App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #1: Category Featured

If you are selling on the App Store you might start wondering on how you will sell your Apps.

Well, some people won’t think but just put their App in the store and wait what happens (I am such a guy ;-)

But afterwards I made some observations I would like to share, especially because there are so few developers that share their experience with the Store.

I will split my observations into different posts to make it 1) easier to read and 2) to allow myself to pause between posts :-)

I will write about the following conditions and events:

  1. Category Featured
  2. New and Noteworthy listing in iTunes Category
  3. “Free for one Day” Promotions
  4. in the Spotlight / in the “What’s hot section” on the iPads App Store
  5. What’s new listing on the iPad and iTunes
  6. Keyword optimization
  7. TV Popularity of an unrelated show
  8. Visual Quality (yes, you heard me!)
  9. Ranking Positions (Top 10 – Top 100)

Not necessary in that exact order. I might sort the list after everything is written and published.

These conditions and events have been made with three different Apps totally unrelated to each other.

So. Let’s begin.


#1 – Category Featured

jQuery Reference is a nice small App to lookup all import jQuery related stuff without opening a browser or searching google. Basically it is a searchable list of the jQuery function listing and its documentation.

The App has been released on Apr 14th shortly after the iPad has been launched and Apple was still playing with the App Store functionality.

In the beginning it climbed into the Top 25 of its category, which wasn’t too hard because there were not many iPad Apps. After a few days it slowly lost its ranking and finally went into something below 100. It came back between 9am – 8pm PST into the rankings when people were buying it.

All numbers for sales and rankings are for the US Store only!
Excluding the rest of the world keeps the stats clean from unknown factors or random customers in some distant countries.


Ranking

On May 5th I noticed a spike in the ranking in its category “Reference”. The App was in the “Featured” Apps on top of its category.

Within hours it jumped back into the top 50 at, this time because of it was “Featured”:


The ranking got a bit more solid for the following two weeks until it was removed from the featured listing.

Screenshots: Category Featured

This is how the featured looked like on the iPad. When someone opened the category “Reference” he got a list of featured Apps on top.
The App was three screens next to the center on the category “Reference” on the iPads version of the App Store:

 

Sales Numbers

If rankings are affected, sales must be too, because only sales can push you up in the rankings.

Well, here are the true sales numbers:

 

Keep in mind that the sales statistics are compiled only once a day on the end of the day. The sales numbers are in units.

The average of 4 sales per day increased to 6 per day which is a 50% increase. The percentage should not be applied to other Apps, the sales numbers are too low to read too much into them.

 

Interesting is also what happens after the featured status was gone. Here are the sales numbers for four weeks after that:

The sales average dropped back to an average of 4 per day and the ranking went down to below the top 100.

While this looks and sounds like nothing was really going on, looking at the big picture of the revenues of that timeframe everything becomes clearer:

The sales were constant in the featured time compared to very random sales before and after. The week following the feature the sales were still a bit higher, which might be caused by the higher rankings. After that sales dropped very fast to zero.

I plan to submit an update with some minor enhancements to see how much influence it has.

 

Conclusion

Conclusion? It’s nice to have such a small category feature and it makes a difference but it won’t make you rich.

There were only 3 million sold iPads after the analyzed time (wasn’t it 3 million after 80 days? correct me if I’m wrong!), making possible customers still very rare.
But when I first seen the feature I was thinking about hundreds of possible customers buying my App – well, the next day told me otherwise: two more customers ;-)

It seems that Apple has dropped the Category-Features in many categories, maybe because it was too much work and too less revenue ;-)
The game section appears to be the only one left which such a Featured-Listing.

 

Oh, and if you are curious about the App, you can find it here: jQuery Reference :-)

Published on 2010/06/29 14:24.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , ,

Analytics for iPad, Release 1.2

A new release for Analytics for iPad has been submitted to Apple today.

Depending on the current speed of Apple’s review process it may take about 10 days to hit the store.

Here is a list of all the things to come with the 1.2 release:

New Features:

  • eCommerce Reporting added
  • Forward Reports as Excel-CSV
  • Forward Reports as XML
  • Possibility to switch to another account added
  • Language Support for Reports added for:
    Deutsch, Français, 日本語, Nederlands, Italiano, Español, 中文 (简体), Русский


Improved:

  • Animation for Fullscreen Reporting improved
  • Report Titles shortened for better readability
  • Several Reports display more than 10 entries by default (configuration for an exact count is on the way)


Bugfix:

  • Fixed a crash that happened if the Premium-Upgrade was done too fast after application launch
  • Fixed a problem in the Login form which blocked a second login after a time out


In the meantime we will work on other features to improve Analytics for iPad to meet your needs!

Keep sending us emails with your ideas and wishes, so we know which direction to go!

2010/07/03 – Today the update hit the store, watch out for update notices in iTunes or the App Store to get it on your iPad!

Published on 2010/06/27 21:37.
Filed under: Updates Tags:

product sections added

I have just started to move the product descriptions of all iPad Apps to this site.

That is:

(click on the link to learn more ;)

All posts are dated back to their original release date.

