iBokan - iPhone App Development

In this post, I’d like to share our pricing experiment on our first iPhone app and the lesson learned.

Galaxy Impact, a classic brick-break game and the first iPhone app created by Team iBokan, went on sale in iTunes App Store on Oct 27, 2008 and free of charge. It had about 220,000 downloads in first two weeks and was ranked as No 10 in “Top Free Apps” in Game and No 20 in “Top Free Apps” overall, before we started charging at price of $.99. on Nov 9th. Here’s the details

Galaxy Impact downloads before start charging $.99

The downloads for Galaxy Impact in its first two week in detail:

• 10/27: 1,377 (the first day on sale)
• 10/28: 10,839
• 10/29: 13,110
• 10/30: 18,875
• 10/31: 18,556
• 11/01:  25,898
• 11/02: 28,390
• 11/03: 26,156
• 11/04: 18,182
• 11/05: 16,633
• 11/06: 14,883
• 11/07: 13,024
• 11/08: 10,928
• 11/09: 1,153 (started charging: 27 downloads PAID)
• 11/10: 23
• 11/11: 20
• 11/12: 1,435 (free of charge again)

So the free downloads vs for-fee downloads is about 400:1 . This means for our downloads of 220,000, we can get a revenue of $550.  It’s obvious that three’s no way we can make money out of this with price at $.99.

Another lesson learned: before price change (from free to $.99) the daily downloads is above 10,000 but after price changed back to free, the daily downloads is above 1,000 and stays the same way for a long time. If we hadd not experimented on price strategy, the total downloads would have been much bigger.

We decided to try ads and updated Galaxy Impact with ads from Admob along with other new features. There was huge spike of update downloads with peak of 30,647 on 11/22, the second day of on sale.

Galaxy Impact Downloads after Update

As you can see, the huge update traffic does not increase the new downloads, even it’s free of charge. To this day (Mar 18th), there are about 500,000 downloads in total and about 160,000 updates (one third of new downloads).  Note, only updates have ad support.

So how were Galaxy Impact doing with ad support on Admob? Let’s take a peek at Jan 2009

Ad revenue from Admob for Galaxy Impact (Jan 2009)

The highest daily ad revenue is $16.37 on 01/17/2009 and right now it’s about $2.50 per day. Here’s monthly ad revnue breakdown

• Nov 2008: $70.81 (11/20 - 11/30)
• Dec 2008: $236
• Jan 2009: $175
• Feb 2009: $142
• Mar 2009: $67 (03/01 - 18)

With no update or marketing, the current free downloads for Galaxy Impact in March is about 120 every day. If we apply for-fee ratio, this transfers to about 0.3 daily download at price of $.99, which leads to revenue of $.21 for us, which is about 8.4% of the ad revenue of what we are making right now ($2.50) everyday.

Conclusion:

In the case of Galaxy Impact, we have done absolutely no marketing and did 2 updates with new features.

1. Free downloads vs for fee downloads ($.99) is 400 : 1
2. New downloads vs updates is about 3 : 1
3. If you decide to go with ad support, do it from the very beginning.
4. Update does not help much
5. Ad revenue in the long run is more than sales revenue
6. It’s hardly a sustainable business for most average app developers with average apps.