I don't know what to think about stories such as these to be honest.
My inner entrepreneur says "Wow, great job guys! I wish you every success".
My inner software developer winces, and fears, both professionally and personally, that the ever-growing number of such low-quality apps will eventually make it pointless for developers to invest in creating a ConvertBot or Instagram.
(FWIW I currently make $15k a month from sales of apps $1.99 or higher)
I just wanted to bring up a point about free-app/knock-off vs. paid quality app.
I would draw a parallel with the fashion industry. Louis Vuitton, for example, will never go out of business because of Chinese knock-offs. Why? because the person who buys the knock off/cheaper product is not their target customer.
Same I think is true with iPhone/iPad apps. Those users who only search for free apps and put up with disruptive ads (let alone click on those ads) are not the target audience of a premium application maker.
Where the cheaper app maker has to churn out dozens of products to make decent revenue, a single app maker who focuses on quality and sustainable business model can really build a meaningful business in the App Store.
- You're conflating a medium (the web) with an action (selling). An excess of crappy websites do not compete with a subscription to Dropbox for example, and there are not hundreds of Basecamp alternatives. A more accurate phrasing for your analogy would be "... made it pointless to charge for access to higher quality webpages". And I would say that yes, there are few examples of pay-walled webpages being sustainable businesses.
- Placing ads is great, providing that a) you can accurately target competitor products and b) the sales you gain are greater than your per-user cost of acquisition. If you have experience of making this work in the mobile space it'd be great if you would share.
I'm just talking from my bingo experience, where I've been told many, many, many times that the instant I have free competition means my lunch gets eaten. (I have free competitors, and they're essentially outsourced customer acquisition that work for peanuts.)
I don't have any experience with mobile. Anecdotally, the CPM rates I've heard for mobile make customer acquisition seem prohibitively expensive for cheap apps, but an explosion of CPM inventory from a wave of free applications lacking in quality means that prices must come down eventually. Increase in supply tends to decrease prices, just like Demand Media exerts a downward influence on my CPAs (while shifting more of my spend away from quality sites and to Demand Media outlets).
"My inner software developer winces, and fears, both professionally and personally, that the ever-growing number of such low-quality apps will eventually make it pointless for developers to invest in creating a ConvertBot or Instagram."
Gimp, OpenOffice, and Linux didn't hinder the popularity one iota of Photshop, MS Office, and Windows (or OS/X) respectively. In fact, the free stuff augments the consumer need for high(er?)-quality alternatives to the free stuff.
That said, I don't think Dash of Color from FreeTheApps even dented Color Splash, which has been cemented in the top 20 overall paid apps for as long as it's been released. Nor has their FilterFX Free app displaced Hipstamatic.
There is _absolutely_ room for low and high quality apps in the App store, as there is room for quality software applications and repackaged GPL apps ported to Windows sold to people who don't know it's available free. Or, for that matter, the Big Mac and the $25 Kobe beef burger.
It definitely creates a lot of noise and worries me as someone who is just about to enter the mobile app market.
I just finished some iOS training and am working on my first paid app. What would you say is the key to getting where you are? Apps with true utility–or something else?
1) Create one app to throw-away - something that's simple, useful to you, and which you are confident you can create. Don't worry about there being hundreds of similar apps. This is your Learner app. Get it together in a few weeks and put it on the app store for $1-$2. Make sure you have some "please leave a review / send email" link that makes it a no-brainer for people to give you feedback. Read them all, but learn to distinguish between genuinely useful suggestions, and comments from people who feel your app really needs their pet feature.
2) Find a need that you think people would pay $3-$5 for, preferably a need that you yourself have, and work on that app using everything you learnt in #1. Get something basic but polished out, then iterate.
General tips:
- Polish is more important than features.
- Ensure you get 6 friends to buy & rate your app (5-6 is the minimum you need for a visible rating).
- Launch at $1 for a week, and cut the price to $1 for a week for every update. It does make a difference IME.
- Read the descriptions of top apps and see how they sell themselves.
- Read the reviews of apps similar to yours and see what people are missing.
- Make it easy for people to send in-app email for support questions. Be the best support person they've encountered. Happy users recommend your app and leave very nice reviews (particularly if you ask for the latter after helping them).
In the early days of the AppStore you could drop your price to $0, then switch to paid, and retain your ranking. Apple quickly quashed this, so perhaps these apps are looking to benefit from word of mouth, or to gain a number of reviews. As I mentioned earlier you need 5-6 reviews before you even get a rating and having more certainly doesn't hurt.
On a similar note, I believe Apple's charts may now be weighted to take price into account, at least in some form. I occasionally play around with app prices to see how sales/revenue/in-app purchases change, and last week I upped the price of one app from $1.99 to $2.99. Sales dropped from ~400 to ~250, but my chart placing was virtually unchanged (I think I dropped once place). I don't believe the ranking is based on sales over a period of days, though it may be a factor, since my ranking does increase/decrease with normal sales fluctuations.
Comments
I don't know what to think about stories such as these to be honest.
My inner entrepreneur says "Wow, great job guys! I wish you every success".
My inner software developer winces, and fears, both professionally and personally, that the ever-growing number of such low-quality apps will eventually make it pointless for developers to invest in creating a ConvertBot or Instagram.
