Although the iPhone appstore and the iPhone has nothing to do with flashlite, i thought i would take a bit of time to write this article. One of the main issues developers have with the flashlite platform is that there is no direct route to market for your apps, and of course, many a developer has quoted the success of the iPhone appstore, and how (note inverted comas) “easy” it is to sell your content and make lots and lots of money. There has not been a lot of transparency in this process as of far, and it almost seems to be becoming an urban legend of sorts, that if you develop a iphone app and get it on the appstore , you are in line for instant success.

At ustwo™, over the last couple of months, we have created and distributed 2 very different applications for the iphone, each with polar differences in functionality, development time and success. Mills has been releasing figures over the last few weeks of sales, and has spoken in detail on twitter of the processes we have used to try and increase publicity ( you can follow him on @millsustwo if twitter is your thing).

The Applications

The first application we developed and released was Steppin Lite , a free game for the iphone and ipod touch that uses the touch screen to ‘run’ across a pond filled with Lilly pads as fast as you can. The users time is recorded @ the end, and uploaded to online scoreboards. This was then followed by a paid version, which retailed @ £0.59p, and added numerous more level styles with a much improved online score boarding system.

In contrast to that, Mouthoff is a much simpler ‘novelty’ application. The idea is to hold your iPhone in front of your mouth and talk, shout, laugh, scream or sing to get your new lips moving. The unique thing about MouthOff™, and what sets it apart from other similar apps, is that its sound reactive, so the animations move in real time with your own voice. This application had no free version, and also retails at £0.59p.

Development time

To give a comparison of the development time involved in these projects, Our first release, steppin (lite and full version) took a couple of months, with 2 people working on it. This was the first application/game developed in OSX, so there is obviously a learning curve to take into account. For those of you that haven’t played the game (which indecently you can down load from here )

Mouthoff was at the opposite end of the spectrum. With 2 people working on it for a week, it was ready to go live on the appstore.

Steppin is very much a full featured game, which is reflected in the development time, where as mouthoff has very simple functionality, but i suppose is very ‘novelty’. It’s important to note, that as a working development company, having people working on this full-time can be very expensive for a daily developer rate, so it is important to get that money back in revenue. And this is were the trend very much bucks the urban legend of the appstore. If you have spent ages creating a really cool app, surely you should make a fortune? With access to millions of users, all linked into itunes/appstore on there iPhones and iPod touches… According to the marketing given by apple on release of the appstore and the press, surely we should be millionaires in a month or two?

Sales

Unfortunately that has not been the case so far for us, although admittedly, the apps have only been on the market a short time ( so here’s hoping :) ). Below are a couple of images that show the sales for steppin’ and mouthoff, since they were released. I have only added the last weeks numbers here, if you want full details, check out the mills™ moblog , and you can get figures and downloads over the whole month.

steppin figures
mouth figures

The first thing you will notice is the difference in total revenue. To put that in to true perspective for you, steppin and has been out for 4 weeks, and mouthoff has been out for two and a bit.
When you start to see the figures, you start to get a true idea of the secret to success on the Appstore, which to put it bluntly , is marketing and exposure.

show us your mouth off site

The mouthoff application has been heavily promoted , initially by us, but more recently by other blogs, and also tv shows. The viral campaign we started with the website (showusyourmouthoff) has played a large part in getting this exposure by giving users the chance to get their videos featured on the site, and showing people what great fun the app can be.

You’ll notice the massive spike in numbers when it was featured on bbc2 ’something for the weekend’ show. Before this the numbers were falling from the original release, but this picked things up again. The application suddenly shot to number 11 in the uk top paid apps chart. Later in the week, Creative Review magazine did a video blog post reviewing the app, which again has started to make figures rise, and since then , the application has been featured on a number of other reputable blog sites.

We have also been spreading the mouthoff application through Twitter, facebook, moblogs, Press releases and any other social marketing tool that Rowan & mills™ (self proclaimed PReam team) can get there hands on.

All this is a far cry from the ‘post it on appstore , and they will buy’ attitude that seems to be prevalent belief. If you look at the actual number of hours put into marketing and PR , it soon starts to add up.

Again, this is reinforced when you look at steppin’s sales. Even though they are much lower than mouthoff’s, you can see as soon as it became a ’staff favorite’ on appstore, sales tripled initially, and are now starting to rise again.

Conclusion…

So, are appstores nessecary to make decent money as a mobile developer/company? I’d have to say yes, but with a ‘BUT’. They are completely essential as a way to distribute your mobile content to your potential users. Without an easy to use, pre-installed way of accessing a market place to get these applications from, the user simply won’t bother. In my mind the reason apple managed to get the business model so right on their setup boils down to a few key elements.

  • It is so easy to buy
  • familiar system (basically itunes)
  • On every device, and heavily marketed in press and media advertising.
  • Decent developer split so more people develop more apps (really, who wants to give away 70%-60% of your revenues that happen with other traditional aggregation routes to market)

    • The ‘BUT’ comes in the form of if you want to truly succeed and make your development costs ( and a profit :) ) , It is all down to exposure, and getting people excited about your content. Without that, your just lost within the ocean of the 15,000 other apps out there fighting for attention…

    Now we just need a similar setup for Flash lite content, but that’s another story…. ;)

    get mouthoff and steppin from itunes.