Well, well!
Black Friday has reached even the app store. After all, the app store is a store like any other stores.
But it is not easy to realize how intense is the “black friday”, because there is no “Special Sales” section to discover those “deals” in the App store. But those of you who browse the app store have probably noticed an unusual amount of apps that have shifted their price for the week end, probably in order to generate more attention, downloads, ratings or simply just say “thanks” to App downloaders. Developers use “price shifting” all the time. But Black Friday sees a logical acceleration.
So we decided to take a closer look. As a matter of fact, we constantly take a closer look in order to bring you the best app store deals in our apps. But we wanted now to take a macro point of view to the situation.
- During Black Friday (and week end) over 1415 apps have dropped price (went free or cheaper)
- This represent a cumulated price drop (or saving for consumers) of $5425!
- About 38% of those apps have gone completely free and the rest have just reduced their pricing but remain paid (eg: from $2.99 to $1.99)
- This is more than double the normal rate of what the app store is used to
- In a close past only 11/11/11 saw a stronger “deals” activity with more apps dropping their price (1508 exactly) but with a lower cumulated total of $3900 in savings. Interesting date for a saving event.
To be accurate the numbers are actually higher. Many apps are constantly or very frequently playing with the price of their app, creating a “fake” promotional activity with unique objective to game the store and the price tracking engines. We call them “yoyo” apps. Including those you would see 20 to 25% additional more apps to the stats above [in our apps we filter yoyo apps to bring you only the freshest and best deals]
Here is below a graph to help you visualize this activity.
Developers know this is a hot period to drive download and they prepare in advance for this period. The App store is nothing more than a retail destination and app downloaders are always in search of good deals.
Black Friday is an evidence of that. But this happens all the time at a different scale.
