Rob's Mobile Apps

Following rather poor sales, I’ve decided to make the Quick Brown Fox a free app.

The app was released about 2 months ago. Initial sales were pretty much non existent. I think I sold about 10 in the first week. So, I spent a day investigating all the app review sites I could find and sent off about a dozen emails requesting reviews. I tried to address each email to the correct person and included promo codes and all the appropriate links to my site and iTunes. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much success. I’m sure these sites get hundreds of requests each day.

Then to my absolute delight, AppStruck actually reviewed my app! I think it appeared on a Friday and the review remained on top of their page all weekend. I was pretty pleased with the review. 3 stars and quite fair I thought.

So, the next day, I checked my sales figure with much excitement and anticipation. Hmmm, nothing – must be the reporting delay. The figures often seem a day behind. I’m sure the next day will be better. No, nothing again. Next day? Nothing! Next Day – Yes! one guy in Japan bought the app!

Not very happy

I decided to give it a while in the hope that someone else may review the app but no such luck.

After almost 2 months on App Store, I sold a grand total of 16 @ 99c. ROI 23c/hour.

Only one thing for it, might as well give it away. I added a little advertisement to the high score screen, released a new version and made it free.

That was about a week ago. So far I’ve had over 900 downloads in 7 days and a 5 star review from a happy customer in the UK.

So what have I learned:

• App Reviews != Sales
  I’m sure a lot of times reviews may help, but there is definitely no guarantee.
• It’s a kind of an odd game and it was difficult to come up with some keywords that I thought might get it found on the App Store. I thought the reason no one bought the app was that not one could find it. However plenty of people have found it now that its free!
• I suspect an odd app like this really needs a lot of word-of-mouth exposure, however I’m not big in the social networking scene so this is a difficult one for me.