iPhone Development and an AppStore Wishlist
I've been doing A LOT of iPhone development since Feb 14th of this year and I'm happy to report our iPhone app has been selling well. Much better than the first release which, well, I have to admit, had a beta feel to it. The latest release is far more solid and it's pretty telling in the great reviews we've been getting.
Now that I finally feel like I understand the majority of what I've been doing I'm happy to break the seal on my experiences as a CF developer learning Objective C and playing in Apple's world.
Being crotchety for today though I feel like I have to start with some gripes and a wishlist for the appstore.
Gripes
This morning I woke up to an email from Apple to tell me it's time to renew my Apple Developer subscription fee for iPhone development. It's just $100 I hear you say but since May 5th when our app hit the store, Apple has had it's cut of our revenue as we agreed to the tune of around $2500. Surely they could add a provision that says, if you generate over a certain dollar value we'll waive the renewal fee as thanks for the easy money.Wishlist for the Appstore
Referral summaries
I'm a nerd and I hate spending money if I can't see the value of my investment. I've submitted feature requests a few times with a few bumps to the iTunes Connect folk to see if they can add some rudimentary analytics.I do analytics for a living, helping my clients understand if they are getting value for every dollar they spend on marketing. For example if I run an ad in Google AdWords that costs me 10 cents and my app revenue per unit is $2, I have to convert 1 in 20 visitors (5%) to break even and if my conversion rate is better, I'm in the money. Same with facebook ads and any other kind of marketing medium.
The problem with the appstore from a vendor perspective is that although I can send people to the appstore, I only get a raw number once a day of how many sales I made in each country.
The first step for me is for apple to introduce referral URL variables. Instead of just:
Hell, even one step before that could be a simple examination of the referral URL so they can segment sales by referring site.
If I know how many clicks I paid for in my Google AdWords campaign and how many sales those clicks generated each day, I have my conversion rate. Presently nothing exists like this.
AppStore conversion rates
This is tied to the previous point but the AppStore is a big black box of mystery. I send people in but have no idea how many times my app page gets viewed per day, how many people went direct to the app, vs searching vs category browsing.Did they find the app on their iPhone and do those types of visitors convert more readily than computer based browsers? What type of search terms result in the majority of my sales? How many times does a visitor review the app before they buy?
Does anyone else reading this do any iPhone (native) development and have any other ideas for how the AppStore can be improved?