As noted by our sister site TouchArcade, Apple yesterday issued a Tweet announcing that Cut the Rope: Experiments is the company's "Free App of the Week", discounted from its usual $0.99 price [App Store] for the iPhone version and $1.99 price [App Store] for the iPad version.
While Apple has previously offered some apps for free through its App Store Facebook page, the new promotion directly through the App Store will make such offers more visible to users.
As the official App Store Twitter account posted earlier today, Cut the Rope: Experiments is their "Free App of the Week", which as far as we can tell is the first of its kind.
Now, don't get me wrong, Cut the Rope: Experiments is an excellent game and you should go download it immediately if you haven't already, no matter what the promotion is. But it will be interesting to see if this is something that Apple keeps doing each week, and I'd be curious to know how they decide on which games or apps to promote.
TouchArcade also notes several other tweaks to the App Store, including new "Editors' Choice" picks and the removal of the "Staff Favorites" section. In the U.S. App Store for iOS, Apple is currently featuring Facebook Camera [App Store] and Extreme Skater [App Store] as Editors' Choice picks on the iPhone side, with SketchBook Ink [App Store] and Air Mail [App Store] being highlighted on the iPad section of the store.
As noticed by The Verge, the Editors' Choice terminology has also been picked up in the Mac App Store, with Cobook [Mac App Store] being the initial recipient of the designation. Deus Ex: Human Revolution [Mac App Store] has also been made an Editors' Choice pick, but there appears to be no Free App of the Week in the Mac App Store to correspond with the feature on the iOS side, although Cobook is a free app.
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I hope that Apple pick apps out of obscurity in the future. Cut the Rope is already a popular franchise, concentrating on successful apps serves to push downloads onto fewer and fewer titles. There is a lot of good content out there that would benefit from some promotion because it has got lost in the noise.
nice. especially for those who don't want to dish out money on an app,but still want a good one that is free. forget Google doing this first, all i care is that the app store have finally implemented this!
It's amazing how full the world is with people who will sit at a bar drinking $5 beer after $5 beer tipping a few bucks each time to a cute waitress, and will bitterly complain how they can't believe a fantastic app costs 99 cents, and no way in hell will they get it unless it becomes free. It's an ironic world we live in. I believe in paying 99 cents for hard work or else it turns into an Android app (no quality and full of bugs).
