“It’s all about location” is a phrase all of us have heard before and is also a rule that we know to be true when it comes to selling and marketing a product (usually related to retailers or business selling physical goods). Of course, what has been proven to be true many times in the “real world” has to be true for mobile and apps in a similar kind of fashion. This article suggests just that, only that with mobile (and mobile apps) it will be about integrating location into your product so that it enhances the quality of the service by combining its basic purpose with immediate environmental relevance.

Indeed, if we look at the numbers (or just apply logic), it seems location will not only be an additional feature or upside, but rather will become something that is a product itself. Agree?

The possibilities are interesting at least, very useful and awesome at best. The before mentioned article names examples of mobile services and how they could be elevated by adding a little global positioning to them, like cooking apps that show recipes from the neighbourhood or apps displaying music that’s being played in the surrounding area and is similar to your taste.

Whether or not you think location will be needed as an integral part of any app or mobile service in the future, from looking at the raw data, it becomes clear that location will in fact be a very relevant feature in the future and will in many cases allow for new kind of services to be rolled out.

But, equally important, will be the impact this will have on how products are being purchased. If location is a big part of anything mobile, then new channels will open up for marketing. These channels will be location aware, but will also have to take the classical marketing metrics (like demographics) into account. And of course, localization of product and marketing itself is not at all something new.

Location will add a new dimension to marketing. It will make it more complex, but has the huge potential upside of being exponentially more relevant. For us this may be something that will be added feature-wise regarding apprupt Performance Analytics. For app developers it has lots of implications for product development. And it bears a lot of potential for effective marketing and customer acquisition. We aim to help you with that.

Apps are already mass market and will become even more popular in the future – be it on the iPhone or any other device. Developers or developing companies of any size (so far) often find it difficult to make enough revenues from their app sales to build a sustainable business. As mentioned in an earlier post, in our opinion, there are two possible solutions to this problem: increase app sales or increase revenue per customer – ideally both.  Since we constantly hear stories of developers that sell a few thousand copies (or more) per day and we also now the impressive amount of apps having been downloaded worldwide so far, our “way-to-go” seems to be the mass-approach. Produce a hit, make it in the top rankings, sell thousands of apps day after day and grow a profitable business – sounds about right, doesn’t it?

But is your app suited for the mass market? To answer this question you should ask yourself how many iPhone users would actually have an interest in your app and then adjust your expectations (and your approach) accordingly. In short, if you’re developing niche apps (a niche among all apps and within the specific category), don’t expect sales to skyrocket, but instead focus on your target group. Categories are not necessarily niches. Rather they consist of different niches. If you sell a cooking app you’re in the lifestyle category where you’ll compete with shopping apps and horoscope apps for a place in the top rankings.
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There has been quite some discussion (on our blog as well) about business models that work for app developers and the influence that In-App Purchase for free iPhone apps may have on these. Ever since Apple made this functionality available, not much has really happened or at least we haven’t heard of a major breakthrough so far. This might change with ngmoco and its recent release of Eliminate Pro.

ngmoco offers the program for free and asks the user to pay for additional ”power cells”, which can be used to power your battle suit. The price range? $0.99 to $39.99, depending on the amount of “power cells” you’re buying. The ratio behind this? Get the free version out to as many people as possible and then have them pay for additional goods they need to advance (more quickly) in the game – and when they are most prone to buy. This may lead to only a small percentage of players or buyers of the game to be responsible for the bulk of the revenues made from the game, but it seems clear that for games this model will probably work very well, as games have a way of getting people hooked on them, leading to impulse buying.
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Have you put a lot of work or money or both into developing your app(s)?

This article on BusinessWeek describes how creating apps with basic functionality is becoming easier and more affordable, resulting in an enormous amount of apps being pushed out by small companies and individuals with little or no coding skills at all.

While we do not want to go into the pros and cons of using a service that helps you get your very own application within a day, we do see these types of services and the apps they produce picking up momentum, leading to an ever more increasing amount of apps, all distributed through one central channel (the App Stores). Surely, questions of quality and general product value should be raised, but the fact remains that almost each and every one of these “24-hour-apps” competes with your product in terms of taking up attention-space in the App Store and among users.
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apprupt was invited to an event of a very successful (iPhone) app development company on Friday. Among other interesting talks, a very interesting discussion evolved around the topic of app piracy. The managing director of the app development company mentioned that on average, 5-10% of their apps were being pirated. This correlates with other available numbers on app piracy, although in individual cases this number can be much higher, even up to 40 or 50 %. Interestingly, the company (offers paid and lite apps) is not too worried about app piracy. Why?
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Have you tried advertising your app through banners or textlinks? If so, did it pay off? What do you look at when putting up money up front to buy reach (hopefully resulting in downloads) for your app? If you think long term, you might also be taking the value of iPhone users “only” seeing your name or the name of your product into account. This means you might actually be satisfied with a fair CPM increasing your brand value and recognition because your banner or your message was “noticed” by a certain amount of people.

In reality, for the majority of you, having been noticed by a lot of people without a noticeable increase in downloads probably doesn’t cut it. You want downloads. You want a measurable increase in performance, right? Also, this performance increase should be affordable.

As an oversimplified way of looking at it, let’s say you are selling your app for 79 Cents and have no additional revenues generated through that particular app after it was downloaded. After Apple and taxes, your payout is approximately 49 Cents. Accordingly, without taking any other costs into account, your cost of customer acquisition should not be more than 49 Cents, right?

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BusinessWeek has a small selection of apps on their site that have shown an impressive performance and brought in more than a million US-Dollars in revenues. These are all really well known apps, most of which (if not all) have been international supersellers.

While the post does not mention whether these are just the numbers for the US-market or overall, it still leaves us thinking, if the full revenue potential is reached for these apps. We’re guessing no.

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