I hope you're sitting down, boys and girls, because what I'm about to type will probably rock the foundation of your entire world: it turns out that the iPhone SDK and a few hours of your spare time are NOT a license to print money. I know, shocking isn't it. Sure, deep down we've all known that the good times have been over for a while — I personally realised it was finished when I saw an article about it in the Sunday Times Magazine — but this may still come as a shock to some people, such as my little friends here.
It's been just over a calendar month since Lexical, my first iPhone app, slipped quietly into the App Store. I wrote it in a few weeks after the project I'd been working on for the previous few months ran spectacularly into a brick wall. I really just wanted to prove to myself that I could actually finish and ship a product.
The chart above shows sales of Lexical for these first five weeks of its commercial life. Week one is particularly impressive (comparatively speaking, of course) given that Lexical appeared on a Thursday and so only represents four days of sales. Its 29 sales are more than the total for the following weeks (14, 4, 4 again and 2 copies, respectively) and simply go to re-underline the importance of the 'New Apps' lists in driving sales.
If you followed the link above, you would have probably drawn your own conclusions about why Lexical hasn't been selling very well. The app icon is dull (or as I like to think of it, elegantly simple), there is only a single line description, and the screenshot is particularly uninspiring (although to be fair that captures pretty well the game's visuals). Coupled with this goes the fact that I made no attempt at promoting it elsewhere.
So I guess the take-home is that, yes, App Store success and the riches and fame which go with it are still possible, it's just that, like everything else worth achieving in life, it now takes some serious commitment and effort to make it. Maybe I should have had the random tile-sorting code generate a swear word each time. Rejections are still great marketing tools. Maybe I should push out incremental update after update to keep it near the top of its category list. Whatever, I'm off to work on another couple of iPhone apps right now. Maybe the next one will sell a million copies.
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