Here we see a steep 50% drop-off with total sales of 9 copies, corresponding to $46 in revenue. So what happened to the paid version in its second week? The idea being that a writer might initially be satisfied with the free version, but would sooner or later come up against the app’s database limitations, leading them to consider purchasing the paid version. I expected the Lite version would give the paid app more of a ‘slow burn,’ leading to more sales in the long run rather than an immediate sales boost. This affects free apps the worst, with higher sale prices attracting more serious customers and generally higher star ratings if your app is good. What it mostly does is lowers your app’s average star rating by one or more stars. The rate-on-delete feature on the iPhone and iPod Touch is ill-advised in my opinion, even if the original intent was to garner additional ratings. If it’s not for them, they won’t hesitate to rate it at one star upon deletion. Some people will wonder what your app is and give the description only a passing glance before downloading. This was over ten times as many as the paid version! Free certainly overcomes any barrier to entry, with the unfortunate side-effect that anyone and everyone will download your app. Story Tracker Lite had 209 downloads, peaking at 79 downloads on August 21st. How did the Lite version do in its first week? Not too shabby! I submitted Story Tracker Lite a week after submitting the paid version, and it debuted on the App Store on August 20th. This was in the days before Apple allowed In-App Purchase (IAP) in free apps, so the Lite and paid versions had to be separate apps by necessity. I developed the Lite version simultaneously with the paid version, using the exact same codebase and a separate build target to create it. More recent versions contain other differences. The free version is identical to the paid version, aside from being limited to five stories, five markets and five submissions. If a potential user balked at the price, they might change their mind after giving the free version a spin. I figured a fairly high launch price would almost require a free ‘Lite’ version for users to test-drive. The Lite VersionĮnter Story Tracker Lite – my secret weapon (or not!). I’d estimated the total number of potential paid users at around 1000, so the app would be on target at the end of year one if the trend continued. The app sold 18 copies in its first week, bringing in $100 revenue at the US launch price of $9.99. It was a modest beginning, but not entirely unexpected given the size of the niche. So much for a quick and easy development cycle! Here’s how Story Tracker did in its first week on the App Store: Story Tracker was approved by Apple and became available on the evening of August 14th. Six months and 300+ hours of late night and weekend design, development, and testing later, I finally completed the app and submitted it to the App Store. I began developing Story Tracker in early February 2009. My primary goal was to learn how to develop an iPhone app from scratch, and hopefully make some money in the process. The app does a whole lot more, but that’s the basic gist of it. Most publications disallow simultaneous submissions, so it’s in a writer’s best interests to ensure they know what stories they sent where and when. This app would allow a writer to keep track of all their story, novel or article submissions right on their iPhone or iPod Touch. With my fiction writing background, a story submission tracking app was an obvious unfilled niche. For my first app I wanted to create something fairly simple that shouldn’t take more than a few months to complete. Since I’m a software engineer in my day job with over 10 years professional experience, the learning curve wasn’t incredibly steep, but it still took a few months to improve my understanding enough to contemplate writing an app for release on the App Store. I signed up for the iPhone developer program in December 2008 and began learning Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, and the iPhone SDK. Since my iPhone app, Story Tracker, recently celebrated it’s first six months on the App Store, I thought it’d be a good time to share some of my experiences and give some perspective as to how well a niche application such as mine is likely to do. It’s been especially eye-opening to read blog posts from independent developers going into the gory details of life on the App Store and learning what worked for them and what didn’t. Since the App Store’s inception there have been some huge success stories and many more a tale of woe. Few developers earn enough to live on, and for many, iPhone app development is more of a hobby than a sustainable business. For the vast bulk of developers the reality is a good deal more modest. We’ve all seen the articles touting the big bucks to be made from iPhone apps, especially in the early days of the App Store.
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