Slashdot Mirror
The Realities of Selling On Apple's App Store
Owen Goss writes "Everyone is familiar with the story of the iPhone developer who spends two weeks of spare time making a game that goes on to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reality is that with the App Store now hosting over 25,000 apps, the competition is fierce. While it's true that a few select apps are making developers rich, the reality is that most apps don't make a lot of money. In a blog post I take a hard look at the first 24 days of sales data for the first game, Dapple, from Streaming Colour Studios. The post reflects what is likely the norm for developers just getting into the iPhone development game."
I got my iPhone a little while after the 3G was released and I haven't found any of the appstore applications to be all that interesting. The only third party application from the appstore I use on a regular basis is Flashlight (which is free). The applications I use semi-regularly are SFNetNews, Palringo and Units (also all free). I can't recall a paid app that I bothered to use for more than a week. On the other hand I use Winterboard, Terminal (and the CLI apps that go with it such as OpenSSH), AdBlock and Reminder quite regularly (granted AdBlock and Reminder are passive applications); all from Cydia. Perhaps if the restrictions on what Appstore applications could do were loosened appstore developers could create really useful applications. Imagine the profit that could be made from an application that provided much needed functionality, such as a "mark all mail as read" button.
What I am more interested in, is how many sales he gets after being "brutally honest" and then being posted on slashdot for doing so.
5 hours after the first sale, it appeared on the warez sites. Man that's got to suck. It's a shame the thieving cunts don't realise that with most of the App Store stuff they pirate that it's usually only a one man band behind it.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
There was an interesting article on TorrentFreak a while back; How Piracy Can Boost iPhone App Sales, may be worth a read.
1. The pirates will like your game.
2. Going first page on a website or list, has a direct effect on sales.
3. Dev's buy/play other dev's games/tools. Dev's are cool people to dev for.
-Woof woof woof!
What, a company makes YET ANOTHER crappy color matching game, and people are ASTONISHED they don't get rich?
What are they honestly expecting? If all you're going to do is repeat, for the nth time, yet another basic, basic, simple crappy puzzle game, you ARE NOT going to make much cash, or get much recognition.
Why is that a story? Just because it's an 'Apple's App Store' thing?
Release a crappy color matching puzzle game onto the web at large, and they'll probably do worse.
Gets right down to the most basic of basics: if you're not going to put the effort in, don't expect to get rewarded.
In terms of the story - make yet another crappy duplicate of yet another crappy puzzle game, become yet another crappy also-ran.
Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD
6 months? 32,000?
What happened to people making games like this in their spare time for fun and maybe getting ad revenue on their website. What kind of a person earning a living (ie. exlcuding rich children, who as far as I can tell make up a substantial portion of the iPhone userbase btw) would pay for this type of entertainment?
And how is that different from what happens IRL (or, as the cool cats are calling it now, AFK)? You enter a market, develop a product and compete with hundreds or thousands of similar offers. A couple will succeed, some will get by and most will flunk and disappear in its own mediocrity (averageness, ordinariness as a consequence of being average and not outstanding).
That is not the "[r]ealities of Selling On Apple's App Store", that's the reality of selling. People will copy your idea and sell. People will copy your product look and feel. The toughest ones will survive, the rest won't, but maybe will make enough money to keep the viability of their business choice. Or not. At all.
that it showed up on pirate sites within five hours. Essentially it shows that the price of software is not a major reason behind piracy. Pirating a five dollar game? I wonder if there is a threshold for pirates? I suspect some do it for the fun of it, the "fame" of being first to do it. Still it blows my mind that people would pirate an iPhone app, let alone a cheap one.
The real problem I see is that he lost among the clutter. There is simply so much shit on the apple store that it is easy to get bored or worse, annoyed, looking through it all. As such if its new it comes up on the list first and that is about the only time outside of reviews like the author noted that an app will get noticed.
Throw in the fact that Apple over sells the game aspect of these units when most people don't associate costs with games on their phones let alone value for anything on the phone short of ring tones (riaa love child I think) or songs. I know on my touch I use a conversion utility, a calculator, a NYTimes reader, and the Apple email program the most; don't get me started on their shitty mail app.
