About the technical part
Many programming languages advertise themselves as simple and easy-to-use. Well, Objective-C is not one of them. Most languages start out as simple, and become increasingly difficult over time. Objective-C is hard to begin with - when I first started writing code in it, it was ugly, unreadable, and totally worthless. But over time it became simpler. It starts to show its beauty after long hours of coding. I never thought I would drop C# as my weapon of choice, but Objective-C has shown me a new world. Maybe it's just me getting better in general (I hope). But I must say that Objective-C impressed me, and if you see learning it as a barrier, you should know: it is absolutely worth the time invested.
About Apple
I'm no fanboy. I tend to look at things objectively. I do not think that Apple products are superior - in fact I do not think superior products exist. My experience is that their support staff is nice and helpful, even responsive - if they respond. Once you got in touch with them, you are in tech support heaven. But sometimes, they do no respond, or they send you some standard reply.
Their way of doing things can also be annoying (and I am not talking about being unable to maximize windows, I have learned to live with that). In the beginning, paperwork was tedious, and most of the time I had to rely on forums and blogs to help me out with some details. iTunes connect is slow as hell (more on that later). Approval policies are strange (so far my only problem was that I mentioned in my application description that blurry images on some devices is an OS bug - they didn't like that). But overall, I think they are better than most companies. And these annoyances are most likely necessary when you have to deal with so many users and developers.
About sales and reviews
Before I get to the numbers, there are some important conclusions to make. First of all: as the number of applications approach 30000, you have to chances: invest in marketing, or update regularly. It is all about visibility. If people can't find your product, they won't buy it. Being in Top100 lists also help. I have seen developers pushing out updates with descriptions like "Minor tweaks". I can't help it, but I think this actually means "I moved a few methods around, so Apple won't notice that this is essentially the same product". I always try to add additional features, or at least fix bugs whenever I release a new version.
I also noticed that some applications have glowing reviews minutes after they are released - I wonder why these comments have perfect wording, sometimes even ridiculous claims that remind me of this T-shirt. What I noticed is that the number of reviews and the number of downloads correlate best when there is a huge problem with your application. And most reviews are very like YouTube comments. I have seen some that are just a bunch of random characters.
Also, people tend to request new features in their reviews - and proceed to give your app a 1-star review to get your attention or because they miss a feature you never advertised. And the worst part: you include the feature they want, and then they forget about the review. It stays there, in all its one-start glory, while the feature they wanted is implemented, documented, advertised and in the end forgotten about.
So let's review sales numbers! I am going to show you some charts, but first, let's review my portfolio:
MovingBoxes
My first application. Okay, that sounds pretty bad. It doesn't have a fancy name, and it is a very simple game. It wasn't even my idea - but it is fun and addictive. It is also pretty much forgotten, has some glowing reviews, and was downloaded only occasionally before I made it free for a weekend. The free spike was pretty significant, then it was forgotten again.
PolySolve
I never expected this one to sell well. It was more like a proof-of-concept, an application very few can actually appreciate. It solves polynomial equations with the Newton method. On good days, 2-3 copies are sold.
Montage
My first serious application. Updated frequently, and with nice sales numbers - compared to the other applications. I have one thing to confess about this application: two weeks after I released it, I noticed that a similar application, Collage has already been in the store for quite some time. Of course you have every reason to believe that I just copied the idea, but to be honest, I didn't know it existed when I developed Montage. (Always do your market research. I searched for montage, but never for collage. As you must have noticed - if not, I am very happy - I am not a native English-speaker, and I just didn't think about the other word.)
Montage went trough quite a few updates, it was restructured and rewritten many times, and I think it is one of the most powerful photography apps out there.
Scissors
When shapes were introduced in Montage, I though you could use the same interface to crop photos. (Okay, I know, I'm cheap - I just recycled some code.) It is quite easy to use, but 1.0 had a huge bug, it couldn't handle image orientations correctly, so I made it free for a while, and eventually fixed the bug. While it was free, it was downloaded 7000 times.
Montage Lite
After I saw how much better free apps sell, I released a Lite version for Montage. The model worked, but I have yet to see the long term effects.
So let's see some graphs! This first one shows overall sales for the past month or so. I do not have detailed data from before that, as I started using AppViz around that time. (It is a fantastic application. I still have a few days from the trial, but once I get my money from Apple, it will be the first thing I buy)
That is not very informative, is it? As you can see, free application sales greatly outnumber paid ones. So let's break it down. Th next one details the sales numbers before I started making my apps free:
Spikes are updates. PolySolve had its best day on May 3 with 4 applications sold. And that was when I started experimenting with making applications free for a while. I had little to loose, and even less to gain :)
Only if these were paid sales... Still, when I started developing, I said if I make 100 bucks, I made money. And that goal was met within days.
Conclusions
I would probably do much better if I had more money for marketing. Then again, I am happy with these results. I am working on a lot of things at once - iPhone development being one of them - and this one at least pays :).
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