$0.99 iPhone apps are underpriced
contrast.ie
contrast.ie
1. nag/prompt the satisfied users for a review inside app
2. price it $4.99Without seeing your product, consider option 3- try to improve your software.
EDIT: Downloaded, and I really like it. I've downloaded a ton of apps that were clearly made because "we need an iPhone app with our logo on it", so I had no clue what to expect. Sorry for the uninformed critique :)
we think it's the bees knees. but, try it and let me know what you think.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bank-tracker/id345667440?mt=8
http://www.mybanktracker.com/iphoneThis system really doesn't make sense (you wouldn't remove a great app) and might need to be removed from the OS, or revised.
The OS could for example, prompt the user the nth time an app is launched. But that would probably be annoying.
Or Apple could send an email every now and then to invite users to rate all their apps (or the recently bought) with an easy to use interface, where they can just rate by number of stars (à la Netflix) and possibly add a comment.
IRL, complaining that much would annoy everyone. On The Internets, you just ignore them. It does create a hairy situation for producers, though.
"Chase are murderers!"Only four reviews.
Sadly, I think the majority of low star reviews do not have an actual text review associated with the rating because it's so easy to knee-jerk dismiss the on-uninstall dialog with a low rating.
Perhaps it would be helpful if Apple forced a radio button dialog - why this 1 star rating (e.g. list a few choices - crashes, doesn't run, etc.)
Have you tried correlating your 1-star ratings with the crash reports on iTunes Connect? This is assuming the rating has a date (which it sadly may not).
Downloading it now to check it out/do some testing.
$1 is well below the impulse-buy threshold, and $1 might as well be free for most people. But the difference on the developer's side is that they get something, instead of nothing. $1 compared to a $0 app means a single sale is an infinite (fine, undefined) increase in income, which totally eclipses the chart's 11% net income increase from a %1 increase in price.
From another angle: what if your favorite free software cost $1 instead? Would you still use it? How about you donate that $1 to the developer directly? You'd be in the extreme minority of any who donated, I guarantee it, and if they had charged $1 they'd probably get several times the income from that freeware in a year than from all their donations.
To make matters worse for app-store developers, people are arguably even less likely to donate when downloading from the app store, because it's not built-in.
The point behind the studies he cited was that an otherwise unnoticeable increase in price helped the bottom line. Those studies have nothing at all to do with app store pricing, which doesn't give you the option of even having a 1% increase in price.
The top grossing category section of the argument was much more convincing.
Wrong! Free apps can definitely make money-- just not through software sales. Free apps need to be monetized some other way, and in many cases, this is a much smarter way to go.
The model available to him was limited to clicks and not impressions, so while he has had tens of thousands of impressions and a decently large number of active users, he receives a very tiny number of clicks and therefore makes a profit that is less than negligible.
One of the apps I released on the other hand (on another store), has cost a variety of prices between 1.99 and 2.99, and I've made a few hundred dollars in sales.
Think about it this way: he makes around $5 CDN a week in advertising for his free application which took him weeks to develop, whereas my app nets me around $1.90 USD per sale and it took me about one full day's work.
I've kind of rambled on at this point, but basically what I'm saying is this: I need to sell less than three copies a week to top his profit, and I'm running on a store that has significantly less traffic than the Android Market and selling my app, not giving it away.