Outside of an ad campaign I don't see how you can stay in the limelight unless you buy reviews on sites, let alone get stories posted to Slashdot. I am not begrudging the author of the game or the submitter, it was truly an interesting read into how it all goes down
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I think he's going for 'Funny' karma.
If you're doing the same, you're not doing it right.
The iPhone software market, like it or hate it, is like any other market. There is competition and only a few are successful. It's no different to the Windows software market or the Mac software market in this this.
it's slashvertising.
Fix the tags!
and it seems slashdotted now. does anyone have a mirror? :)
I don't have an iPhone, but from the description and reviews, Dapple looks like a dinky little fun time-killer app. There are loads of such games, at least on other mobile platforms, and looks like on iPhone too, quite a few of them great fun, and many very cheap. Meanwhile for PC I just bought Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete on Steam for £2.99 (about $4.20) - a great edition of one of the greatest games of it's type ever. So I'd say the guy's $5 valuation is way out of whack. Dinky little time-killer games of that sort will never be worth more than a token payment to me (like $1), if anything. No matter how much fun it is, it's inherently replaceable, and therefore of limited value. Expecting to get rich selling such games on iPhone is just wishful thinking unless you get hugely lucky.
Oh no... it's the future.
The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)
March 9th, 2009
I will freely admit, I've been avoiding writing this article. In fact, as I type this, I'm still not sure that it's something that I want to do. However, again, I come back to that damn promise I made when I started this whole thing about being open and honest. Curse me and my big mouth! I also stated just over a week ago that I would write up on my numbers, so now I stand (sit typing) before you to reveal "The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)".
Dapple
If you've been reading the blog then you know that I released my first iPhone game, Dapple, to the App Store on Feb 13, 2009. The game sells for $4.99 in Canada and the U.S. and at corresponding prices throughout the world.
Dapple is a colour-matching puzzle game based around the idea of mixing paint colours to make new colours. I feel like the gameplay is innovative and new, but rests on top of a solidly proven genre. Critical reviews seem to support this hypothesis, many calling out the fact that they were expecting "just another match-3 game", but instead found themselves completely hooked on a game with an innovative gameplay mechanic that works.
Costs
I did a presentation for the 360|iDev conference on creating an iPhone game. If you've read it, then you've seen my "conclusions" section that had some numbers. Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD. That budget includes: paying my contractors, business expenses incurred during the 6 months of development, and paying myself a very small salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).
Royalties
Apple's deal is this: for every sale, Apple keeps 30% and you get 70%. So for a sale of $4.99, I make $3.50. That's made in the currency where the app was sold, so I make more money when someone from the U.S. buys my game than someone from Canada. If you're in Canada, it's actually cheaper for you to buy the game than for an American, since it only costs your $4.99 Canadian.
If you do the math, you can see that I need to sell about 9,150 units in the U.S. before I break even on Dapple.
Reviews
Again, if you've been reading the blog then you've seen the excellent reviews the game has been getting. People who play the game tend to really enjoy it. Every review I've had so far has been extremely positive. I even managed to get a review from Kotaku, which is a very large gaming blog. It was the Kotaku review that led many people to start asking me about sales numbers, assuming that I must have seen a massive increase in sales.
However, I haven't had reviews yet from any of the "Big 3" iPhone review sites (Touch Arcade, 148Apps, and AppVee). Those are the ones that I think might really affect sales.
Sales Data
This is what you're here for: the numbers. Here's a graph (done in AppViz) of revenue (the y-axis is dollars, not number of sales) I've made world-wide from sales of Dapple since it went live (all funds in Canadian Dollars):
Dapple Revenue Graph
Dapple Revenue Graph
I've marked four important data points:
First Sale - This was the first sale of the game, made maybe an hour after the game went live. I suspect this was purchased by an app cracker. Dapple was cracked and uploaded to pirate sites less than 5 hours after it went live. This was the only sale prior to that. So thanks, Mr./Mrs. Cracker, you were my first sale! On the topic of pirating/cracking: I have no idea how many pirated copies of Dapple are being played right now. I don't track metrics like that, although I should perhaps start.
Launch Day - This was the first day Dapple was on sale. Many of these purchases would have been friends of mine buying the game. Many other sales will have come from my app being in the "New" apps list, as other devs tell me that appearing in any list on the App Store helps sales significantly. By the end of the third day my app wasn't on the front page of newly relea
TIAEAE!
