The appetite for apps
The app market will be worth a predicted $20bn or more by 2013. All the big guys are getting involved – so shouldn't you? Here’s a starter guide for the app amateur.
Although all the developers, entrepreneurs and investors we spoke to disagreed on a lot, they all agreed on one point: to be successful, your app needs to make the Top 50, at the very least, in the App Store.
“To start, we didn’t appreciate the importance of being in the Top 25,” says Andrew Scott, founder of Rummble, the UK’s answer to location-based app service Foursquare. “You really need to punch your way to the top, or even buy your way there.”
Buy your way up? As in all highly competitive industries, the app market has become cut-throat, with many developers using underhand tactics to get ahead. Some now just farm out downloads (“purchase outsourcing”) to India. No-one we spoke to admitted to doing this, but it’s happening.
Oli Christie of Neon Play, which specialises in games apps, says there are two milestones you want to reach with your app: first, making the Top 25 within your app category (there are 20 categories in Apple’s App Store), and then getting into the Top 50 ranking of all apps in the UK.
He explains that it’s important because people browsing the App Store only really look at the Top 25 or 50, rarely further: “Outside of that, you’re not really earning much money. Only five per cent of games apps make money, so it’s essential to be ranked.”
Although Apple’s App Store is the largest, other platforms are growing fast. By the end of last year, more than two billion apps had been downloaded from Apple’s App Store from a pool of nearly 250,000 apps (and with Apple taking a 30 per cent fee on every app sold
in its store). After Apple comes Google’s Android Market, selling apps for its open-source Android phones. There are more than 20,000 apps available on the Android Market (with Google taking a 20 per cent commission on each sale). Then there’s Blackberry, Nokia and Palm, trailing behind.
There is much debate over which platform you should invest your app development in, but the key is to not get pigeon-holed.
Alistair Crane explains: “You just want to reach as many people as is relevant. Having an app is fine, but you need to be on more than one platform.” This helps to protect you from consumer demographic shifts.
But while targeting more than one platform at a time will multiply the size of your potential market, it can also raise development costs.
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