickview; a beautiful animated rendering of multiple locations in a split-screen fashion that is not only fast and extremely easy to use, but also looks amazing.

MultiForecast for Ultimate Weather Data Accuracy.

With MultiForecast, you can add through in-app purchase Accuweather and MeteoGroup, so you can see how the weather is reported differently between providers and never have to second-guess how your day will turn out to be.

It’s Social!

With Weather HD 2 you can now share the weather to Facebook and Twitter. Also, with the Friends’ Weather feature, Weather HD can show you how the weather is in your friends’ locations; a fast and easy way for you to keep track of how the weather is for your friends and family. And Live Tweets shows you how everyone is tweeting about weather in the United States

Beautiful Animations, Severe Alerts & More Languages.

Weather HD 2 comes with beautiful new animations that will pop from your iPhone and iPad’s screen, and now provides information about severe weather alerts in the United States and Europe. Also, you can now receive Push Notifications for Severe Alerts affecting your cities.

And it is now fully localized in 15 languages!

And all of this as a FREE update!

It is a great new update, packed with so many new features, all together perfectly balanced to achieve the best user experience.

Weather HD 2 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad is available today for $0.99 on the App Store here. A free version is available here. And it comes as a free update existing users.

More details here.

Weather HD, the iPhone and iPad’s top selling weather application is now available for the Mac, and brings the stunning beauty and design of Weather HD tailored and specifically designed for Mac OS X.

With forecasts all around the world and stunning high definition animations, Weather HD brings you the weather forecast in a stunningly gorgeous way. And with weather maps, severe alerts and notifications, it makes a perfect balance of features you’d need for knowing the weather on your Mac.

Today was the launch of the Mac App Store, and also today, one developer falsely, and pretentiously, started selling an application in the Mac App Store under the name Weather HD; the same name of our top-selling iPhone & iPad weather application. We want to make it clear that this “Weather HD” currently in sale in the Mac App Store is not ours.

Given how successful Weather HD has been on the iPhone and iPad, and having being highlighted by Apple as the top selling weather application in 2010, Presselite, the company behind the fake application, must have thought it would be a nice pay day to steal the Weather HD name. They already have the same application for the iPhone as “Weather Live” and for the iPad as “Weather for iPad”, but when it came the Mac’s turn, they managed to steal off the “Weather HD” name.

And it played well for them. In less than 6 hours, the application shot to the Top 10 list of the Mac App Store. Not because it was any good, but because our own Weather HD has a large user base that was interested in trying it out on the Mac. However, their application was, beyond the name, all shit inside, which is why it has garnered negative reviews across the board.

Sadly, this reflects negatively on us, and on the Weather HD name. And is why we want to separate ourselves from this farce of an act from Presselite. Almost everyone on Twitter, and in virtually all the reviews on the Mac App Store, there is nothing but complaints on how bad the application is. Unfortunately, many thought it was ours. It’s not.

App Name Squatting has been an issue in the iOS App Store, and we apparently took the first bite of the issue on the Mac App Store, as some developers try to find the shortest paths to profit without regard to ethical, or even legal considerations. Digging around, we found that Presselite had already done something like this before, by creating an app that had almost the same name and icon of the London Tube Deluxe app. And according to London Tube Deluxe’s developer Malcolm Barclay, he found they have a history of leaving fake reviews, making false originality claims, and even fictitious legal claims. They make cute claims too, like right now in the description of their iPhone version, they say it was “selected by Apple to be featured in its iTunes Rewind 2010 List.” It wasn’t.

It’s pitiful that some developers resort to such tactics.

Weather HD has had a great 2010. It was the top selling iPad weather application, and was selected several times by Apple in their Staff’s Favorite and What’s Hot lists. It was loved by users across the board, and critically as well, from The Guardian, The New York Times and The Huffington Post to Mashable, Gizmodo, TUAW, Macworld, and many others.

But for our loyal users, don’t fret. We have Weather HD coming soon for the Mac, and here is a hint: it is stunning. It will be released soon after we clear away the name issue with Apple.

Today we have released the 1.5 update of Weather HD, which now makes Weather HD a Universal application, supporting not only the iPad but also the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Released with the launch of the iPad in April, Weather HD has from day one become the number one top-selling weather application for the iPad, and today, six months later, it still holds this spot. It was, and remains, among people’s top recommendations amongst what first apps to buy for their new iPads, or so says thousands of tweets.

Weather HD was not only liked by users, but was also received extremely well by critics. The New York Times wrote that “Weather HD elevates the user, placing her at cloud level for a hushed real-time weather tableau that puts the web’s goofy sunshine-rain-cloud icons to shame;” The Huffington Post selected it as one of the 15 Best iPad Apps Every User Should Try; only to name a few.

Weather HD for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad is $0.99, and is available on the app store here.

Much has been said and written about the magic of the iPad, how it would be the savior of industries, and how it would transform and reshape the world.

Having an application, Weather HD (watch trailer), in the Top 10 top-paid list, we wanted to share our early look into how the numbers really are, and what the iPad App Store is shaping to become. We will use our own sales numbers to estimate how everyone else is faring out, and how much the iPad App Store is worth.

If you’d rather not go through the details, you can jump right into the summary.

