Medialets

It looks like a simple price change in the App Store may have revealed just how extensive the gap is between free apps and their less-downloaded, paid brethren.

Right now the Top Paid app is Units Convertor - available for $0.99 as a Paid download.  However at some point after July 28th, the app made the jump from being a free app to paid-for, and apparently took its App Store calculated popularity with it.  On July 28th, Unit Converter was the 48th most popular free app, yet today, as a paid app is #1.

While it’s possible that Units Convertor built up a huge fan base as a free app, then garnered enough support to become the Top Paid app, but it’s more likely that in changing the price, Units Converter changed the peers it was being compared to, and the number of times Units Converter was downloaded for free dwarfed the competition of competing paid apps.  Of course, this is all conjecture, seeing as download data is not made publicly available, and Units Convertor may have risen to the top of the paid downloads list legitimately due to its rapid emergence and growing number of supporters.

So what’s the aftermath of this going to be?  Some opportunistic developers are likely to try exploiting this, using their relatively overwhelming volume of downloads as free apps to boost a paid rating, at least until Apple changes its policy for converting free to paid apps.  And for Units Convertor, this switch has garnered a decline in reviews.

On the other hand it also highlights the unique window of opportunity developers can take to profit from their code.  By offering two versions - one free and ad-supported, and one paid and ad free - it offers developers the opportunity to profit from the mass distribution advantages of a free app, while offering a way to reward the most loyal users with a paid app that gives users the benefit of an ad-free app and the knowledge that they are directly supporting the developer.

Idea:  If you’re going to provide a free and paid version of your application, consider how your users will migrate their data from free to paid.  You might want to offer a WebDav sever to migrate data between versions (though you’ll want to tell your users before they upgrade that you’ll be moving the data off the device, only to put it back on a few moments later).

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Medialets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.