Now that there are many thousands more applications on the store, I don't think we're ever going to get back to those early days. I think that when the App Store launched, the initial sales numbers were so high, that many developers - myself included - ended up with cartoon dollar signs for eyes, multiplying the first few months of sales figures out to a whole year. It's well publicised that the store is pretty crowded now, and it's getting increasingly harder to find things. Do you think there is currently a long-term business model for developers of niche-apps? I think it's a much harder market than it was back in July. TiPb has been looking at the App Store and whether or not there is a "long tail" for developer income. Read the rest of the interview after the jump. To a certain extent, the blog itself /is/ a form of marketing - I don't think I can really deny that, given it is raising the profile of our software. If they remain flat, with all the other changes, then I'm going to have to try some more traditional marketing beyond the Google AdWords adverts we are already running.
The real question is what will happen to sales then.
#PCALC ITUNES STORE UPDATE#
I'm working on a small 1.1.1 update at the moment to fix a few things, and I'll likely add some more layouts and themes. So far, there has been a relatively small boost to sales, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to my changes, and how much is just down to the overall publicity that the article generated. I've also tried a few other suggestions, like renaming the app to "PCalc RPN Calculator" to make sure it appears during searches for the word "calculator" which it didn't before. It's unclear whether it really is a trick, or just what you are supposed to do, but it does seem to work. I talked about that a bit in a follow-up post here.
#PCALC ITUNES STORE SOFTWARE#
Some pointed out the "Availability Trick" to change the App Store release date for your software when you do an update, to make it sort higher up in the listings. Many iPhone developers contacted me privately, and via the blog, to say they had encountered similar problems with sales after the recent changes to the App Store.
What was the reaction like to that article, and did it bring about any changes in your current thinking or how you plan to proceed with PCalc going forward? James Thomson: Reaction was interesting. TiPb: James, you recently blogged about PCalc in the context of a "postmortem". Following up on his recent blog postings about the challenges involved navigating the still-nascent App Store business model for developers, and TiPb's own look at whether or not there's a "long tail" potential for the market, James was gracious enough to sit down (virtually) and share his thoughts with us about the issues facing 3rd party iPhone developers going forward.
#PCALC ITUNES STORE FOR MAC OS X#
James Thomson is the acclaimed developer behind DragThing for Mac OS X and PCalc RPN Calculator for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
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