Recently I’ve been spending some time teaching myself some new programming skills (Silverlight with C#) so not done much more iPhone development. However a bug came to light that needed fixing in my released app CodeSpin (if the screen was locked while the game was playing then the countdown timer misbehaved), so once fixed I was ready to release an update version (v1.2 in fact).
In the last few weeks the app hadn’t had many downloads, so I thought I may as well do an experiment and reduce the price from 59p in the UK (99 cents in USA, 79 cents in Euroland) to nothing, until the end of the month (May).
The following day I logged in to the Apple portal not sure what to expect – and found there’d been over 400 downloads overnight! Several hundred followed the next day, and a couple of hundred the next few days as well. So it tailed off a bit, but even so – a week with no downloads at all, followed by a 1000 downloads in half a week. Looks like a lot of people appreciate something for nothing!
I knew there were several websites that track and announce price drops for iPhone apps, but these numbers were still surprising. I’d also announced the update and price drop on various forums, but the number of views of these postings didn’t add up to half the number of downloads in the first day, so I can only assume a lot of people look at or subscribe to the price drop sites.
Now this is good since it means there is a way to get an app noticed (apps get almost no visibility on the app store unless they have enough sales to appear in the top 80 for any category, and the recently released list was no use to me when I released my app since it never appeared in the first couple of screens) but it’s also perhaps instructive of the number of people that will download something seemingly just because it’s free.
A common approach is to have a free version of an app purely as a sales driver for the full version, just so that the free version can get you some visibility and those all important iTunes ratings. I had tried giving away promo codes via forums which only got one or two reviews – but now I’ve noticed that several people who downloaded the app once it went free gave it one star on the same day it went free. I can only assume that these were people who saw that a game was free, downloaded it, and then immediately decided it wasn’t for them (it’s a logic puzzle game after all, not the next Doodlejump or Angry Birds), deleted it, and hit ‘1 star’ when prompted by the delete app dialog.
Now I don’t want to whinge, but this does seem a little unfair that the first people to delete an app when the realise it’s not their sort of thing, are probably also the first ones to rate the app. My game takes a little while to learn how to play properly, so people that give up straight away won’t have understood it – meanwhile (I like to think, at least) some other people who do like it are busy playing it, and aren’t prompted to rate it. A couple of 4 and 5 star ratings in the US store seem to indicate that some people like it, at least! (as did the test subjects I tried it on before release).
The other thing is, I’m not sure if making it free for 2 weeks was the best approach – there was such a spike in downloads from the first day or two that I can see why many developers have a one day sale for apps as a way to drive the app up the sales charts. Will the number of downloads tail off over the next week or so even though it’s still free, or settle at some level? Time will tell…
Hangingwater's Blog 
An update to this – the number of downloads while the app was free for 2 weeks did tail off – almost a perfect curve with each day’s figures being just over half the previous day’s, until settling at about 10 or 20. So it’s probably worth making an app (a game app at least) free for only a day or at most two if the idea is to gain ranking in the app store.
Also, I released an update, v1.3 at the end of May (minor bug fix plus I added a dialog to prompt reviews after a good score, to help combat the 1 star review brigade). It’s hard to tell if this did lead to more positive reviews from happy users, but it’s useful to note that after the free download period generated around 1100 downloads, the upgrade got about 400 downloads, which presumably gives some indication of the number of people who were happy enough with the game to keep it after trying it out.