If you expect karma from "funny" then you're not doing it right.
Then again, don't expect karma as an anonymous coward either.
I'm just happy that UbuntuLinux wasn't doing his usual "ghosts on the moon" troll.
I refer to my post yesterday.
Seems it's more than a day, it's a week. This is paid-for-bashing at its worst.
Seriously:
In a blog post I take a hard look at the first 24 days of sales data for the first game, Dapple, from Streaming Colour Studios
You take a "hard look" at one game. And a game, to boot. You might have noticed that the "games" category is by far the largest, thus the fiercest market.
A friend of mine is an iPhone game developer. He's got three games and four or so small apps in the app store. He's not a millionaire, but from what I hear there's a steady stream of good income. That's seven times the data points of TFA, and still I wouldn't dare to claim that as "the norm".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
While it's true that a few select apps are making developers rich, the reality is that most apps don't make a lot of money.
What a surprise. Not so different from the real world, is it? Where every now and then, some idea goes big and makes someone rich, and for every one such lucky guy, there's a thousand whose ideas never work out.
What's even the story here? "Some products sell real well, most sell average"? Why not take it further? "Bell curve distribution confirmed for the 4,000th time!"? :-)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The important thing to take away from this writeup is the fact that, after the author gave a presentation about his game in front of a crowd, he instantly made a handful of sales.
Anyone relying on (or griping about) their position in the App Store listings as an unfair arbiter of their sales needs to account for that simple phenomenon. There is a world outside the app store; a world that must be reached.
Compare it to other media forms: What sells movies? The position of their name on the marquee? No. TV trailers, signage, radio spots, web ads, product tie-ins...
What sells books? Their relative position on the shelf? Not usually. Interviews, book tours, reviews, a good name...
Without real advertising, iPhone devs are beholden to blind chance when they post their app in the store. The only reason a handful of them have become rich is because they are/were pioneers exploring a shiny new UI and form factor. These rags-to-riches stories will fade away, and the usual approach, of advertising in and around established channels, will reassert itself.
Also keep in mind that this is a PLATFORM, and it will move and expand, leaving obsolescence in its wake. Like any good platform game, you need to run and jump to keep up.
Wow, a color matching game. How incredibly groundbreaking. And it's only selling for five times the minimum application price. Sorry, but the value isn't there for a game of this simplicity. I've got two games under development, both immensely more complex than this, that I will sell for at most half the price.
So my appraisal:
1) Clone of a clone of a clone of the color matching / bubble popping games that can be written in less than a week. No surprise people aren't jumping up and down with excitement, or going out and buying iPhones so they can play this game.
2) Price is way, way too high for this game.
I do thank the author for his concise summary of sales though.
Better known as 318230.
I thought it was:
2. ???
3. Profit!
But maybe it's
2. Whine about life on Slashdot.
3. Profit!
Anyway, I too look forward to hearing how many Slashdotters will buy something solely because it's linked from here. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
This is where I may get grilled for posting about my own app... I've released a reference app called LexLook! Yes, there are a ton of them available, but none allow users to upload their own references and share with other users. It currently has an English dictionary, recipes, cocktails, country codes, etc. The application is currently free. I'm not sure what I'll do about pricing yet. I more interested in getting feedback at the moment and seeing how the application evolves. If you got an iPhone, give LexLook! a try. I'd love to get constructive feedback. See our page below to send us comments. Thanks, Alvaro
Cant everyone become a developer, and get the source , compile and place the app on their iphone?
Sure its a few more steps, but if its THAT HOT, it will work.
Second, why not just make a 'hit paris hilton with a dildo' app/gimick. Sure its lame, but all those teenies will download it for 2.95
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
because if he did, he would get pissed of at the mail app too.
UNLESS, he can afford to use his personal $$$, to pay apple engineers to add his own techy nerd features, to his id#1 iphone that is 100% unlocked or has a 'VIP' section on istore.
Mmmmm Seriously, its not hard to make a VIP section, two - i bet its done, three, I bet he sells those accounts for $5k a pop to his Fortune 500 buddies.
