From 0 to 450k, an App Store Success Story - With Charts and Numbers

I'd consider that "featured" because you touch the little "featured" spotlight icon in the bottom of the App Store to get to these apps.

I probably buy a game from these sections every week, or 2 weeks, but I almost never scour the store for hidden gems myself.

I think this section of the App Store is a HUGE draw for developers because it allows them to use their imagination when creating a new game and they still have an inkling of hope that they'll get noticed or featured.

In the Android Market however - if you create something awesome but original, you're pretty much doomed to obscurity unless you find some other marketing avenue to drive traffic to your game.

Or maybe by some miracle Google will feature you, but they have pretty limited space available for featured apps, and nobody seems to know how those are chosen.

The little bump at oct 2 is $240, so it looks like each major horiz line is 2k/day. It seems the day he posted this, it made just north of 9k/day.

Note also that 450k download number for the free version is now > 1 million!

From its App Store description: Downloaded over a million times, woah!

[Edit: make that 2 million now http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810010]

It's not just the title that was wrong: when I load the article, there is nothing compelling in the first 3 pages of text! It takes scrolling a lot before some useful data shows up here and there. No wonder it didn't get any upvotes the first time.

Anyone care to speculate or enlighten the rest of us on where this pearl comes from?

If you release on Thursday and there are problems, you can always fix them on Friday. If you try and release on Friday, any problem will make for an unhappy releaser.

Trainyard was at $1.99 at launch and for a while after that. I figured it was a low introductory price, but not so low that I'd get careless users who wouldn't put any effort into the game and would just give it 1 star reviews, which was a bigger problem back a few months ago before Apple took out "rate-on-delete".

These days, I feel like there are less tangible disadvantages to the 99c price point, other than the fact that you make less per sale. There's still the issue that users are willing to put more effort into a product they pay more for, and will even go to further lengths to defend it, because they want to justify their purchase and their taste.

On the App Store, it all comes down to perceived risk. If a user is unsure about an app, they probably won't spend much more than 99c because they don't want to overspend on a dud. Once a user sees an app in Apple's "featured list" or has used the lite version of that app, they'll be much more willing to splurge on a higher price, because they know what they're getting.

For Trainyard, I felt that there was no longer a big difference between the $1.99 and $2.99 price points, because by the time a user arrived at the purchasing page, they already knew they wanted it.

All that being said, there is a large contingent of users that seem to only buy apps at $0.99, but most of the time, your apps won't be visible to those users. The moment I reached the top 50, I knew I would have tons of that sort of user looking at Trainyard, so I did the price drop.

You sell your app for 1.99 and get a bunch of customers, who speak to other people and in time sales in this particular market start to slow down considerably. At this point you increase the price to make up for lost revenue on new sales. Then after sales start going under a threshold of popularity, you come out with a free version to appease markets that have been untouched by your project yet, but it also happens to have the massive effect of a new type of consumer that's more concerned with the expected vale vs real money value is now interested in your app. Some of them will buy the 2.99 version, but most will probably not. Then you come out with a sale, and boom it's now in reach for all those people that though 3 dollars was too much. Now you have massive sales and publicity, and when it starts to slow down you're back to increasing the price.

Then comes a time where there are no new markets to exploit, so you build a a new app or a continuation of the old one, a sequel. At this time you also lower the price to 0.99 just to make sure you have the most exposure possible. Only now you have the advantage of past and present publicity and if rightly timed, momentum... And then off course you repeat the formula depending on your market and the viability of your app.

My startup tracks pricing on iOS Apps (among other products) and its fascinating seeing how much pricing volatility occurs.

For instance, we've found that that Apps generally fit into two camps: those that change their pricing consistently; such as:

http://www.happybuy.com/product/Jog-Log---GPS-Run-Tracker/ap...

Versus those Apps which try to keep pricing stable and only have one-off promotions; such as bejewelled:

http://www.happybuy.com/product/Bejeweled-2--Blitz/apple-app...

The general notion and hope behind such price changes is to get an influx of people in to buy rapidly (to grab the limited time discount price). This in turn hopefully pushes the App up the sales chart where it will receive more visibility and in turn more sales from users who would not otherwise be aware of the product.

Yeah, absolutely. I've heard way too many stories about return policies and all that on Android, so I think I'd try to do the same thing they did. It really depends on the market at that point in time though.

Nope. :)

400k now. Yeah pretty crazy, I've almost used 40 gb of disk space, and if the traffic keeps up, it'll be a TB of submissions. That being said, it's also a bit unreliable and users often have connections fail when submitting, but it's really pretty solid. I've now switched to Dreamhost PS, so it's a little more expensive, just to make sure it's a bit more reliable.

It depends on your definition of "decent", but I wouldn't be surprised if there are many. This very article would be an example, if the author had not decided to release a free version and the Italian press hadn't picked it up. Prior to that, the exact same game languished in obscurity.