AppsFire.com ★ blog ★

True. The top 100 favors apps with general appeal. I don't think, however, that niche apps cannot succeed on the app store.

Developers have to face it: niche apps aren't going to get into the top 100. This means they absolutely cannot sell for 99 cents. Why? Because the 99 cent model is an app-store dependent model. Advertising a 99 cent app has almost no possibility of returning your investment. Also, the press tends to neglect niche apps. Thus, the app store charts are your only hope and getting there is a huge feat, even for apps with wider appeal.

Some niche apps won't work. Either the niche is too small or the niche isn't willing to pay more than a few bucks for an app (or both).

Its not impossible though. If your niche is large enough or if it is willing to pay more, you can make it work—though an extreme case, Wolfram Alpha's $50 app has done very well and I've seen others like it.

Further reading along these lines:
http://www.taptaptap.com/blog/convert-first-month-sales/

http://tapity.com/iphone-app-marketing/convert-150000-and-traditional-vs-hit-driven-iphone-apps/

A niche app won't mean a thing if no one can find it. The mobile app store needs more ways to find apps - either randomly sorted, sorted by rating, community picks, 'users who bought this also bought...', etc.. Everything is sorted by sales, so the things that get the most sales also get the most traffic and thus more sales - it's a feedback loop.

Also, the mobile app store only lets you see 100 apps in a category. This means that tens of thousands of apps don't even show up there. Search is great, but only if you know what you are searching for (ie, doesn't work for 'browsing'). It's very hard to find things the way it's set up now.

It would be nice if Apple gave more app discovery tools but they haven't. Right now we have to live with what we have.

Niche apps (and apps in general) cannot depend on the app store as a marketing tool. In the beginning, when there were a few thousand apps, that was viable. Now, with 100k apps, it isn't. Developers need to find ways to market the app outside the app store.

There is an other way to look at it: why should all apps be easily visible to everyone? In fact, exactly as is logical with the long tail theory, many apps are only of interest to a few people, and if you trust the long tail theory (in this case I do) they will find the apps that interest them via their networks, not via any search on the store.

yes and no, since the number of possible sources of informations, and their targeted audiences, makes it possible for anyone to know about the apps he is interested in via other sources than a search on the store. Frankly the store is of no interest in most cases, but an appsfire :) or a tweet or just a recommendation from someone of my tribe will do a great recommendation job...

I think one of Apples functions (unless appsfire gets there first!) is to have one of the main sections, e.g. remove the top grossing apps section and replace it with something not too different from how stumbleupon works for web browsing. With a little info but a good portion of randomness it could just work.
The current genius results dont really work, it's too literal, why would I want more apps like I have already?!

Interesting statistics, but I'm curious, how many users are you basing this data on? Can you reveal the size of your user base? The more users, the more credible, of course.

I certainly like your model better than the spyware-ish approach of Pinch Media and its ilk.

This isn't going to be an easy problem to solve for anyone. On one hand you have Apple who, from a business perspective have no real incentive to expose apps/games that aren't selling extremely well. On the other hand you have some really great games/apps that never get exposure. There isn't going to be a single solution to this. It's probably going to take external efforts to get those apps and games visible that Apple isn't directly exposing.

Thanks for reporting how many users you have.

I think your service is valuable, and I've installed and will use your app, but I have some doubts about the validity of data from just "a few thousand" self-selected users being used to extrapolate how everyone who has an iPhone uses it, which is how your graphs are being interpreted and causing such a stir on so many other blogs.

Granted, I know little about statistics, and polls or surveys, so I may have my head up in some dark orifice in that regard. As I think about it, I know Gallop and other polls are based on very small samples relative to the size of the US population, which they extrapolate out to the population as a whole. I'm not sure I trust their sample sizes either, but they've got a lot of experience at it, and I suppose if it works for them, it probably works for iPhones. ;-)

Exactly, and that's why I chose to install the app. It serves value for those who understand what it says, and you're open about what you're doing.

The data can be misunderstood, though. I've seen a few developers post discouraged comments about if they'd seen this kind of data before writing their apps, they wouldn't have bothered. Obviously, they wouldn't be discouraged if their app were selling, so this data just justifies their own experience and possibly explains it, but it would be sad to think that the next MUST-HAVE app could end up never being written because the developer looked at the long tail and decided not to bother...

But this is true to most of the businesses. 20% of your products generate 80% of your income. No surprise here. Do you think this is different in the Music store? What is new it's this retail store-the App Store-not cleaning up the shelves from the products that doesn't sell. IMO, an app that doesn't sell a certain number of units in 12 months should be removed, because either is just crap or a major marketing failure (like wrong name, no attention in the blogsphere or in any other media, etc.). As major benefit a less cluttered App store should make easier to find what you are looking for.

I have found so many interesting thing in your blog and I really love that Keep up the good work