UPDATE 7/18: Our first app just hit #14 on Apple’s ranking of “Top Free Apps” overall !!
In case you haven’t noticed, our first iPhone app went live on Friday morning July 11 on Apple’s App Store: the “myLite Color Strobe and Flashlight.” Check out our own web page about the app here, which includes a link to download the app via iTunes (assuming you have v7.7). And, of course, you need iPhone v2.0 software on your iPhone or iPod Touch to run the app.
It was a wild day on Friday, watching all the hoopla about the iPhone 3G debut in the Apple stores and the AT&T stores! Crazy long lines, stock running out, difficulties getting the phones activated because of the huge rush on Apple’s servers. And, for those of us with original iPhones, there was the challenge of trying to download the 2.0 update, which was not easy to do on Friday. (Of course, our developers had it quite a while before.)
But things got even more interesting as the day went along! First, we were surprised to see so many other flashlight apps were also up on the App Store — though we quickly determined they were basically plain white screens, and we noticed that reviewers on the App Store and bloggers were already putting them down as overly simple, and not worth the 99 cents most were asking. So, as the day progressed, our team made a strategic decision. Even though our app was much more than a simple flashlight — we have color and brightness adjustments, plus strobe and trippin’ features — we felt we were largely getting lumped together, however unfairly, with all the other, lesser flashlight apps. So here’s what we decided to do: drop our price to FREE! And that evening I began drafting a news release to announce that fact, since we had already put out a release two days earlier announcing the app at the 99 cent price.
As luck would have it, we couldn’t get our release out late that night (Friday) because the news service web site wasn’t working right! But come Saturday morning, the word went out to the world that we’d dropped our price. And here’s where it gets even more interesting. Before that, our app had not even broken the top 100 apps listed on the App Store. And we were not getting too many consumer reviews on our App Store page for the myLite app. But, over the weekend, things started changing quite rapidly — people were downloading the app with much greater frequency! — and, by Monday morning, we were already listed as the #47 on the Top Free Apps page. We watched in amazement all day as the app steadily went up in the rankings! And the positive reviews started piling up — as, of course, we knew they would, if people just had a chance to try it out!
By Tuesday morning, we had moved up the rankings even further — into the 30s — and some of the lesser, simple flashlight apps were moving down the list in popularity. It was looking like our decision to go FREE was a very smart one, indeed. (And I should say here that we had a plan to make money off our app in another way, which shall remain our secret for now.) By Tuesday evening the 15th, we were into the 20s in the rankings, and still rising! And another ranking we’d found, of “Top Rated Apps” (based on consumer reviews), had us as high as #15 of all apps overall (paid and free)!
Whew! It’s been one wild ride since our app first went live when the App Store opened, just a few short days prior. But we sure became convinced we’d made the right move. So much so that we just had to put out another news release to tell the world about our success, which you can read here.
What’s next? Well, we can hardly wait now till our second, third, and fourth apps get up there — any day now, and many more apps in the pipeline — so we can share the good work of our developers with even more of the growing world of iPhone and iPod Touch users, worldwide. Keep your eye on DoApp!
Posted: July 15th, 2008 by Graeme Thickins
Tags: 3G, App Store, iPhone, iPod Touch, iTunes, myLite app, popularity, rankings