Oh and then theres the UltraVIP NSA accounts, using their specially hand soldered 512GIG iphones with dual battery & sat mode with 1024bit AES secure talk mode.
Money can buy anything. Especially if the DHS calls.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Match 1000 boobies to 1000 faces app.
I doubt apple would approve of this app.
Easy to code, but an effort to put together the media.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The original article is slashdotted. Here's a cached copy.
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
The RA doesn't seem to be accessible.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Here's a thought: most iPhone/iPodTouch apps are too cheap. How much performance do buyers seriously expect for a buck? and do developers really expect someone to pay even a buck for such lousy performance?
A recent /. story addressed the "killer app" BulletFlight. Currently it is selling for $11.99 - rather high, relatively speaking, for an iPhone app. The author is planning to raise the price into the hundreds of dollars, reflecting both the price of equivalent top-grade PC applications, the standard price of tools and accessories it will typically be used with, and the sheer convenience of using a tiny iPod instead of lugging around a laptop.
As time passes and developers start creating REAL applications - relatively robust video/audio/photo editing, detailed special-purpose apps, etc. - the prices will go up. Personal computers had cheap crappy software too in the early days of the IBM PC and Windows, much of it "buy it cheap, use it once, shelve it 'cuz it's crap". Ditto iPod apps: right now it's easy to make cheezy apps that might actually sell; give developers some time, and we'll see worthwhile apps - at profitable prices.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The apple store is a great example of the free market at work.
The daily whines here at slashdot don't change that.
Fierce competition is the sign of a WORKING market, not one that's broken.
Compare the 30% cut you give apple to the 80% cut you'll give a distributor and store in the real world.
I have yet to see a single useful app developed for the "open" G1 that isn't available on the iPhone because some API's are "closed".
I am interested in the very same question. Repton on the App Store. Thanks!
Mod me as you like.
I feel for this guy, I really do. I've recently experienced something similar. There's this farmers market just opened up in my town so I though "hey, I can do a bit of business there!". They make it really easy, you can pretty much just go there and sell your stuff. So after some thinking I decided I was going to set up a stall that sells apples from my garden. I spent a few months picking them (that's all I did for those months, I didn't want to do anything else to support myself at that time) and hired a couple of guys to do some extra picking. When I'd picked all the apples I did some calculations and figured I'd need to sell around 10000 to break even and pay my labourers. So I went to the market where I found about 1000 other people selling apples for 1/5th the cost of mine and some people even giving them away for free...but hey, my apples are a little bit better than the rest so that's ok!
I sold about 10 apples and I just don't understand what went wrong. I just don't get it. Life isn't fair.
Not sure why this is a shocker to anyone, lets look at the list:
If you notice, the one thing thats missing from that list when compared to your typical slashdot list is the 'Profit!' line.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Everyone loves to hate marketter/marketing, but let's face it - no one is going to buy something they don't know exists.
10000 sales doesn't sound like that huge of a number to me. But, it's going to require marketing. I doubt this guy has money for a large/expensive advertising campaign, and if he did sink a lot of money into it, that would force him into the position of having to make lots more sales to cover the marketing investment, so he will need to be creative (and it sounds like he is trying to be).
Still, he *must* get his product more exposure to the iPhone consumer audience. There are what, several million iPhones in use around the world? If people really do like the game, as the author claims based upon reviews, then sales in the range of 10k to 50k copies seems like it should be an achievable objective without spending massive amounts of money on marketing, but some will definitely need to be spent.
Everyone is familiar with the story of the iPhone developer who spends two weeks of spare time making a game that goes on to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars
What? Say again? I'm definitely not familiar with that (or with any "get rich fast" story you might hear somewhere)
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
This scenario is not exactly uncommon in general, especially in markets with sufficiently low barriers to entry. Look at software in general. There are TONS of applications and games for sale out there, most of the authors of which still maintain a day job out of financial necessity.
The fact is, it's just really easy to become a software developer, regardless of your platform of choice. It's difficult, however, to make a living doing it unless you a) write something so unique and interesting that it spreads by word-of-mouth, b) write something good and market it well, or c) work for a big company that has already accomplished a or b.
There's nothing special about the app store in this regard. It's just another platform where the major players will make a killing selling good-to-mediocre products, and the little guys will never make more than a few bucks unless they happen to produce something extraordinary.