Published on 2010/06/27 21:14.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: ,

UIScrollView and lazy loading

If you have encountered memory problems loading too many images into your UIScrollView, lazy loading them is your answer.
Lazy loading describes an easy technique to load only what should be shown, no more.

Lazy loading of images in a UIScrollView is critical because of the iPhone/iPads/iPods low physical memory.

Doing it on the other hand is very easy if you follow these four steps:

1. Listen for scrollViewDidScroll on your delegate, like this:

-(void)scrollViewDidScroll:(UIScrollView *)myScrollView {
}


2. Calculate the current page using the known size of your images:

	/**
	 *	calculate the current page that is shown
	 *	you can also use myScrollview.frame.size.height if your image is the exact size of your scrollview
	 */
	int currentPage = (myScrollView.contentOffset.y / currentImageSize.height);


3. Look if the image already exists, if not, add it:

	// display the image and maybe +/-1 for a smoother scrolling
	// but be sure to check if the image already exists, you can do this very easily using tags
	if ( [myScrollView viewWithTag:(currentPage +1)] ) {
		return;
	}
	else {
		// view is missing, create it and set its tag to currentPage+1
	}


4. And don’t forget to clean your memory:

	/**
	 *	using your paging numbers as tag, you can also clean the UIScrollView
	 *	from no longer needed views to get your memory back
	 *	remove all image views except -1 and +1 of the currently drawn page
	 */
	for ( int i = 0; i < currentPages; i++ ) {
		if ( (i < (currentPage-1) || i > (currentPage+1)) && [myScrollView viewWithTag:(i+1)] ) {
			[[myScrollView viewWithTag:(i+1)] removeFromSuperview];
		}
	}


= And the final combination of all steps:

-(void)scrollViewDidScroll:(UIScrollView *)myScrollView {
	/**
	 *	calculate the current page that is shown
	 *	you can also use myScrollview.frame.size.height if your image is the exact size of your scrollview
	 */
	int currentPage = (myScrollView.contentOffset.y / currentImageSize.height);

	// display the image and maybe +/-1 for a smoother scrolling
	// but be sure to check if the image already exists, you can do this very easily using tags
	if ( [myScrollView viewWithTag:(currentPage +1)] ) {
		return;
	}
	else {
		// view is missing, create it and set its tag to currentPage+1
	}

	/**
	 *	using your paging numbers as tag, you can also clean the UIScrollView
	 *	from no longer needed views to get your memory back
	 *	remove all image views except -1 and +1 of the currently drawn page
	 */
	for ( int i = 0; i < currentPages; i++ ) {
		if ( (i < (currentPage-1) || i > (currentPage+1)) && [myScrollView viewWithTag:(i+1)] ) {
			[[myScrollView viewWithTag:(i+1)] removeFromSuperview];
		}
	}
}

Published on 2010/06/27 12:50.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , , ,

Telekom on twitter

Have you seen this?

http://twitter.com/deutschetelekom and http://twitter.com/Telekom_hilft ?

“Der Rosa Riese” mit nichtmal 160 Zeichen – Wer hätte vermutet das die Telekom einmal Support im “Social-Network” macht?

Ich finds super! Vor allem weil das Feedback wirklich hilfreich zu sein scheint, dazu noch ehrlich und für jedermann nachlesbar.

Von mir ganz klar ein:


Macht einen super Eindruck!

Auch im Allgemeinen scheint der Support der Mobilfunkanbieter besser zu sein, zumindest macht es derzeit für mich den Eindruck. Liegt vielleicht auch daran das ich erst zwei Verträge gekündigt habe und von beiden Anbieter jetzt einige Male nett angerufen wurde.

Published on 2010/06/24 20:02.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: ,

Support is so yesterday

Sometimes I wonder how much support one need.

I am working with Google Apps for emails, Apple for selling iPhone Apps and Amazon for some hosting.

All three companies are major players when it comes to internet services.

All three offer some very unique services at a very good price.

In the previous 6 months I had several support issues with all of them and was left wondering, how much support does one really need?


My answer is: None, well, a little bit, but it should be organized.


Let my explain why I came to this conclusion:

These three companies do their homework and have the ambitions to provide very solid premium services. Normally there should not be a need for support because services are running and everything is explained in a help section. That does apply to 99% of their customers for 99.99% of the time.

If you have a support request it will normally be something you can get help yourself by reading the help sections or it is simply a not (yet) supported feature. Use it as it is or leave it.

So why the need for support, if everything is working as expected and you can’t change the services themself? Right, no need for it!

This is exactly how we have run Google Apps the first year without the need for support, we run servers and services on Amazons WebServices the first year without the need for support (except some billing related request in the beginning) and sold iPhone Apps for the last two years without the need for support (except one support request on contract beginning).

But nothing is perfect and sometimes problems emerge that can’t be foreseen. In these cases a well organized support structure is needed. You will need to a clear statement when the problem occurs, a status about the progress and a final statement about it being solved/closed.

From the support requests I had in the last months, I can see only one company offering that kind of basic support structure: Amazon

Published on 2010/06/23 15:15.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , , ,

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