This Feedback is Worthless

Over the last couple of years I've received hundreds of emails from users of my List! and List! Lite apps. Most are for assistance or requests for additional features, the vast majority are courteous, and occasionally I get really nice emails such as this one:

Thank you! I just reviewed this app and it is better than 5 stars.
I love this List app and i cant tell you how many other apps i have tried and deleted and waisted money on.
Your app does everything i wanted and more.
As a firefighter-medic and working in a hospital to home life.. This app has a list for everything I need.
Thank you again

I also receive criticism, mostly through the reviews in the App Store. Sometimes it’s constructive.



Sometimes it's not.



And sometimes it's a little wacky.



But my favorite criticism is this email I received the other week.

This app is worthless....glad I did not pay anything for it.  It well be deleted....

What a maroon.

Clearly the free version of the app allowed you to determine that you didn't want to purchase the paid version, so it was of some worth to you as exhibited by your gladness. In return, I would prefer that you thank me for my consideration.

And what’s the point of sending me an email, but not leaving a bad review in the App Store to warn other people? If it was to convince me that you're a bit of a jerk, then mission accomplished, but I suppose the irony of your email is lost on you.

The Long Slow Decline of App Store Income

I didn’t expect to get rich creating an iOS app. If that were my goal I certainly wouldn’t have create a ‘to do’ list app to compete with the gazillion other ‘to do’ lists apps in the App Store.

But for a very long time I'd been making lists on scraps of paper, so when I first got my iPod Touch in September 2008 and couldn’t find a list app that I liked, I decided to make my own. If I could make a bit of extra money in the process, so much the better.

I released List! Lite in February 2010 and List!, a paid version of the app, in July 2010. Since that time, I’ve released 25 updates including new features and bug fixes. List! has 210 ratings with an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars.

There are many excellent articles worth reading on the challenges of making money on paid apps, but I can nicely summarize them with a single graph showing the monthly income I’ve made on List! between October 2010 and April 2014:



I got a large bump in income shortly after adding support for the larger screen of the iPad in June 2011, but nothing I've done since that time—new features, sales, promotions, and localization—has had any lasting effect on generating sustainable income. At best, all I've done is just slow the decline.

As a hobbyist, I have no regrets on the time I spent developing the app. I learned a number of new things, made enough money to buy some toys, and have an app that I use on a daily basis.

As a developer, I’m glad the only investment I lost was my spare time. There’s all kinds of speculations I could make, but at the end of the day I wrote an app I loved creating that just wasn’t commercially successful. I haven't written my last app, but I now have a more enlightened view of the economic realities of app development.

So if you approach a developer about an app idea that’s sure to make money and they look at you skeptically, now you know why.

App of the Day Promotion

Back in February I was approached about offering List! on a “free app of the day” promotion app. The idea is that you make your paid app free for a day during which you have mass exposure to the millions of users of the promotion app. The benefit pitched to developers is that once the app becomes paid again, there will be a significant increase in the number of downloads (4 to 50 times more). In my case, there was no cost for the app promotion other than the lost sales caused by reducing the cost of the app from $1.99 to free. The results of the promotion during the week ending February 10th, 2013 are shown in the following chart.



I’ve graphed the week of the promotion as having no paid downloads—there were over 446,000 app downloads during the week of the promotion, but only a minuscule portion of these would be paid rather than free on the days before and after the promotion. There was a slight bump of 2 to 3 times the usual number of downloads in the following week, but this wasn’t a sustained trend. So in my case, there was no upside to the promotion.

There was a downside to the promotion that I hadn’t fully considered beforehand. The promotion app was not available in the US App Store, so most of the additional exposure from the promotion was in Europe, Central and South America, Russia, and Japan. List! is not localized for languages other than English and the promotion app apparently did not contain any information about the languages supported by the promoted app. So rather than getting downloads from people who were fluent enough with English to consider using the app, there were a number of people who weren't comfortable with English, downloaded the app without knowing it didn't support their native language, and then left one star reviews because of the lack of localization. It wasn't a huge number, but a half dozen reviews is all it takes to get a one star average. Bottom line: I might consider another promotion like this even though the results were disappointing, but I wouldn't do it unless my app was localized.