{"id":13733,"date":"2016-03-02T16:03:25","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T21:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=13733"},"modified":"2016-03-06T14:07:52","modified_gmt":"2016-03-06T19:07:52","slug":"life-and-death-in-the-app-store","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/02\/life-and-death-in-the-app-store\/","title":{"rendered":"Life and Death in the App Store"},"content":{"rendered":"

Casey Newton<\/a> (comments<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

Since Kaneko founded the company with Scott Sykora in 2009, Pixite has released eight applications dedicated to photo editing and design. Each has been featured by Apple as a Best New App; photo editor Tangent and design tool Assembly won year-end awards from Apple. Between 2013 and 2014, downloads of Pixite apps jumped from 395,472 to 3.1 million, and annual revenue doubled to $943,000. Pixite grew along with its cash flow, expanding from two to six employees as it explored ways to link its apps together and grow a loyal base of customers.<\/p>\n

Then the bottom fell out. Last year downloads flattened, and Pixite’s revenues plunged by a third, to $629,000. Suddenly, a company that needed to bring in $2,000 a day to break even found itself making $1,000 or less.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

But for a large swath of these app developers — particularly those without venture capital and sophisticated marketing tactics — the original App Store model of selling apps for a buck or two looks antiquated. In 2011, 63 percent of apps were paid downloads<\/a>, selling for an average of $3.64 apiece. By last year, a mere 27 percent of downloads were paid, and the average price had fallen to $1.27<\/a>. Today, profiting from the App Store most often requires a mix of in-app purchases, subscriptions, and advertising.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a fatigue is setting in among customers. There are now more than 1.5 million apps in the App Store (Android users have 1.6 million to choose from), but by 2014, the majority of Americans were downloading zero apps per month<\/a>. And it turns out people simply don’t use most of the apps they do<\/em> download. According to ComScore, the average person spends 80 percent of their time on mobile devices using only three apps.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The most telling part to me:<\/p>\n

\n

And Pixite clung to using the one-time purchase business model, which led to a perpetual cycle of boom and bust as each launch generated a single revenue spike followed by a rapid decline. […] Pixite aimed to release one app a quarter, giving it just three months to design, code, and ship each product.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is exactly what Wil Shipley and others predicted would happen given the App Store’s policies of no trials or upgrades.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Casey Newton (comments): Since Kaneko founded the company with Scott Sykora in 2009, Pixite has released eight applications dedicated to photo editing and design. Each has been featured by Apple as a Best New App; photo editor Tangent and design tool Assembly won year-end awards from Apple. Between 2013 and 2014, downloads of Pixite apps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[91,101,31,26],"class_list":["post-13733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-appstore","tag-business","tag-ios","tag-iosapp"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13733"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13758,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13733\/revisions\/13758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}