Lights Post-Mortem

After two full seasons in the App Store, it’s a good time to look at how Lights Finder has performed and examine some of the metrics.

Marketing

By far the biggest problem for the small developer in the App Store is visibility. We cannot rely on Apple to market our apps. Getting featured is akin to winning the lottery; it’s great, but we can’t count on it. Nothing has changed from selling software before the App Store: we still have to figure out how to market it.

In both 2010 and 2011, I used prMac to send a press release to iOS-related news outlets. With the exception of some automated repostings of the press release, neither year resulted in any real editorial coverage. I also submitted the app to many iOS review sites. Again, nothing came of this.

I did three things in 2010 that I did not repeat in 2011: a screencast, mostly for review submissions, advertising (Facebook and AdMob, neither were worthwhile), and a free weekend in early December.

Last year, I priced the app at 99¢, figuring that it would appeal to the mass market audience and be a good impulse buy. Sales were disappointing, so for 2011 I figured I had little to lose and raised the price to $1.99. The free weekend in 2010 didn’t boost visibility at all, and since weekends are the biggest sales days of the week for this app, I felt no need to repeat the experiment.

Excluding the free downloads, year-over-year sales for December were up 13%. Apple hasn’t announced earnings for the quarter including December 2011 yet, but for the prior quarter, iPhone sales were up 21% year-over-year. My sales lagged overall iPhone growth, but it’s still growth and customers seemed no less willing to buy at $2 than $1.

Design

Lights Finder is a classic “scratch my own itch” app. For years, since I was a kid, my family set out once or twice a year to drive around and look at lights. I moved to Columbus in 2006. In a new place, it isn’t obvious which neighborhoods are good to visit and which are mostly dark. Young children have short attention spans and aimless wandering isn’t very popular.

For the first version, I was fine investing time, but gave myself a very limited budget, which meant I had to design it as best as I could myself. The result was serviceable, but far from polished.

For 2011, my biggest goal was to get rid of the programmer art and work with a professional designer. I have mixed feelings about my decision. While I am very happy with the result, sales didn’t cover the costs. It’s hard to justify spending thousands on a personal project when sales don’t cover costs.

Technology

In 2010, I supported iOS 3.1 and later. At the time, this followed the common “current version plus the previous major release” advice. For 2011, I stuck with this, but a year later that meant iOS 4 and 5. Since any device that can run iOS 4.0 can run 4.2 (and should, given how sluggish 4.0 is on iPhone 3G), I set the minimum version at 4.2.

This allowed me to delete quite a bit of code, modernize my API usage, and, most importantly, convert the project to ARC.

ARC is wonderful. There isn’t even one crash report in iTunes Connect, on any iOS version.

Next year, and for every new app, I will only target iOS 5 and later, though. Take a look at these charts:

For the sake of completeness, the chart on the left shows the breakdown by device type. Unsurprisingly, most people used the app on their iPhones.

The next two are the pleasant surprise. The middle apes Marco Arment’s device and OS stats from Instapaper. Almost 78% of Lights Finder users were already on iOS 5, and 90% were at 4.3 or later. Of course, anything running 4.3 can also run 5.0, but it turns out that quite a few people running 5.0-capable hardware were still using 4.2 or earlier. Fully 99% of users were on a device that is capable of running iOS 5!

While I don’t feel like sharing raw numbers, I acknowledge my sample size isn’t nearly as large as Instapaper’s. Still, I’m encouraged by the data. Lights Finder is as likely to be used by casual people as technology nerds. iOS 5 has only been available for a couple of months, and the lagging 21% will upgrade eventually, especially if more apps require it. Looking forward from iOS 5, adoption should be even faster with over-the-air updates.

Customer Support

Based on a presentation a few months back at CIDUG, I decided to add a link on the about screen soliciting feedback. This resulted in some ego-bruising moments, but overall it was a good choice. Some people wrote in with a question, and it was nice to have the opportunity to help them. It also allowed me to ask for a review, and several obliged.

Others were unhappy and demanding refunds, sometimes rudely. I suspect most of these people never expected an answer, and some became much nicer after I sent one. I tried to be helpful, explained that App Store developers can’t issue refunds, and how to contact Apple about one. (To date, AppViz shows no refunds.)

It is disappointing that people can get so worked up about a $2 app. These are probably the same people who spend $2 on a lousy cup of restaurant coffee and don’t think twice about it. If an app doesn’t meet their lofty expectations, though? A venomous 1 star review and demands for a refund.

Giving these people a quicker route to vent their disappointment than an App Store review likely worked in a few cases. Often, they were unhappy because the directory, while robust, didn’t have excellent coverage in their area. I asked where they lived and, for those that replied, dug up some addresses from Google. In the long run, it makes the app better, but it left me feeling bitter about doing so much for $2 (well, $1.40) and rewarding rudeness.

The upside is that about 30% of the people who used the app in 2010 came back in 2011. That doesn’t seem very high, but it’s likely that half of the 2010 users acquired the app during the free weekend, used it once, then forgot about it. If most of the returning users were the ones that paid, that bodes well for 2012 and beyond. Eventually, the holes in the directory will be filled, and maybe one day Apple will decide it has a place in the holiday apps feature.