Great post by Jeff Tunnel: Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes You Nothing
One, Learn Origami with Origami Mastery, has done OK, staying stable at about 30 copies a day for the first two weeks, then dropping down to about 5-10 per day, many on foreign sites. This was my first app, and so I had no expectations. I was disappointed it didn't sell a billion copies, but I didn't really expect it to, as it had lots of competition. I sell it for 99cents here: http://www.origamimastery.com/ However, the second app really disappointed me. I thought I had a eureka moment, because while there were a billion iFart aps, there was nothing juvenile like iBooger or iSnot. I figured if iFart can make a lot, so can something called iSnot. So I made this great little app, very small, doing all my own design and splitting the profits 75-25 with the developer (normally a bad idea but a good one in hindsight) and developed it in less than a week. We had no direct competitors... It's a funny app whereby you pick a face, hold the phone up to your face facing away and a line of dangling snot, using the accelerometer, comes out, and well, you get the picture. It's funny. Stupid. Guaranteed to make a million bucks like iFart, right? Wrong. Its done worse than my Origami app. Sold maybe 10 a day or less for the past two weeks. I spent money to get it reviewed, and then asked my friends to download and review it, and also randomly bought people drinks at bars to download and review it the first day. I think its a very very funny and clever app: www.isnotapp.com However, the key to success appears to be HEAVY marketing beforehand. The iFart guy, Joel Comm, is an Internet Marketer by trade. That means he has mailing lists and twitter followers in the hundreds of thousands. He knows what he is doing. His competitors do not. There are other things you can do, which I will be doing, like releasing updates to keep yourself at the top of the daily top sellers. In the case of Dapple, one look at the screenshot of the game and the price of the app told me everything I needed to know. The game looks NO BETTER than a 99 cent app. He should have sold it at 99cents. That is his first mistake. Drop it down and his volume will increase dramatically. But he will still never make his 35 grand back. All in all I spent about 1000$ on my development. 325$ for the first apps development costs, 500$ for a mac mini for myself to help with development, and 99$ for applying to the app store as a developer. I will probably make my 1 grand back in a two-three months if all goes well. And that's with a genius app like iSnot doing poorly.
Sorry, the iSnot link is http://www.isnotapp.com/
I think the real problem is all the garbage in the APP store. I think apple should charge a monthly fee as well for apps to be in there ($50 a month?), that way teenagers aren't going to put the garbage games in there for eternity. Only serious developers will that actually have apps that sell.
I'd be interested in seeing tools rather than games.
More companies are taking advantage of remote access to their products, iPhone/iTouch Remotes will be a peripheral sale/freeby many companies as a added bonus. Much like saying you can buy an iPod dock for an AV receiver.
These downloads will be dependent on sales of said product, not be subject to competition, news feeds or the like.
what can i do for this guy? Even now i cant have a look at his game. Would he have programmed for a mobile platform (symbian, palm, j2me/midp) with a large userbase, i could have a look at it. Sadly apple decided to have no java. Somebody who invests $32000 into something that limited in scope should be very sure about what he is doing.
The biggest lesson learned in all of this is to not spend $32,000 developing an iPhone game.
Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD. That budget includes: paying my contractors, business expenses incurred during the 6 months of development, and paying myself a very small salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).
That's nuts. What did he think - he's launching an entire business around an iPhone color-matching game??? What is this "paying myself a small salary" nonsense? What "business expenses"?
For this sort of thing, you do most of the dev work yourself or you partner with someone. You keep your day job and the only "business expenses" you should have are a domain somewhere.
His costs are insane for this kind of project. They should be a tenth of what he incurred. Even at that, he'd have to sell 1,000 units or so to break even. And saying "to break even" speaks volumes about his business naivete. It's not about breaking even. You could have taken that $32,000, put it in the bank at 5%, and made $800 in six months. Instead, you made less than that and now you don't have the $32,000 any more.. He's not comparing opportunity costs.
Honestly, I would not invest much hard money in such a venture - perhaps if I was doing iPhone dev during the day, I'd work on something on the side at night, or if I had a friend/partner who wanted to team up.
Advice: on VPS providers
The apple store is a great example of the free market at work.
