Well i checked it out, and after seeing that Mumford and Sons "The Cave" was one of the songs i couldn't help but buy it. Very cool app
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Christmas 2011 Showed Significant Sales Boost for iOS Developers
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Well i checked it out, and after seeing that Mumford and Sons "The Cave" was one of the songs i couldn't help but buy it. Very cool app
I completely agree. The App Store design favors the top apps. It is difficult to get any visibility for the vast majority of apps as the App Store continues to fill with titles. The layout and search functions of the store are too limited for the number of titles.
The only thing I've seen that is worse is the new Windows 8 app store concept. The tiled presentation is absolutely horrid for a "Start" menu and it is even worse for a storefront.
Trouble is then you'd have loads of people signing up to list their apps and then they'd get lost in that pile too.
For what it's worth sales of my TiledMaps doubled from Christmas Day to Boxing Day, and made $3 total.
Am I the only one who is still irked by Apple taking almost a third of someone else's work? Even the government doesn't take that much on the first dollar and eBay only takes 10% for hosting a product to sell.
Probably not. I'm realistic though, they provide an international point of sale, good SEO for your page, decent and timely reports, and a hell of a lot of bandwidth. All these things I don't have to spend time on, so I can just work on apps. They also provide the framework (API) and created the ecosystem itself before anyone else did. (I think). Would I be happier if it were less? Sure.
Regarding visibility, I'd like to see them expand on the "people who viewed this app also bought..." and possibly an AppGenius like their Genius for iTunes songs.
Actually, I'm not. The way they did it is also sort of a win-win situation. It's a heck of a lot better than many other avenues already in place for quite some time. That is, if you have anybody else publish your work. For many, (especially retail) the take is significantly larger, giving the devs less of the cut, and what's worse is that they actually risk loss a lot easier. They have to sell a significant amount more to break even.
So interestingly enough, the App store is probably one of the most painless ways of distributing your software through another host as you don't pay a cent to cover unsold games. Outside of your own internal payments, there's no significant upfront cost to you. Sure, there's the developer's fee, but it is definitely well affordable to even the most meek developer trying to break into the industry. Now try doing that for Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and their handheld markets. The only way of doing it cheaper is if you do all your own publishing, distribution, marketing, and that's after you made the product. The marketing alone, just to even App Store standards, can cost you a pretty penny before you even sold your first game. You need to put it on sites with high viewers.
People may try Facebook and Twitter, but people don't just generally or randomly search through those to find games. They aren't exactly friendly to that kind of searching. Youtube also takes some great effort and luck to get attention as well, unless you are already big.
So yeah, unless you have that good stroke of luck, a dev can't just get by easily by just coding a game and selling it. They have to run and finance the business structure around all of that to sell the game. That structure which is completely outside of just the part that is just paying other members of the development team (if a team). With the App Store, there's little more to do other than code, send it to Apple supplying the information you want to go with it, and of course describe all of what the application is supposed to do.
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For my app, Photo 365, it doubled in sales for Christmas time. Went from around 50 to around 120. This is worldwide.
But for some reason on Dec 29th, it did 628. I can't figure out why either. I'm not featured in the app store I the US, where most of the sales came from.
Pretty excited about it. Hope it holds for awhile.
But for some reason on Dec 29th, it did 628. I can't figure out why either. I'm not featured in the app store I the US, where most of the sales came from.
Pretty excited about it. Hope it holds for awhile.
Check Google to see if someone did a review for you. I got a spike that held quite a while (and is still holding on it's 3rd month) and I'm not really sure why. I cut the price of the app, the 4S came out and someone wrote a great review of it, so it's one or all of those three.
I had cut the price of the app before and the difference in volume didn't make up for the price, so I changed it back.