When I first started with iPhone development, I looked all over for hard numbers on how sales translate into rankings (or vice versa). The most often cited article seems to be the iFart one where the developer sold 10's of thousands of copies in just a few days, but that is clearly the exception to the rule.
Here is some hard data from one of my company's games - "Bug Squash". I am going to give the "sales numbers" for the Lite version (free) showing its rise from nothing to over 100,000 downloads (around 120,000 total as of today .... one month after the initial release).
I never had the illusion that the game would be wildly successful. It is a fun game, but we don't have the staff to create the kind of games you get from some of the big production houses that have full time artists, etc. This is just a simple game where you squish bugs (never would have guessed from the title, right?).
The Lite version of the game has been ranked the #1 Kids Game in over 10 countries (including Mexico, Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Colombia, Turkey, Israel and others)
The highest it reached in the US so far was #4 (behind Tic Tac Touch, Wooden Labyrinth, and Four in a Row... hard to beat those). At the time of this writing, it is the #7 kids game in the US, #1 in Turkey and UAE, #2 in Indonesia and Peru, #4 in Russia, Pakistan, Argentina, and Israel, and in the top 10 in 28 countries.
This graphic shows an Excel spreadsheet with the Total Sales, US Sales, Mexico Sales, and Russia Sales (these were some of the highest). I am also showing the ranking in the App Store from the time I started tracking it.
It is interesting to note that the paid version of our application does in fact go up in sales as the free version did. Here are the rankings for the paid version in the Kids Games category for a few spot dates on the chart:
4/1: #41
4/2: #34
4/3: #24
4/6: #11
4/7: #9 (broke top 10!)
4/11: #5
4/15: #4
Hopefully people find this information useful in some way... I know I would have loved to see it when I first started out.
