The app economy is growing at a pretty tremendous rate and one of the major innovations in the space is in-app purchasing. With in-app purchasing, users are downloading the apps for free, and purchasing upgrades or new features to the app. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with in-app purchasing like buy new levels in a game, buy virtual currencies or credits, or upgrade the app in a free-trial sense.
With in-app purchasing, developers will see far more downloads because there is no barrier to entry. With a free app, users can download the app and see whether it’s worth purchasing. Since there are far more opportunities to monetize the app, and users can choose what they want to pay for rather than put the money upfront, there will be more money spent and more satisfied users. We’re seeing a lot of growth with in-app purchases and my prediction is that this strategy is so successful, we’ll soon see the end of paid apps entirely. Continue reading ‘Prediction: Eventually All Applications Will be Free’
There’s been a lot of buzz recently over the IHS Screen Digest Table: Global Mobile Applications Store Ranking in 2010 and 2009. Though I’m sure you’ve seen it in many articles, I’ve included here for reference.
Most of the buzz related to this chart has revolved around people saying either Apple still dominates, Android has a weaker showing than expected, or look at how much growth Android has had. Very little has been written about the REAL story that chart is showing: BlackBerry App World generates a higher revenue per app than any other store — by a wide margin. Guess you better drop all your iPhone devs and get working on BlackBerry projects right?Well, maybe, but drastic action to statistics is usually a bad idea. Let’s take a closer look at these numbers and I will make the case that BlackBerry gets hosed by the media in terms of coverage (at least positive coverage) for App World and that, while a drop-everything-for-BlackBerry approach is probably not warranted, if you’re still not considering BlackBerry for app development you are seriously hindering your revenue potential for your product.
Recently, we screenscraped the App World database for a project we’re working on and we came up with some interesting data. After scraping the site, we found:
It looks like App World is the only major smartphone storefront to allow for app name duplication. A search of “glucose tracker” in App World, App Store and the Android Market, reveals that only BlackBerry returns the same app name from two different companies. It’s not clear whether this is an oversight on RIM’s part, or if the company is taking a stance on the issue by allowing app name duplication.
On the one hand, this can cause some headaches with two companies confusing marketing efforts, or having their support lines crossed by users unsure of which company to contact. From a user perspective, it’s not much of a concern because you generally make your app download/purchase decision based on other factors such as reviews, recommendations and price. Continue reading ‘Should Application Storefronts Allow App Name Duplication?’
It looks like RIM is announcing App World 2.0 on June 16th, as they’ve sent out invitations to a press event where they’re showing “what’s new in BlackBerry App World”. We’re not sure exactly what they’ll be announcing, but RIM is fairly predictable in its announcement strategy. The general approach is tell you what they’re going to announce and then 10 months or so later have an event where they say “we said we would deliver X and here it is.”
So what did they say will arrive for App World 2.0? Here is what we’re expecting:
Credit card billing
Carrier billing
Preload on all OS 5 devices and higher
WiFi downloads
Desktop catalog to mirror on-device App World
Microtransactions for games, premium video content etc.
More account management options and search improvements
Greater number of enterprise apps in the catalog (new category perhaps)
Free and Paid catalogs in all countries App World currently supports
