2/3 of iOS apps never downloaded, estimate finds

Thoughts on this? Does it change your view on iOS development?

Personally I can’t see how it’s possible to market your app so badly you never get a single download.

Its simple, you have the marketing ability of me, but then don’t have any family or friends.

Owh… wait :frowning:

Doho… in all seriousness though, unless your app is a complete POS, I can’t see how you cannot get any downloads, period.

No surprise, since there is so much cr@p in the app store.

There are still many shovelware developers that thanks to apple not doing what they are meant to do by their guidelines flood the market with crap that is not even meant to succeed. These apps are not marketed and hence get never downloaded.

Others simply fail on rule 1: Add proper screenshots of your game / app - nothing is worse than apps that are offered on the store the same way most lazy wp7 / android devs do it without or with little screenshots. No normal user will even dare to waste the time to download such an app and you lose a major amount of potentially interested users before they even experienced your app.

Also keep in mind that anything beyond the top 100 of a genre has a high chance to not show up for most users at all as they unlikely dig through that deeply. Combine that with badly choosen tags and you are unfindable basically as genius does not link by tags to make up for dev incapabilities.

its badly flooded

Way too much crap in the toilet and no plunger in sight.

Then you have those who may make something good and have the marketing skills of an ant.

I can see how after the first few weeks the number of downloads could tend to zero, but for the first 2 weeks with any free app you seem to get a few thousand downloads. I’ve got 3 games on the store now and it’s been very eye opening. My first game TorpedoRun gets a regular 600 downloads a day and has done for the last nine months. whereas my better second game Full Frontal Assault is lucky to get 30 free downloads per day! I’ve spent many an hour trying to figure out why and so far I think it has to do with what keywords people search for. If you search for a Naval game or just any combination of Naval my TorpedoRun shows up in the top 6 returned search results. Full Frontal on the other hand no matter what combination of war words I try in the search box I don’t get a mention for dozens of pages.

I’ve decided that people can’t know if a game is good or not without downloading it first so to not get the download in the first place must be a combination of keywords, screen shots and app store icon.

Oh one last niggle, On the app store I got a great review of Full Frontal from a player in the Netherlands, but the way the app store works ONLY people in the Netherlands will ever read it. It doesn’t show up on any other store’s review section. It would be great if all reviews were amalgamated together when you view the app in any app store.

I would not be too worked out about it. My Chicken Panic game is nothing out of this world, its rather lame if I say so myself (was a week-long project designed by my wife based off a game from her childhood, from Georgia The Country.)

The game has had a collective download count of 7,850 copies (the free edition, of course, is most of them, the paid edition only accounts for 52 downloads.)

This is in a relatively long window of time (released January 19.)

It has not done a killing (79 bucks in iAds, 35 bucks in sales) but for a game that I didn’t expect much from, and in a world where some attempt to spread fear saying “oh noes you will never see a downloads!” its not bad.

The Holliday edition of Bomber Cat [free] has been downloaded 7,966 times since it’s release and it never got a feature.

The Mac editon of that, also free, has been downloaded 45,912 times, but that one did get featured.

The iOS paid version of Bomber Cat was downloaded 12,407 times, it did get featured and most downloads occurred during that window. I had a free day that saw about 2k downloads.

The MacOS version was downloaded 213 times, but keep in mind I launched that edition at a rather step price (7 bucks, now 2.99)

Final stat to share:
The Google Play version of the game, free, got downloaded a wooping 617 times. That is free. And anyone that has played the game knows it’s not junk. Compare that to my free Chicken Panic game for iOS and you will also see why I have not bothered porting Chicken Panic for Android.

There is a whole economy of people making shitty little games,… They have no intention of making a good game but making a game that will fit into whatever budget the client gives you.

Case in point: I saw a post on odesk where someone was trying to make a mortal kombat fighting agame for 5k and it had 25+ replies from various developers

The market is flooded. I reminds me of web-pages. In 5 minutes, my daughter created a wordpress website and wrote a few articles. But, her site is invisible - no one notices it, no one counts it. But, with apps, it’s different. Even if you’re just fooling around, all apps go to the same place - the appstore. And it’s not easy to google apps on my device!

On my ipad, I cannot even sort games by their category! Preposterous!

Gigi

Well the idea is anything thats crap will be sink to the bottom and anything that is good will be featured and listed on the front page. I guess the problem is that anything that is just “okay” will also get killed.

Someone is selling the Unity iPhone demo in the app store… they used to have it for free but now they are charging 99 cents. They literally did nothing but build the demo. I’m working on a 3d space game (which is how I found theirs).

If you search for “3d space” in the app store, it’s the 5th app listed.

Here is the link to it.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/3d-space-flight/id303749208?mt=8

(it’s not even in space)

They have 354 apps in the app store…

Someone should make an app that filters out apps with no downloads.

So when you upload an app it will never ever get noticed by that app unless you download it yourself? :slight_smile: Flawed concept imo.

Hey, it sounded good when I read it. Until I scrolled down and read your post, that is.

Not only on AppStore but on PlayStore as well. That’s why we need to spread the words about our game.

Hey, Apple even has a New and Noteworthy page. I frequently scroll through there to see what kind of games there are. Usually it’s crap, as people have stated, but maybe one day I’ll find Shadowgun in there!

Probably because its usually crap you wont find that many people that will be adventurous. I usually just look at featured and then a category I might like, even I dont look in new and noteworthy.

When a platform is new, people buy everything. When a platform looks prospering, many people want to develop for it. Then after some time, the platform can look less sexy, people already own many games and only very good/hip/free games are going to make it. Those which are doing fine are really doing well because of the large installed user base, established structures and so on, it’s a pyramid system.