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I’m sorry I haven’t blogged much this week. I’ve been building a new chookyard (Chooks = Chickens)
We’re lucky enough to have a fairly large block of land and have been growing more and more of our own food over the last few years. I’m reducing the size of the lawn – which did take around 4 hours to mow, uses too much water and doesn’t do much for us really. I’m replacing lawn with corn, heirloom vegetable crops, fruit trees plus obviously we have some chickens! At least we know the fruit, veges and eggs have no pesticides, hormones etc.
We’re now going to increase the chook population from 3 to 8 so I needed to build a new enclosure…
ANYWAY, that was a fairly long excuse on why I haven’t blogged lately!
Wobble Premium began to slide down the charts last week, so before it dropped out altogether, I have sacrificed some sales and used it to promote the free version of Wobble. The idea being to get the free version to the top of the charts, then upsell people to a better featured application from the free version. This approach is working nicely – with our paid sales increasing again now that our free installs have started to jump rapidly.
Wobble Free is now at #29 in USA and top 10 in Australia, UK, Japan and several Euro countries. Wobble Free has had total installs in 6 days of about 120,000, with 35,000 of those today.
Wobble premium is still doing pretty well with about 2000 a day and it has sold just over 150,000 – I’ll have some more detailed stats up soon.
The branding is getting a refresh next week too – thoughts on these new icons anyone?
It might take an hour or two to land in iTunes.
We submitted this on the 11th of Feb, not too bad – 10 days for approval. I got notification late on my Saturday night, so Apple are working long hours on approvals – jolly decent of them!
Anyway Wobble Free mostly has the same features as Wobble, but it will run a couple of iterations behind – so currently doesn’t have thumbnails for example. Also you can only save one Wobble composition per hour (I may adjust this in coming days dependant on our usage data).
The aim of Wobble Free is to show how good Wobble is and try and convince doubters to upgrade to the paid version. I’m not interested in advertising anything else when we have a perfectly good product to sell.
I think the long term business case is weak for free versions that rely on advertising revenue, firstly the amount of advertising required to make real money will annoy the user – secondly the drop off to obscurity is sufficient that the developer will no longer earn enough to support the application. from the Pinch media Presentation is seems that free app revenue cannot compete with that of paid – and certainly not in the long term.
My belief is that Free applications will attract a large number of people who are not willing to buy under any circumstances – as well as “try before you buys”. So these non buyers are unlikely to click on an ad within a Free app and then buy something at the destination. Over time, CPMs on mobile advertising are therefore likely to fall to about the level of social network ads – ie low. If somebody won’t shell out $0.99 to try an app, getting them to buy anything that is advertised in Free applications will be difficult. If they don’t buy, advertisers will dry up or lower bids.
Reports I have had from other developers who have tried advertising their apps show that they will not go back to it – and it is very unsuccessful.
Obviously this applies to “advertising” a premium version with a lite version, however if the app is good enough and the lite version has a feature or two missing then an upgrade might entice the user. We shall see!
We have longer term plans for Wobble, and we now also have another 7 Applications in the planning and early development stage.
From the below it looks to me like there is only one way to make money from free apps – either a LOT of advertising, or as a lite version to encourage people to upgrade to a paid version.
I have posted before about the differences between Wobble and iJiggle, seeing iJiggle up near the top of the free store is great! I guess an update with ads is coming?
Click here for a demo video of Wobble
If you like iJiggle you should probably try Wobble and see how much better Boob Wobbles can be!
Wobble was built to Wobble Boobs, and it does that task very well.
If you want to Wobble Boobs – buy Wobble, if you want an App with advertising and a poor copy of the boob physics – try iJiggle.
There is a reason Wobble is 4.5 Stars and iJiggle is 2.5 stars! 🙂
Thanks to all our great buyers!! And thanks for reviewing it so highly – average rating is 4.6 stars!!
Updates are due in the next few days – and boy are some of them cool..!
We’ve switched the team working on the new app over to updates for a while to get all the feature requests done.
I’m somewhat happy<!> with what we have achieved with Wobble to date, and I’m looking forward to launching our next App on an unsuspecting populace in about 3 weeks. No Boobs or Booty – I promise 😉
$37,000 in one day? hmmm – Wobble is only<!> earning $10,000 a day at number 3 in the USA.
I have a cunning plan that will see us at number 1 on Wednesday next week.
Or maybe Friday. 🙂
I hope.
#1 in Japan
#1 in Australia
#5 in Norway
#4 in USA (edit – just jumped to 3 right when I posted this!)
#3 in UK
#9 in Canada
When Wobble has dropped out of the top 10 I’ll be publishing a full set of graphs showing rank to sales.
We’ll comfortably pass 100,000 sales within the first month.
There are 3 types of Application I think:
1. Pure entertainment such as games, Sudoku etc – for the owner of the phone
2. Show off applications to entertain others – something you can show your friends “Hey check this out”
3. Productivity/business type applications.
The pricing of (1) is dependent on how many minutes in the persons life your app is going to fill.
The pricing of (2) is $0.99 almost without fail
The pricing of (3) is dependant on
a/ how much time you will save the user.
b/ how much money you will save the user
Most importantly – ALL of the above are dependent on the PERCEPTION of those values that a user has when they front up to buy the application.
Since there is no try before you buy system – and I doubt there ever will be – users make their decision (and developers earn their income) based on a screenshot, a bit of text and some reviews.
Copywriting is as important as the code!
Firstly, if you are competitor… or have an application in the top 10 drop me an email – I have some information for you on how we can work together. wobble at clean dot net dot au
As a competitor I guess it could be frustrating to watch a simple idea do really well, after spending a year on a complex one and not getting a huge sales volume. Wobble is a pretty good idea that has captured the imagination of users all over the world. You simply can’t get to the top of the charts unless you have an easy story to tell or you have a really compelling idea.
Out of 257 reviews at the time of writing there have been 175 x 5 stars and 40 x 4 stars.
I guess our message is simple enough for a user to “get it” in a few seconds.
A word of advice for developers – simplify your idea, simplify it again, and then discard 90% of the features. If you have too many features nobody will get it.
iPhone Application Development. Hot, Fresh Ideas 