Saturday 24 October 2009

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
  • 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

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