iPhone development: fighting for more downloads per day

Today I attended the introduction class to a week-long seminar on iPhone development (one year and half too late, probably) which will be in charge of several representatives of Mobivery, a Barcelona-based mobile content development company which currently has 190 applications in the Apple App Store.

Besides from a very informative fly-through of the whole process of getting an app into the App Store - starting with “you need a Mac” and going all the way to “you can choose from different pricing tiers” - the representative presented us with some data from different case studies taken directly from the apps they have developed and put up for sale or download.

iPhone development is not precisely my thing, so even though I have a pretty good notion of the iPhone development process I had never gone out of my way to gather this kind of data. The gold rush of iPhone development is well past us and so companies (and particulars) are now exploring all possible avenues in order to call attention to their apps and to keep the downloads per day vs. time graph from going down too quickly.

“We estimate that there are around 500,000 iPhones in Spain”, he said, and if we add to that the fact that Spanish people are used to downloading their media the conclusion is that there is not much money to be had in the Spanish app market. Two of those downloads per day vs. time graphs sum it up pretty nicely: the first one shows how virtually no paid downloads of an app intended for Spanish customers are made per day; when the app is offered for free for a week, the downloads soar beyond the realm of the graph but, sure enough, when the offer is over the downloads go back to nil. The second graph shows the case of a similar app which, again, has been getting close to no downloads; the company solution is to release a Lite version which prompts for upgrades: the Lite version soars in downloads but the paid version is not affected in the least bit.

The Lite strategy is something that the company is very used to doing and has learned to leverage in the right way, says the representative. He showed how the strategy has yielded more positive results in other European countries like France and went over some strategies the company is pursuing in order to market their paid apps as enhancements to their Lite counterparts.

Getting featured by the App store, he says, is about the best thing that can happen to you. He pulled another of his nifty graphs to show the effect that getting featured had had on one of their first apps - one that made use of GPS to track public bike rental locations back when using GPS was not the norm for apps. As expected, the downloads are affected significantly by being featured, but what’s more interesting is that as soon as the product is not featured anymore the downloads drop just as abruptly to precisely the same level of downloads per day it had before getting featured.

After going through several examples of actual responses they have gotten from Apple when they review the apps for the store (including an actual “we are sorry but there were issues with your app. Please send it again”), he closed the talk by talking to us about one of their most successful apps, called Push the Button. This app was conceived as a sort of proof-of-concept app for the company members to get acquainted with the iPhone development process and consisted of a game/activity which counted how many times the user could push a button in 30 seconds. It was offered for free and downloaded over 600,000 times. When they tried their luck at charging one dollar for it, the downloads stopped. When they made it free again they went back up to the same level.

All in all, a very enlightening talk by Mobivery. It’s always delightful to hear people share their success and failure stories, especially when it comes to both a popular platform like the iPhone and a secretive company like Apple.