iPhone sales and the App Store dynamics

The yellow brick road of the iPhone world is not all that hunky-dory after all.

Countries were iPhone has yet to hit the mark.

Amidst all the hype of iPhone developers striking "gold", here is some data that is being shared by the owner of Dapple, and a gold-rusher, and one out of Australia. In general, people have been hesitant in sharing this info.

Pricing has also been an issue, with $20-apps a distant dream, as highlighted earlier.

Some data-bytes from Pinch Analytics analysis, that they shared:

• App Store rankings tend to depend on a 24-hour rolling window of units downloaded


• Appearing in a top 100 list increases daily new users by an average of 2.3x


• The average price increase drops demand to 25%


• You need 20,000 downloads to get into the top 25 now, versus 10,000 six months ago.


• Only about 20% of users will keep using a free application beyond the first day.


• After a month, only about 4% of users will still be using a free application.


• Advertising is not a solid business model (it works, but it can’t replace paid sales revenue)

Finally, a list of iPhone dev resources (its a big list) - with some good video tutorials available for various levels.

P.S. One by-product of the App Store model, is that it encourages "typos and lower quality" (as making releasing new updates to an app is one way to get onto the "New apps" list - which has a direct correlation of sales.

Incidentally, on the dev-side, dates are a "pain" to deal with.   Here is a way to deal with them, along with a technote on debugging, as well as a level 2 - intro into the iPhone.