Introduction

We had Weather HD approved for sale on March 30. Some hour of the day on March 31, Apple made it possible for anyone to download iPad applications, even though the iPad was still not available for sale.

On April 1st, Weather HD became the number four top-selling iPad application, only after Apple’s own Pages, Numbers and Keynote, and on April 2nd, it continued to be the top-selling 3rd party iPad application. In those two days, we sold a little under 2,000 copies of Weather HD, at $0.99 a pop. Not too bad, considering the iPad wasn’t even out yet.

Sales of Weather HD stretched further with the release of the iPad, making about 3,500 units on the launch day. Our rank then relaxed for a few days, falling to the 20s, but then we raced back up till as high as the #3 spot.

This high-start, dive, and then jump, while surely affected our sales, gave us the ability to see how sales were at various spots in the App Store’s charts, and with a bit of maths, and by correlating Weather HD’s sales and ranks, to the ranks of other applications, and mixing in the numbers from Apple’s Top Grossing list, we were able to have a good estimate on basically how much money is flowing in the App Store!

Sales and Ranks

We will start by using our own sales and ranks data for Weather HD to draw the bigger picture. While we were the fourth (and a couple of hours the fifth) on the launch day, getting about 3500 downloads, ten days later when we became the third, we saw a little over 2,250 downloads. We attribute this variance to a launch fever, and we will thus not include in our analysis the first four days.

Shown to the right is our sales data for the second week after the iPad release. We will be using 10 data points from our sales. We found that we are lacking data points in the Top 100 that ranked lower than 30, and that ranked higher than 30 in the Top Grossing. To compensate for those points, we used points from each of the graphs to find points in the other. For example, we know how the graph looks like in the Top 30 Paid applications, so we can use this data to find the revenue of some of them, and then use this revenue along with their Top Grossing rank as new data points in the Top Grossing graph. For example, take April 15th:

It’s important to note that these numbers have been reached through first, there being 500,000 iPads in the market, and second, as we said earlier, that the launch might have had a positive uptick to the sales numbers of iPad applications. We tried to limit the latter by not including the first post-launch four days in the analysis. Curve fitting was used, and the error is about 10-15%.

The following is the estimated sales of the Top 100 Paid.

Here is the full list of estimated sales for the Top 100 Paid. These numbers only represent the App Store as it is right now, and will obviously change as the App Store grows. The error is about 10-15%.

Current Market Size

Based on the data we have calculated, we estimate the Top 100 Paid applications made on April 15, based on the day’s specific Top List, $304,058 in the United States alone, and of these, the Top 10 Paid applications represented 32% of the total sales of the 100.

The Top 100 were calculated by curve fitting, and by extending the graph, we estimate the Top 1,000 applications to have made $372,649 on April 15, thus the latter 900 applications above the Top 100 list are making about 23% of the total sales. The number of applications for the iPad is growing, but given the rate of sales in the 101-1000 ranks compared to the Top 100, we expect the later spots to be even lower and thus neglect them in our analysis.

Potential Market Size

At $372,649 per day, this maps to a market that is worth about $136 million per year, and that’s not accounting for growth in iPad sales. Furthermore, the above numbers are for US sales only, and if the iPad App Store were to be like the iPhone’s, then 40-60% of the sales are occurring internationally, so on average that figure could be become more than $272 million per year with the international launch.

The iPhone App Store saw a tremendous growth from mid-2008 to today. By September 2008, 100 million applications had been downloaded, and then 2 billion by September of the next year, and by April 8 of 2010, downloads shot past the 4 billion mark according to Apple. If the iPad were to enjoy a similarly lucrative growth, it’s fair to assume that within two years, hitting the 1 billion dollar mark, per year, will not only be plausible, but easily surpassable.

Corollary: Let’s Hope iPad App Prices Won’t Kill Us All

In an editorial at Engadget, Paul Miller suggested that the iPad’s application prices are too high, and “will kill us all”. While it’s undeniable that the prices are higher, the unit sales pushed daily are still far from the iPhone’s, and so for developers to be able to recoup their costs, higher prices seem only logical. Hopefully, as the iPad sales rise, hesitant developers will feel more inclined to lower their prices to be at a better position to compete.

Summary

Based on the sales and ranks of our very own Weather HD, we estimate that the Top 1,000 iPad paid applications are making about $372,000 per day, which sums up to about $136 million per year. This figure is based on there being only 500,000 iPads in the market, and is accounting only for the application sales in the United States. If the iPad App Store were to be like the iPhone’s, then 40-60% of the sales would occur internationally, so on average that figure would rise to become $272 million per year.

We believe this to be a conservative estimate. If the iPad were to enjoy a lucrative growth as the iPhone’s, which rose from 100 million downloaded applications in the first 2 months to 4 billion 19 months after, we can easily see the iPad’s App Store becoming a $1 billion per year market in 2 years.

This is quite remarkable. While Apple has re-invented how music is sold and played, and then went again to re-invent the mobile industry, the iPad is an entirely new market. Two weeks ago Apple did not just introduce a new type of computer, they put the seeds of a new market that is bound to make many developers and publishers… happier.

Closing Remarks

Special thanks got to Applyzer, the iPhone and iPad analytics company, for providing us with the Top 100 Paid and Grossing lists of the iPad App Store for the past two weeks.