The Apple Store is not a free market... it's Apple's Market. It more closely resembles a centrally planned oligopoly.
A closer approximation to a "free" market in handheld mobile sales would be Windows Mobile/Symbian/Palm, where ISVs can and do sell their applications at whatever price point they want through as many multiple channels as they want. They have been doing this for over a decade now, with very mixed results. Many sales come through single, large aggregators of products (for example, Handago) whereas other vendors seem to rely almost exclusively on carrier-specific channels or even their own tiny websites.
Ironically, because of the embrace by the twittering masses of the Apple Market model, many of the ISVs on the non-Apple platforms have been clamouring for their own massive, closed, centrally planned marketplaces. I suspect this is a cyclical development (with temporary dislocations of pricing, information, distribution and user naÃveté creating transient advantages for centrally planned marketplaces), but I wouldn't be surprised to see sites such as Amazon/Facebook/MySpace getting more into multi-platform software sales.
Da Blog
You made me LOL. iSnot was your "Aha" moment?
By running advertisements, some of the pirate sites are making more money than most of the applications they pirate. Their objective is to pirate *every* application at the app store. It happens so quickly after the release of a new app that one must assume that the process is now automated.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Yes, you nailed it. Nobody should build any apps for iPhone which cost more than $990 to build. Oh, wait ! Even better! The cost should be limited to $500 to build (so they can still make 100% profit, so as not to deprive the wieners at Slashdot who may therefore still whine about the absurd profit margin).
Whining wieners want wafting wares without waggish wvender wages.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
We put out Pharce (an app to let you create mocking or cute videos from pictures on your iPhone) a few weeks ago. (Video here). We sent out a press release, and got about 140 downloads a day for several days after the press release went out.
This slowly dwindled to 40, then to 20, then lower. We expected that people sending the videos to one another would lead to notable growth over time, but that appears not to be the case. (The app lets you email the video or post it on YouTube from the phone).
I am working on a small update to the app, then we're going to buy some ads. I'm just curious if your app took off on its own, or if not, where you're advertising ;-)
I am currently in the same situation but with different perspectives: It took me 4 months to create PozBook all by myself - no investment to lose except time, time and time (and I've never worked so hard). PozBook is one of the few useful and feature packed but beautiful and easy to use applications that could rival what we have on the desktop, and it is universal in purpose: create geographical text audio, text and picture notes, and share them with everyone. You can use it to create guides and publish them to thousands of iPhone users - and any end user can use it for beautiful note taking. Think kml or POI on the iphone, but super easy and beautiful, and with a PozBook Share community website (www.pozbook.com/share) to share your creations. It is a bit more complicated to get than a game, but with so much more value and potential. I will get back to a normal day job now that most of the development is done and will spend my nights advertising and getting the concept out. Sales have been disappointing but it has only started - I have the chance to have a promising platform for content creation and distribution to push as a product, and not a one-time game. Unfortunately good apps don't always get recognized and featured. Apple has to quickly find a way to sort out the applications better- they are at risk of alienating both users who do not find unusual and innovative applications without a long hunt and are stuck with lot of crap applications purchased, and quality developpers who cannot make a decent living making professional applications for the platform. Shameless plug : I am also looking for a developer job in Vancouver - you can contact me through the pozbook.com website.
I think most developers suffer from a product that doesn't have a market, is poorly marketed, or is just plain poorly made.
iFart has a market because it's cheap, universal, and doesn't require any investment of time or effort to use. Call it stupid if you like but the truth is that everyone finds a fart joke funny.
Most programs are poorly marketed. They aren't advertised online or are advertised poorly. They aren't properly keyworded in App Store so that people can find them easily. They don't have good descriptions, artwork, etc in the App Store. Often there is no free version for people to try before they buy. And the problem for the program from the article, Dapple, is that it isn't priced correctly for the platform. After reading the article I was interested in buying the app and pulled it up. $4.99? I buy quite a few $.99 apps and a couple $1.99 or $2.99 apps but why would I spend $4.99 when so many other options are cheaper and just as good at being throw-away fun? If Dapple was $.99 I'd buy a copy today.
In my experience most new iPhone developers that I see complain about sales are the root of their own problem. Their apps look and feel unpolished. They need to go that extra mile to make their app desirable.
