Application stores and marketing

With the flurry of interest in application stores and mobile application distribution a couple of weeks ago I decided to try an experiment:

Can an iPhone application be designed, developed, tested, and released within 1 day?

(I further set myself a target of no rude noises - which reduced the scope for innovation somewhat)

The answer - yes - as within one day I was able to create the Inflation Calculator and go through the signing/release process within 1 day.

Sure enough 7 days later the application appeared in the Apple App Store - and, much to my surprise, has actually been selling (it's marketed internationally, and at the lowest price point £0.59)

We are now one week further forward, and I'm happy to share with you the statistics from a real application's release.

So far I've sold 12 copies, and in 4 different countries.

So, I've earned approximately £4.30 from application sales. I'll take care not to spend it all at once!

While this application clearly is not the ultimate killer application for a mobile phone - there evidently is some interest in the information. Which raises the next question for mobile application developers - how to effectively market a mobile application?

Apple have made it easy to get an application into the App Store - but how does discovery then work? With over 50,000 applications in the application store this is getting harder - however it's not unusual to have very large numbers of items in stores - Amazon has over 2.3m books in it's online store - so Apple's App Store has just 2.3% of the inventory of Amazon.

Thus the same challenge that faces a book author faces an iPhone App developer - how do I get people to discover my application, and buy it?

Some people think that a "recommendation engine" - similar to Amazon's is the way to go. Others think in application advertising is the route to success. Maybe the successful route will be sponsorship by large aggregators who can afford big marketing budgets.

The reality? It's likely to be all of the above - along with surprise viral hits dreamed up by innovative developers and agencies. Given the simplicity of creating applications today, the challenge in mobile application development and profit is no longer the development skills - it's the combination of those skills with the communication and marketing of the applications to consumers.

Others building application stores would do well to remember this challenge - and consider whether they really want to build their own "application store" - or whether they want to invest in creating innovative ways for developers to communicate and market to consumers. Will there be a "google" of the mobile application market - one company that delivers a better application discovery experience to consumers than others (just as Google delivers a better internet search experience than others)

I'm continuing my experiment with the Inflation calculator - next step? Look at using traditional search advertising on the internet to drive traffic to the app store.

Comments

[Maria]

I think iPhone should go for some new techs of advertising...

[Gracelin]

Zz6zwt Kudos to you! I hadn't thought of that!