Christmas 2011 Showed Significant Sales Boost for iOS Developers

[MacRumors]

Each year, iOS developers scramble to position themselves well ahead of the iTunes Connect shutdown/freeze in order to benefit from any boost in sales from the holidays. NYTimes wrote of the phenomenon this year, as explained by iOS developer Bryan Duke:

"It's typical to see a jump on any major holiday, but Christmas is the biggest one," Mr. Duke said. "I'm certainly hoping for a nice big Christmas bump this year."

This boost is what drives many of the massive holiday sales as developers jockey for position before the iTunes Top 200 charts freeze for the holidays. Major companies such as Gameloft and EA get in on the action to flood the charts with their apps.

Camera+ developers TapTapTap shared their iOS app sales numbers with us again this year which shows the effect in dramatic fashion:

TapTapTap's app sales figures for Christmas week

TapTapTap's Camera+ [App Store] application had been floating around the ranks 4-8 and settled at position #8 in the Top 200 list during the holiday freeze. Their average sales had been around 18,000 sales in the days prior to the holidays, but shot up to a peak of 73,808 sales on Christmas day. The graph above also includes sale figures for Faces and Voices 2, though the vast majority of sales were for Camera+. At a $0.99 sales price that means $51,665 in revenue for the company on the Christmas day alone after Apple's 30% cut.

The increase in sales is reflective of more iOS device activations and the gifting of iTunes Gift cards for the holidays. As shown in the graph, this sales boost does sustain for some time after the holidays.

Article Link: Christmas 2011 Showed Significant Sales Boost for iOS Developers

[michaelvoigt]

Now that itunes connect is back up, I was able to verify my sales numbers and I to saw a 50% sales increase for our children's book DinoBoy.

[bettaboy123]

I usually don't buy apps, but I got an iTunes gift card and I definitely bought some apps. Glad to be helping out these developers.

[mms13]

My sales numbers for my app Shuffle+ doubled, from an average of 1 unit a day to 2 units on Christmas. Damn you TapTapTap.

[Buckeyestar]

In other news today, rain is wet.

[FrizzleFryBen]

Originally Posted by mms13

My sales numbers for my app Shuffle+ doubled, from an average of 1 unit a day to 2 units on Christmas. Damn you TapTapTap.

I just checked out your app. I will be your average of 1 for today. Nice work.

[kirky29]

I bought a quite a few apps this Christmas actually, all for myself

[BJMRamage]

great news for developers.

I happened to purchase several apps during the week of days before/after Christmas. Mainly because of price drops/reductions that made me say "why not?"

It is funny to see some drop a lot...like the over-priced Charlie Brown Christmas App that was about $7, dropped to $4 then was down to $1. (still didn't get that one though)

[Akarin]

Excellent ! Happy holidays !

[Consultant]

That's pretty impressive, considering most people give iPod touch or iPad for xmas, and that more iPhone are sold (but probably not gifted at xmas).

[gigapocket1]

Originally Posted by michaelvoigt

Now that itunes connect is back up, I was able to verify my sales numbers and I to saw a 50% sales increase for our children's book DinoBoy.

Originally Posted by FrizzleFryBen

I just checked out your app. I will be your average of 1 for today. Nice work.

Make that 2 units

[commander.data]

Personally, I'm very curious how many sales a #1 position on the App Store represents and how much revenue a #1 grossing app represents. I'm assuming GTA III must have made around $2 million by now in the 15 days since release. That may not be much against full console releases (GTA IV had a budget in the $100M), but it must make mobile releases credible against handheld PSP and DS releases.

[TallManNY]

Originally Posted by gigapocket1

Make that 2 units

Make that three, Shuffle + seems like a neat app. A little extra battery usage, it would seem, but a nice feature allowing one to scan through random songs while listening to current song.

[marting]

Originally Posted by mms13

Damn you TapTapTap.

Indeed. One of my apps went from 0 to 5. The other (free one) went up more on the 27th than on the 25th.

No doubt this is why they put the app store freeze in, to minimize gaming the top 10+ positions.

[Consultant]

Originally Posted by commander.data

Personally, I'm very curious how many sales a #1 position on the App Store represents and how much revenue a #1 grossing app represents. I'm assuming GTA III must have made around $2 million by now in the 15 days since release. That may not be much against full console releases (GTA IV had a budget in the $100M), but it must make mobile releases credible against handheld PSP and DS releases.

iOS is already credible against other releases. For example world of goo:
http://obamapacman.com/2011/02/world...inux-wii-xbox/

[phlavor]

I, for one, gifted my son some apps Christmas morning. I went that way instead of an iTunes gift card because he's new to the iPhone and doesn't know really know what it can do. Also being a broke college student he would have flinched at a $10 app.

[*LTD*]

This is an obvious development, but it's also known that developers who want to make money develop for iOS. Now throw in Christmas sales. Paydirt.

[imanta]

Honestly what this really shows is that the developers that are highly favored by Apple are seeing major upticks over Christmas day while the rest of the dev world only sees small gains.

For example, Camera+ (which is an awesome app) saw this kind of traction because they are featured by Apple in over 167 different places, not all of which are sales driven (Top Paid, Top Grossing). And do you even want to think about the numbers from Rovio, Halfbrick, or Chillingo?? Fruit Ninja is featured in over 700 places and Angry Birds over 1,000 and both are on ~100 separate App Store home pages.

Most of us saw sales increases (we saw about 500%) of course which is great, but this goes without saying as people are looking to buy. I really think Apple in the end needs to work on discovery within the App Store. Too many good apps, games, and developers are not finding their way to the surface.

[ironsienna]

Jeez... How some developers can sale so many apps and some others ( including me) after spending more than a couple of thousands hours just for the implementation of one app dont even sale 1/10000th of their sales...

[bacaramac]

The shuffle+ app looks pretty cool. I would buy if I used iTunes for music. I unfortunately use Rhapsody so it's no use to me. Surprised you haven't seen more hits for it. I would say throw some money at advertising it and it would take off. Or sell it to Apple since this should be built into the Music app. Haha.

[SherTN]

Originally Posted by gigapocket1

Make that 2 units

I purchased, too (this thread made me sign up for the forum).

[rmwebs]

Pretty pleased. Had a 250% increase on Dec 25th, and an overall increase of 280% between 23rd and 27th. A bit higher than last year, but nothing groundbreaking or unexpected.

[AppEzzy]

Originally Posted by mms13

My sales numbers for my app Shuffle+ doubled, from an average of 1 unit a day to 2 units on Christmas. Damn you TapTapTap.

Yep, TapTapTap is just killing it. I hope someday we have a Christmas like theirs
Our sales were more like your's we did have about a 40% increase but still on some small numbers. Got to keep writing some new apps for next Christmas.

[Jaredly]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Originally Posted by TallManNY

Make that three, Shuffle + seems like a neat app. A little extra battery usage, it would seem, but a nice feature allowing one to scan through random songs while listening to current song.

Shuffle+, make it 4. This is a great app and I never would have even guessed that it exsisted.

To macrumors:
Would you guys consider making a page where small app developers could post their apps. There are so many apps out there and i think it would be cool to see what people from our forum are creating.

[GenesisST]

Should read: Christmas <any year> showed significant boost for <anything>...

Glad for devs though.