Fix these three issues and I think you can make a lot of money on iPhone apps. If at first you don't succeed then try try again.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I released Jiggle Balls on Feb 23rd. My graph looks very similar to Dapple. I've sold 422 units at 99 cents a piece. I've made $275 (enough to pay for the iPod Touch I bought). I've released 1 update and another forth-coming this week. Each update spikes the sales a little bit. I am putting out a lite version next week, so we'll see what that does. However... my expenses are low (just me and my spare time), so anything I make is profit, so I will still find time to do it just for the pleasure of it and the experience. doug funkyvisions.com
n/t
They should.
Anybody selling mangoes, apples or oranges knows that if the damn things are not selling you have to cut the price.
To be musing about this like if discovering something ultra insightful is frankly pathetic...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In the real world you actually sit and think about how you are going to throw 35000 away...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
At least in the UK in certain accounts.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Free isn't the same thing as open.
Where did I say "Open"?
Da Blog
You are indeed a delightfully special little character, aren't you now? I feel that aside from your bizarrely schoolyardish taunts, we may not be using concordant meanings for the words we are exchanging. If you don't know how I define "open", how can you possibly impute its projection to my unwritten intention? How do you define "open". And how do you define "free". I suggest we use the Proudhon definitions. How about you?
Da Blog
... and 99$ for applying to the app store as a developer. ...
I always find it interesting that people will spend hundreds, even thousands for the device, but insist on the apps being no more than .99 cents, because obviously $5.00 is just too expensive. That is funny and sad. If you truly have a superior product, market and advertise it as such and you will be surprised at what you can sell it for, perhaps $9.99, lol, ($50 would be better for something truly superior) just make sure the reality lives up to the marketing hype if you want your company to have a future in the marketplace.
In addition to them taking 30% of each sale, what a non surprise. At .99 per copy you would need to sell how many copies just to recover the $99.00 application fee,
.99 - .29 = .70; (app store taking 30% of each sale)
$99 / .70 = 142 copies to recover the $99 app store fee.
I would rather go out on my own, put up a website and advertise my product for sale....
Oh thats right, Apple will not let you do that will they. Guess that is the price you pay.
I had a problem with paying royalties to a larger company to develop software for their platform. If you were lucky to become remotely successful, they simply come out with their own product to replace yours effectively putting you out of business. And they do NOT have to innovate, just steal your idea, admittedly changing a couple of things so that they can call it their own original work...
The very thing that made the PC platform so successful was that it was open and anyone with a little knowledge could develop products for it. Not so with closed source or proprietary platforms. You think they would learn, but they do not, just look at all the cellular companies still locking down their proprietary hand held platforms...pathetic. Fortunately for those willing to raise their heads up and look around there are plenty of options, here is one.
With Apple, you had no choice but to pay whatever Royalty they required in order to release a product for their platform. Of course that is after purchasing development tools from them in order to develop for their platform.
Way back in the day with the first Apple computer I decided that I did NOT want to go down that road. Loved the computers, but would not consider developing for them. Even if you can muster the fees for the tools and the Royalties, you still have to get your product to market and that can be tough as some friends of mine found out when they created a MacIntosh Works package, back in the day...best of breed with 9 full blown modules (no limitations like you find in Microsoft Works, that require you to pay another fee to upgrade your Spreadsheet and another fee to upgrade your Wordprocessor, and another fee for PowerPoint,(granted those are all in Office today, but not back in the day) etc...; 9 full blown modules: WordProcessor, Spreadsheet, Graphics, Draw, Modem connection; Slideshow; Database; and two others that escape me at the moment. But try to get the distributor to ignore pressure from Microsoft and carry your product when over 40% of their profit is from Microsoft. Yea, good luck with that. The developers of Great Works simply did not have the cash to push it to market around the already established distribution channels who were unwilling to carry them for fear of offending the 800 lb gorilla; thus they sold out to a bigger company. Granted they sold for multi-millions, but would have made so much more if they would have been able to get their product to the market where it was very much in demand based on the buzz in all the Mac publications.
So many companies develop something that is truly revolutionary and unique, however fail miserably in their
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just like in all previous gold rushes, the people making the most money are the shopkeepers...