Over 1k sales for Christmas for IOS indie app (AMA)
I have a little app called SafeSpace which I was working part-time for over 2 years now.
It's a privacy focused photo and video encryption media folder, built with SwiftUI and Composable Architecture.
Which I was mostly promoting through the App Store with ads. But it never really took off, so I decided to go to a Christmas sale called indieappsanta which went super nice. The app went on massive discount from $14.99 - $4.99 (it's still going for a little while btw, check it out) and made over $1082.47 in 5 days (before Apple's tax)
The most unexpected was the geography of stores.
Most of the traffic from the App Store was in US (which is still the case), Australia and UK. But during the sales period it completely changed
US with $333.37
Netherlands with $143.76
Germany with $119.8
Taiwan with $100.47
France with $71.88
Taiwan make sense, but Netherlands and Germany I would never expect. Looks like I'll need to add Dutch and German localization pretty soon.
I think a lot of iOS devs start the career with the idea of building their own apps, and finding real info about App Store sales is quite a problem. So ask me anything you want, will stay in the comments for a while.
P.S. if you want to support me, please check out SafeSpace while it's still on sale https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1536734125?pt=122248301&ct=indie&mt=8
or follow on twitter https://twitter.com/satanworker
I'm preparing the series of articles about CRDT and how to build a reliable sync engine on top of iCloud.
Cheers ✌️
I think even a small change in the pricing model can make a difference. So you got to test, experiment and finally learn. Good luck with everything.
14.99 for an app?
I'm sorry, but when most paid apps go for <$5 I understand why the Christmas sales were so successful.
Is there a reason why it's priced so high? I might understand it more if you have very high operating costs.
Also I followed on twitter. Still think it's an interesting app, so I'm keeping track.
https://twitter.com/therealetch
The main selling point of my app compared to competitors is exactly pricing. Although people are used to cheap apps on the App Store, the quality of cheap apps is lacking, while on the other side high quality apps are all going the subscription route.
For example, most of the similar apps do 2 things:
KeepSafe which is top 1 in the App Store ask for ~ $40 per year (depending on the region) similar pricing to other apps in top 5.
So compared to this, 14.99 for 1 time purchase is quite cheap, although I'm not sure if pricing is pushing away more main stream users
Subscription is different than one time purchase though.
When people see the price, they'll balk at it. But if you let them have a free trial and then offer a subscription within the app, then they'd be more receptive.
Plus you'll have recurring income.