BarCampLondon7: iPhone Stats

Chris and Simon gave a good description of what it’s like to be popular in the Apple App Store.

• get an angle for the app
  • 0870 talked about in Guardian, twitter, TechCrunch, …
• 0870 download stats available on simon’s website
• marketing from Apple is not the be all and end all
  • and you have no control, so no warning when serious traffic hits…
• top 5/top 10 is the big hit
• when you put out an upgrade, 60-70% of new downloads will hit your app (and your feed)
  • again you have no control of when this happens
  • it’s usually at night (in the UK)
• hosting:
  • simon started on slicehost
  • went down after a couple of hours…
  • moved to rackspace cloud (engineX)
  • their cheapest server — has cost about $10 so far
• Kieran: tune apache so it can handle more connections at once since mobiles will talk for longer
• Ads:
  • good at the beginning but tailed off rapidly
  • Simon looking at premium ad suppliers
  • need 500K impressions/month
  • made $800 this month, but could make more on a premium network
• Q: Is it a point against you if you release your app on Cydia?
  • A: don’t think so, but then haven’t tried
• stats for paid:
  • if you’re lucky you’ll get 1000 a day
  • that will get you into top 25
  • a little more will get you top 10
  • if you’re focussing on a single territory, make it the US!
• iPhone apps are a great marketing tool
  • but probably won’t cover your costs…
  • Nigel saw a company that saw increase on their mobile web site when the iPhone app went live
• subscriptions are rolling:
  • app will warn you that you need to purchase a renewal
• Kieran: in-app purchasing is extremely successful — much more than subscriptions
• Even Nike couldn’t get app fast-tracked….!
• submitting & checking by Apple:
  • even new versions get treated as a new app
  • they only tell you one problem at a time
  • it’s about a 2-minute review — not a QA test
• AppViz — you need it for viewing your stats
  • nikf: there’s some equivalents that run on your iPhone (see markjnet’s review)
• 0.5% of users write a review, and less than that actually write a comment
  • paid apps get more reviews — people have invested
  • people don’t know how to do reviews unless they delete the app
  • appirater is an open source library that will prompt people to put in a review and take you to the right place on the app store
  • definitely put a feedback screen in the app
• putting apps cheaper at the beginning doesn’t seem to make much difference
  • there’s a bit chasm from free to paid, but then once you’ve made it paid there’s much less of a drop-off