Apple has announced that the Apple App Store has sold 15 billion apps to over 200 million customers. That's a whole lot of "Angry Birds," and in turn, a whole lot of iOS devices floating around the market. The bad news, for Apple, is that a judge has sided against Jobs and company in regards to their protests against Amazon's use of the name "AppStore." For us it is exceedingly difficult to get real data on what sells and what does not.

In our own business of making Skins and Modules for a small Open Source store called SnowCovered, for many years we successfully sold skins and Modules for DotNetNuke Open-Source echo system. However, the landscape is changing as the DNNCorp the custodian of the DotNetNuke Community CMS has been learning from Apple and its approach on APP store is planning to create a similar walled garden.

These changes in the echo system has prompted us to scrutinize the App Market. Furthermore, we have been learning that our own market is either getting saturated with the kind of modules and skins we made a few years ago or the core is slowly replicating the modules we made money and offering it as free. So to ensure we have a business in the next few years, we are looking to expand our business into other app stores like Apple's App Store.

Getting into Apple App Store has been very difficult. Rewards are fantastic if one gets it right, but downside is that it is very difficult to get it right. The other problem is that it is very difficult to get real inside data and statistics from any of these private App Stores. So in Part one of these articles, I plan to just discuss what is available in public domain. And in the next few weeks try and work out what sells and what does not sell so that it can help us make informed decisions for what kind of Apps to build so to invest a lot of time and effort in building apps that are in demand rather than what may be better be published as free apps.

The Holy Grail for the success of an app is being featured in some form or other by Apple in their App Store or other advertising. We’ve seen numbers of downloads increase on average by around 500% for featured apps, so it’s well worth trying to improve one's chances of being noticed by the Apple review team. Same applies to other app stores such as SnowCoered, Amazon where a product that is pushed to homepage will get an immediate advantage compared to other similar Apps or Modules.

Having a genuinely original idea for your application will also help, but this is easier said than done. If the idea isn’t unique then one need to ensure the app does what it does better than the competition. Research is the key here – download your competitors’ apps, read their reviews and see what features it has or has not that you can improve upon.

app store data

We learned from our mistake in the past with a few of our Apps. Where in the past we had built an iOS apps that suited a very small market and therefore, sold very little. Your app should be genuinely useful to more than just a handful of people. This may sound obvious, but recently we have had enquiries from people asking us to create apps which are essentially just digital business cards. Apple rightly has started to reject these kinds of “limited functionality” apps.

In the Apple case the Apple's business model is increasingly dependent on the health of its App Store, the rich breeding ground of the company's software ecosystem, and a report to clients issued Monday by Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster suggests that the ecosystem's vital signs are good. However, currently Apple only releases data about the App Store when it serves its interest - for example last week they were trumpeting the 15th billion download. So to take the store's temperature, Munster had to build his own model for how it works.

More apps: The average iOS device owner will download 83 apps in 2011 vs. 51 in 2010, a 61% increase year over year. "Smartphone users are showing an increasing appetite to use apps to add features to their phones," Munster writes, "and iOS has the leading app ecosystem."

More expensive apps: The ASP (average selling price) per app is rebounding. ASPs are up 14% y/y in 20111 vs. an 18% decline in 2010. "After the initial race to the bottom in App Store pricing," says Munster, "we are seeing users pay up to add features and games to their iOS devices."

More apps than Android: Apple's App Store has more than 425,000 apps. The Android Market has 200,000. In May, Google (GOOG) announced its 4.5 billionth app download, compared with Apple's 15 billion as of July 7.

Plenty of free apps: 82% of the apps in Apple's store are free. The 18% that users have to pay for have an Average Selling Price of $1.44. According to Munster, the increase in ASP is driven by the more-expensive iPad apps that represent a growing percentage of app downloads.

Marketing Apps and Modules is essential part of any promotional tasks for your App. Where you need to ensure you submit good quality, standout graphics for the app icon and the large image displayed in the App Store. Regardless of whether your app is featured or not, these are the graphics people will see when browsing so it’s vital they catch the eye.

A snappy, short title for the App or Module will also help, free from promotional phrases like “Lite” or “Free”. Remember a lot of people search the App Store using the free text search so try to include a key search term in your title if you can. As well as this, categorize your app correctly. Poorly categorized apps are less likely to be found by interested browsers.

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About General Topics Long Blog by Salar Golestanian

These are various short and long News Articles and Blogs by Salar Golestanian the founder of SalarO.com about the latest topics that interest me. The subject matter are mixed topics from Web Trends, Technology, Software, Science or Current Afair, or whatever that can affect Internet Technology in any shape or form. I have been told that the best place for these would have been for me to place them on a page at SalarO.com, However, some of these Blogs have less of a commercial or corporate genra, so they are placed here in this personal site. These Blogs help me explain a little more than normally is allowed in the 140 character real-estate of a typical Twitter post. They may also link you to the actual news or site that can expands further on my comments.

SalarO.com is a respected UK web consultancy with a proven record in DotNetNuke WCMS and System Integration expertise for ‘.Net’, E-Commerce systems. Recently we have also been working with nopCommerce as highly versatile ecommerce solution that can live alongside Wordpress to deliver great blog engine that Google loves. We possess the necessary skills to create solutions based on the 3 technology as well as mobile apps for iOS/Android so they can communicate with your WCMS or E-commerce portal using nopCommerce. We are also helping some of our clients at Salaro to setup and use wordpress as fringe sites blogging about their products and services helping to maximize SEO potentials on the key words that can increase their Google position. SalarO team is expanding their offerings with a range of custom modules, extensions & templates for DNN and nopCommerce.