This graph caught my attention big time this morning.
Found this on Gizmodo [AppCubby]. Product Life Cycle (PLC) of an iPhone App goes through pretty tough times. By no means, the graph above would depict a typical PLC of an iPhone App. Please dont take this phrase literally
. iPhone Developers haven’t made much except for a few lucky ones like the Trism game developer. Developers like Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory, developers of Frenzic and Twitterific and David Barnard of AppCubby have shared their experiences of why iPhone Apps development cannot be profitable in most of the cases; thanks to skewed app positioning algorithm in iTunes.
Craig Hockenberry – Both of our products, Frenzic and Twitterrific, have been quite successful in the App Store. But what happens when we start talking about bigger projects: something that takes 6 or even 9 man months? That’s either $150K or $225K in development costs with a break even at 215K or 322K units. Unless you have a white hot title, selling 10-15K units a day for a few weeks isn’t going to happen. There’s too much risk.
AppCubby – Spikes are nice, and quite welcomed, but I’m trying to build a business, not a roller coaster! With enough good press spread across a few weeks, an app can build a base, and gain some traction, but a single article is often not enough to propel an app into stardom. As with much of my efforts at marketing, things would probably be a bit different if I weren’t selling niche apps.
Read more – Craig Hockenberry and David Barnard
[via - Gizmodo]
Tags: iPhone App, PLC, David Barnard, Craig HockenberryIf you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed.
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[...] has been lately criticized by few top iPhone app developers for not doing enough to make sure that better and popular apps show up on top somehow. Amid this criticism, this week [...]
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