Jan Zdarsa I suppose this headline could not surprise anyone. The fact that development for the iPhone/iPod Touch pays off has been known for about a month now. If you doubt it, take the Trism game he developed for the iPhone as an example the only person, set the price at $4.99 and in 2 months she earned him more than $250.000! I don't even want to think about how much the game Super Monkey Ball (price $9.99) made, which sold more than 20 units in 300.000 days. But SMB is considered a higher category game, it was accompanied by great hype and not a single person worked on it.
For a long time, Apple blocked applications that they did not find useful and unnecessary. Ever since Apple slightly relaxed this policy of theirs, there have been a lot of "stupid" apps. One of them is, for example iFart Mobile od Joel Comma. It's nothing more than that you select the sound of a fart and when clicked it will play. Alternatively, you can set the timing and trick this app on a friend. Of course, the application found its target group and iFart Mobile has become quite popular.
The goal of success was not only correct price setting at $0.99, but also promoted through community forums. Then it was only a matter of making the application she got as high as possible in the ranking and thus became more visible. She managed to do this relatively quickly thanks to the fact that she was included in entertainment applications. For example, a new application in the games category has a much harder time, as it is a really popular category for developers (but also for users). So how did this app do?
The author released the complete sales for individual days:
13.12. – 296 downloads – #16 entertainment
14.12. – 841 downloads – #76 overall, #8 entertainment
15.12. – 1510 downloads – #39 overall, #5 entertainment
16.12. – 1797 downloads – #22 overall, #3 entertainment
17.12. – 2836 downloads – #15 overall, #3 entertainment
18.12. – 3086 downloads – #10 overall, #3 entertainment
19.12. – 3117 downloads – #9 overall, #2 entertainment
20.12. – 5497 downloads, – #4 overall, #2 entertainment
21.12. – 9760 downloads – #2 overall, #1 entertainment
22.12. – 13274 downloads – #1 overall
This is a very good example of how sales increase as the app climbs up the ladder. And even more incredible is the increase in sales if the app makes it to the top TOP10 apps. The numbers are absolutely incredible, for such a simple application that doesn't actually do anything. iFart Mobile, for example in just one day (22.12.) proved, after deducting 30% of Apple's commission, earn a whopping $9198. In total, even more than 10 thousand dollars in 29 days of sales!
I think that it would be enough for some Christmas presents already, but this application is at the peak of its sales right now, so this income is certainly not final. And how many hours can it take to program such an application? A few hours?
But Joel isn't the only blogger to share his results. Another is for example Graham Dawson, who shared his results from app sales on the Australian Appstore. Dawson programmed the app Oz Weather, which displays the weather forecast for Australia. His key insights are:
- Getting to number one in the Australian Appstore means daily sales of over 300 units
- Being in the TOP10 means daily sales of 100 units
- 20 pcs are needed for a possible TOP50
These results are for paid apps. Free apps will require a higher number of downloads per day. It also presents the results from the Australian Appstore on a graph.
And the last person I would like to present to you is Lars Bergström. This is behind the popular WiFinder application, for example. Thanks to daily sales at the level of 275 pcs/day, it reached the 11th place in the UK Appstore, and with the daily number of downloads of 750 pcs/day, it reached the 3rd place in the German Appstore. You can see on the graph that these two markets are relatively dwarfs compared to the US market. But still, I think these are decent numbers.
Of course, these numbers related WiFinder back when it was still a paid app. After it became a freely downloadable app, the data looks completely different. WiFindera has reached the best 58th place in the US Appstore in the ranking of apps that are free. For this he needed about 5-6 thousand downloads per day. Overall in the world with WiFinderu on this day downloaded 40 units per day. That, for a change, should be an indication of how it is the iPhone app market is huge.
Why did I write such an article here? Perhaps because this could be the right impulse for a person who was deciding whether or not to try iPhone programming. And maybe I'll be able to review his app here in a few weeks or months! That would really make me happy :)
