App Store Year 2 - My observations and predictions
I wish everyone had a good year, financially, or at least I hope everyone enjoyed the coding.
App Store is changing as we all know it. We were talking about the end of god rush even six months ago.
So, I am putting my thoughts on the App Store and how it will change for Y2 and beyond.
1. Mentality
Forget about getting rich quick with a single-feature app. With 50,000+ apps now (and I predict 100,000 apps by the end of this year), nobody will find your app. Whatever unique feature you have will have copycats in 2 weeks.
While average app price will continue to drop (toward free and 99 cents), more % of the total sales will go toward full featured apps from $2.99 to @4.99. Those are the apps which require 3-6 months engineering time instead 3 days.
2. Branding.
How will users find your app? It is like finding a needle in a haystack. Thus, the traditional consumer behavior will return.
Think the Y1 of the App Store as the goodwill store, where people browse to find goodies. Y2 of the App Store will be like regular shopping. People will start to recognize brand names.
3. Coding
Part time developers will have a hard time. It is about the economy of scale. Full time developers will do better, and small companies will appear with 3 to 5 developers to fully utilize their combined experience and re-usable code.
Re-usable code is the fundamental of modern software engineering. Individual part-timer developers simply cannot accumulate enough code base to give the right user experience for full featured apps.
4. Marketing
During Y1, App Store is the delivery channel AND marketing channel. The most important factor for the marketing is to get to the top of the list (by release date, or by sales ranking).
Now, each category have dozens of new releases per day, so fresh update no longer have a lasting effect. (1-2 days)
We will see a return to the traditional marketing, mainly internet, and some may even use B&M.
You must have a professionally designed website, with the information users need.
5.Summary
Essentially, the iPhone App field will be like the traditional software (think PC shareware) field, with the traditional development cycle and marketing.
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