(FWIW I currently make $15k a month from sales of apps $1.99 or higher)
Great comment.
I just wanted to bring up a point about free-app/knock-off vs. paid quality app.
I would draw a parallel with the fashion industry. Louis Vuitton, for example, will never go out of business because of Chinese knock-offs. Why? because the person who buys the knock off/cheaper product is not their target customer.
Same I think is true with iPhone/iPad apps. Those users who only search for free apps and put up with disruptive ads (let alone click on those ads) are not the target audience of a premium application maker.
Where the cheaper app maker has to churn out dozens of products to make decent revenue, a single app maker who focuses on quality and sustainable business model can really build a meaningful business in the App Store.
Exactly. The same is true in films too.
Has the ever-growing number of free, low-quality web pages made it pointless to sell stuff on the Internet? </rhetorical>
I love free competitors. They make excellent places to place ads. ("Want to try a solution for this that doesn't suck?")
So two things
- You're conflating a medium (the web) with an action (selling). An excess of crappy websites do not compete with a subscription to Dropbox for example, and there are not hundreds of Basecamp alternatives. A more accurate phrasing for your analogy would be "... made it pointless to charge for access to higher quality webpages". And I would say that yes, there are few examples of pay-walled webpages being sustainable businesses.
- Placing ads is great, providing that a) you can accurately target competitor products and b) the sales you gain are greater than your per-user cost of acquisition. If you have experience of making this work in the mobile space it'd be great if you would share.
I'm just talking from my bingo experience, where I've been told many, many, many times that the instant I have free competition means my lunch gets eaten. (I have free competitors, and they're essentially outsourced customer acquisition that work for peanuts.)
I don't have any experience with mobile. Anecdotally, the CPM rates I've heard for mobile make customer acquisition seem prohibitively expensive for cheap apps, but an explosion of CPM inventory from a wave of free applications lacking in quality means that prices must come down eventually. Increase in supply tends to decrease prices, just like Demand Media exerts a downward influence on my CPAs (while shifting more of my spend away from quality sites and to Demand Media outlets).
"My inner software developer winces, and fears, both professionally and personally, that the ever-growing number of such low-quality apps will eventually make it pointless for developers to invest in creating a ConvertBot or Instagram."
Gimp, OpenOffice, and Linux didn't hinder the popularity one iota of Photshop, MS Office, and Windows (or OS/X) respectively. In fact, the free stuff augments the consumer need for high(er?)-quality alternatives to the free stuff.
That said, I don't think Dash of Color from FreeTheApps even dented Color Splash, which has been cemented in the top 20 overall paid apps for as long as it's been released. Nor has their FilterFX Free app displaced Hipstamatic.
There is _absolutely_ room for low and high quality apps in the App store, as there is room for quality software applications and repackaged GPL apps ported to Windows sold to people who don't know it's available free. Or, for that matter, the Big Mac and the $25 Kobe beef burger.
It definitely creates a lot of noise and worries me as someone who is just about to enter the mobile app market.
I just finished some iOS training and am working on my first paid app. What would you say is the key to getting where you are? Apps with true utility–or something else?
I would recommend you do two things:
1) Create one app to throw-away - something that's simple, useful to you, and which you are confident you can create. Don't worry about there being hundreds of similar apps. This is your Learner app. Get it together in a few weeks and put it on the app store for $1-$2. Make sure you have some "please leave a review / send email" link that makes it a no-brainer for people to give you feedback. Read them all, but learn to distinguish between genuinely useful suggestions, and comments from people who feel your app really needs their pet feature.
2) Find a need that you think people would pay $3-$5 for, preferably a need that you yourself have, and work on that app using everything you learnt in #1. Get something basic but polished out, then iterate.
General tips:
- Polish is more important than features. - Ensure you get 6 friends to buy & rate your app (5-6 is the minimum you need for a visible rating). - Launch at $1 for a week, and cut the price to $1 for a week for every update. It does make a difference IME. - Read the descriptions of top apps and see how they sell themselves. - Read the reviews of apps similar to yours and see what people are missing. - Make it easy for people to send in-app email for support questions. Be the best support person they've encountered. Happy users recommend your app and leave very nice reviews (particularly if you ask for the latter after helping them).
> Launch at $1 for a week, and cut the price to $1 for a week for every update. It does make a difference IME.
I see a lot of apps cutting their price to $0 for a few days. Does this technique work? What are the advantages of doing this?
In the early days of the AppStore you could drop your price to $0, then switch to paid, and retain your ranking. Apple quickly quashed this, so perhaps these apps are looking to benefit from word of mouth, or to gain a number of reviews. As I mentioned earlier you need 5-6 reviews before you even get a rating and having more certainly doesn't hurt.
On a similar note, I believe Apple's charts may now be weighted to take price into account, at least in some form. I occasionally play around with app prices to see how sales/revenue/in-app purchases change, and last week I upped the price of one app from $1.99 to $2.99. Sales dropped from ~400 to ~250, but my chart placing was virtually unchanged (I think I dropped once place). I don't believe the ranking is based on sales over a period of days, though it may be a factor, since my ranking does increase/decrease with normal sales fluctuations.
Where did you take iOS training?
http://pragmaticstudio.com/