Most Popular Solitaire is the most popular solitaire game for Mac OS X.

The Good News over the last few weeks has been that our solitaire title, Most Popular Solitaire, featuring 30 favorite solitaire games, has proven to be the most downloaded solitaire game at Apple Downloads.  Ever since the latest update, Most Popular Solitaire 2.02 has been receiving amazing numbers of downloads, even eclipsing the Windows version of Pretty Good Solitaire.

Most Popular Solitaire appears on the ‘Top Downloads‘ list on the left side of every Apple Downloads page, and has consistently done so since shortly after its release.  Charting as high as #7 and only dropping off for a single day.  (As of this writing, MPS is ranked at #12.)  Note that this is for all downloads from Apple’s site, including such packages as iTunes, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox.  At times, our solitaire game has been ranked higher than QuickTime, and no other solitaire game has appeared on the list.  In fact, we have regularly had the most download game (period).

Now comes the Bad News.  Whether it is due to some oversight in the midst of the iPad excitement, or related to the recent change to remove the ‘Downloads’ link from the main Apple page (in favor of “iPad”), or just a run-of-the-mill screw-up, the ‘Most popular’ pages for each category are not being updated, and this problem has lasted for three weeks now, which means that these pages show the top downloads from just before our game update was released.  It is clear that Most Popular Solitaire should be ranked #1 on the Cards & Puzzle: Most popular page, and probably no lower than #2 on the Games: Most popular page.

Now we still have the problem that traffic is falling off due to the lack of updates, and assuming that the problem will be fixed (hopefully soon), there will probably be a frenzy of product submissions, especially with those already in the pipeline, and our products could become lost in the noise.  Since Apple Downloads is a very important distribution point for Mac OS X titles, this issue is already impacting our marketing.

Despite this inconvenience, development for this platform is continuing apace, and there should be an official announcement about Pretty Good MahJongg Mac Edition in the very near future, as well as one for a related platform, hinted at the end of the most recent post at A Shareware Life.

In any event, I am currently enjoying an absolutely beautiful day, with summer temperatures, bright sunshine, and the stress-free knowledge that all of our business and personal taxes have long since been filed.  Happy Tax Day!