Marketing Mobile Applications

The Value of An App User on iPhone & Android

If you've been looking for some data points for your business plan, or have just been trying to figure out if you'll make any money on ads, Mobclix has put together a handy infographic that shows the average revenue for an iPhone or Android app user.

It's interesting to note that iPhone users were worth more than Android users, and that utility customers are better than game customers. The apps profiled for the data had 500k downloads and/or 75k daily users, and are free "top 10" apps.

You can view the full-size image on the mobclix website.

via Mobile Marketing Watch.

Two Key iOS Data Points: Apps Per User & Apps Per Device

The excellend Aynmco blog recently posted two stories that included some important data points for your business plan: iOS users download about 5 apps per month, and More than 60 apps have been downloaded for every iOS device.  

When to Ask Your Customers to Review Your App

Shane from Blue Lightning Labs has some great advice on the Bolt from the Blue blog about how and when to get reviews for your app (and includes some code):

In the fast paced world of the AppStore a user may come across your app in the store, download it, use it and never have a need to return to its page on the AppStore. Consequently a potentially happy user of your app never lets you or anyone outside of their close friends know how much they like it. Politely asking the user for a review has been a great success for Mathemagics garnering it 262 written reviews and 1568 ratings thus far. The vast majority of the reviews are quite positive and generally come with a 4 or 5 star rating.

I believe one key to this success is that the dialog asking for a review is non-invasive to the users current actions. It pops up at the end of a successful game, congratulates them, and politely asks for a review on the AppStore. If the user chooses to review the app they are taken immediately to the apps page on the AppStore. If they choose not to rate the app the dialog goes away never to be seen again. Polite and non-invasive.

Reviews are incredibly important to the success of your app.

2D Boy Shares Lessons from the Launch of World of Goo

World of Goo is the top game at our house right now, and 2D Boy shared some lessons from the launch of the hit game on their blog. First, they talk about the importance of merchandising:

As far as we could tell, there are three ways an app can be effectively promoted:
1. Get it featured by Apple,
2. Get press to write about it, and
3. Be in the top selling / top grossing charts.

It was intuitively clear to us that the most important promotion we could get is to get the game featured by Apple. Promotion inside the sales channel is effective in both retail (the reason publishers buy end-cap space for their games and why impulse items are shoved in your face at the checkout line at the grocery store) and in digital (which is one of the reasons Steam promotions are so incredibly effective and why publishers buy dashboard placements for their XBLA games).

On the importance of correctly pricing your app:

If a game earns 50% more revenue at a lower price point, it’s a pure win situation as the developer makes more money AND more people get to enjoy the game. And if those two things are true, does it really matter what the sale price is? If we all charged double for our games we might all earn more money, but we could also end up earning less money because people would buy much fewer apps.

That, along with examining the top selling games on the iPhone App Store made us realize that if we end up releasing an iPhone version we would need to sell it at a very low price point if we want it to be a top seller in the long run. At the time of writing, 18 out of the top 20 selling iPhone apps are priced at 99 cents. Of the top 20 grossing apps, 15 are either free or cost 99 cents.

On iPad sales vs the Wii and Steam:

World of Goo’s launch on iPad gave us a new perspective on that discussion. In the first month of sales on the iPad App Store, World of Goo sold 125k copies (thanks to being prominently featured by Apple). In comparison, World of Goo’s best 31 day period on WiiWare was 68k copies (thanks to a mass mailing by Nintendo), and on Steam it was 97k copies (thanks to two promotions at discounted prices). So far, the iPad version is by far the fastest selling version of the game, both in terms of number of units sold and in revenue generated.

via TouchArcade.

Make Your Free App UI So Beautiful That People Will Pay to Get Rid of the Ads

The Tapity blog featured the new Robocat app Thermo because of the way they use the design to make  you want to pay to get rid of the ads for 99 cents (if you click on the "x" on the ad it opens the in-app purchase dialog). 

I really appreciate how they kept this app to a single feature (I wish more apps had fewer features). 

You Need to Start Developing an International Strategy: Only 25% of iPhones Sold in US

As we're developing our first app this post from Asymco has us thinking about how to market our apps for iOS and Android internationally.

comScore reported that 15.4 million iPhones were in use in the US as of November. (25% share of 61.5 million total smartphones.)

We also know that about 75 million iPhones were sold by November since the product launched. With about 17 million units older than two years, and assuming that half of those might still be in use and that all the iPhones less than 2 years old are still in use, we get an upper bound of 66.5 million iPhones in use globally.

That means 23% of all iPhones are in use in the US and that 77% are in use outside the US.

Yet Another Reason You Need A Website and Blog for Your App

The number one search for "taxi app" in Google is not an app developer (there are more than 40 Taxi apps), instead it's a popular blogger named James Siminoff.

One thing that jumped out was how much traffic I was getting to a post I did a long time ago about taxi applications on the iPhone.

Well it turns out that I come up #1 if you search “taxi app” in Google.

So since I have the eyeballs (don’t get too excited it is about 100 a week) I figured I would try and send them over to my new favorite Taxi App that my friend Garrett Camp launched called Uber.

The time to start a website is when you're starting to develop the app, and a frequently updated blog can help your search engine rank. If you can't be the first result, it can't hurt to be friends with the top link.

You Can Only Hope That Your Customers Love Your App This Much

Greg Borenstein, a fan of the excellent game The Incident, sweded the app (created a real-life version).

You can only hope that your customers love your app enough to do something as crazy as this.

via TouchArcade.

The Making of the 37 Signals Basecamp Video

37 Signals shared how they developed a professional-quality video for the new Basecamp Web app in just a few days.

"4 days, 50 takes, and a few Skype discussions later we had a final video."

A video is a great way to promote your app (and bloggers like me like to share them, too).

Important Lessons from the Angry Birds Launch

The Sydney Morning Herald has some great lessons from the launch of Angry Birds, the runaway hit that has been downloaded more than 50 million times and consumes 200 million minutes of gameplay daily.

Naming your app is an extremely important part of developing a brand:

Finally, and crucially, Rovio put together a remarkably canny strategy for getting to the top of the iPhone chart. This was where Mikael Hed's commercial nous - a business degree from Tulane University in New Orleans and years working for his entrepreneur father - paid off.

If they wanted to get noticed among all the competing apps (there were 160,000 at the time) he realised they would need a strong brand; to put a face to their product. Which is why the game was called Angry Birds and not, for example, "Catapult".

The launch was carefully planned and involved the publisher Chillingo to get a featured on the App Store:

"Everything was aimed at eliminating luck," he says during a tour of the office. "You could make a game according to your own tunnel vision and then, fingers crossed, if you get lucky, people will pick it up. But we didn't want to depend on luck."

Updating the app with new levels (and birds) and creating new apps based on the original is another key part of the strategy:

Rovio's designers are constantly having to think of different structures for the birds to destroy. Since launching the game with 63 levels in December 2009, Rovio has added another 147, at the rate of about 15 every three or four weeks, in a ploy to keep the game at the top of the charts.

They released special themed versions of the game at Hallowe'en and Christmas last year, and are publishing a Valentine's edition - with exploding chocolate boxes and pink hearts. There will also be a game to accompany the new animated film, Rio, in April.