Introducing the new Guardian iPhone app

I'm delighted to introduce our brand new Guardian app for iPhone and iPod Touch. The new app contains a host of new features, which have been developed based on your feedback. I'll expand on these later in the post, but I'd like to start by revisiting some of the successes of our first app.

Since launching in December 2009, the app has seen over 200,000 downloads, received one of the highest App Store ratings for any news app and dominated the news category, both in the UK and in many countries beyond.

User retention has been significantly high with over 170,000 unique users - or 75% of those who had downloaded the app - continuing to use it on a monthly basis. Well over 50% of that audience accessed it every week and 25% every single day (based on December 2010 usage). We've learned a lot along the way, not least to keep abreast of the expectations of one of our most loyal and engaged audiences.

So why have we chosen to launch a new app? The answer is quite straightforward. The App Store has come a long way over the last 12 months and now forms a major part of the way we deliver content to our mobile audience, whose expectations are, rightly, rising. We can't stand still. With the new app we'll be launching more frequent updates, offering a broader range of content and bringing you a better experience. This means ensuring we can meet the associated development costs. The best way to provide this in the longer term, we believe, is to move to a subscription model - and at £2.99 for 6 months and £3.99 (£4.99 from 15 July 2011) for 12 months, we believe the new app represents excellent value for money.

This has always been an ambitious project, not least because we opted to charge a small one-off fee of £2.39 from the start. While we remain committed to offering our content for free on guardian.co.uk and our recently upgraded mobile website, it's clear that in order to deliver the highest quality product for a single platform, considerable investment is required.

As we've previously announced, we don't intend to switch off our first app for another six months, so anyone who has previously downloaded it will continue to be able to enjoy it for the time being (see our FAQs for more details).

In the US, where we aim to increase our reach (only 8% of downloads to date have come from this huge audience), we've taken the decision to integrate advertising and offer the new app as a free download.

So what's new?

Faster, automatic updates for our live news and sport blogs - no need to refresh

A new football scores service with free goal alerts by team and match for the main UK leagues and European competitions

Our award-winning video content is included for the first time, and looks great whether you're connected via 3G or Wi-Fi

You'll see reader comments below articles that are open to them; we'll be adding in the ability to add comments via the app as soon as we can

A brand new homepage design - look out for the multimedia carousel - and a new treatment for live blogs

A new way to view the stories trending across guardian.co.uk and social media (otherwise known as Zeitgeist on our website)

Use the app in portrait or landscape mode

A brand new search facility, which we believe makes this one of the most comprehensive news apps

Of course, all that comes on top of the features from the original app, such as offline reading, front page personalisation, retina display graphics and the ability to easily save articles and sections as favourites or share content via email, Facebook or Twitter.

We hope you enjoy using our new app as much as we've enjoyed making it. As ever, feel free to contact userhelp@guardian.co.uk for further assistance and advice on using the app.

Update 15 July 2011: Apple has today changed the price of the 12-month subscription for the Guardian iPhone app from £3.99 to £4.99.