Do you gain anything out of giving away a free app?

[akacaj]

I am considering giving my iFight app away for free and hope that it would help sell Tingalin. Do any of you guys have experience with giving a totally unrelated app away for free and gaining sales on your paid apps?

[funkytaco]

99 Cent iPhone Apps Not Significantly More Popular

It seems like free apps are way more popular (obviously) so if you advertise your other app in it, I'd say it would.

[RickMaddy]

Personally I don't think it will help at all. Customers don't buy other apps from a developer just because they have or like one of the others - especially if the two apps aren't related.

And making your app free just opens up a huge opportunity for lame 1-star reviews. I just got one on my free Lite version of Palettes. Some clown in Canada (my only Canadian review) posted a 1-star, 1-word review of "Stupid". Who takes the time to post such crap on an app you decided wasn't something you needed after all but downloaded just because it was free?

[tawpie]

personally, I wonder why one wouldn't take some money in exchange for the effort... maybe some of y'all have no use for money?

If it's really just an ad vehicle, then it should be free. But if it has any value at all, you should charge for it, no ifs ands or buts. Free apps really get my goat because they can do several things:

1) if you give it away, it sets expectations that everything "should" be free. It shouldn't.
2) the tendency with free apps is that there's no support and the app isn't all that good in the first place -- this drags down the quality perception of the app store as a whole and negatively impacts all of the developers who put a lot of time and life force writing good-or-better programs
3) cluttered with free, it's difficult for consumers to identify the quality apps that might have a chance to do what they want. Can anyone find your game/utility/thingamabob and if they do should they keep searching to find out if one of the bazillion free things might do well enough? I believe this can cause choice overload and eventually people go away unable to decide on anything.
4) free, even if crappy, is very very difficult to compete against--again, we all risk disappointing consumers as a group. We want shoppers and more importantly buyers.
5) if you value your work at the "free" level, why don't you open source the code so that learners can have something concrete to study? Do that and you'll be helping us all.

Anyway. I'll get off the soap box.

[akacaj]

Rick, you just reminded me of what happened when I gave Tingalin away free for 1 day. I guess I wont switch iFight to free. At least not yet, ill give it some more time to grow.

[johnqh]

Ask yourself. Did you ever buy an app because I liked an unrelated free app from the developer?

I really doubt you will get anything out of it.

[akacaj]

I never really did but it always surprises me that people click on my signature link at Macrumors.com. I have also done advertising on Facebook and it surprised me how many people clicked on my add. For those reasons I thought that if they see my website on the splash screen so many times they might actually decide to check out the website where they would learn about my other app.

But as I said before, I was happy to see Rick's post as it confirmed what I have been preaching this whole time. For a while I thought that I was the only one that experienced the bad ratings issue when giving away app for free.

This might sound contradictory but does app rating really matter when an app is free? Most of the top apps in entertainment category have a low average rating yet people continue to download them.

[spinyanteater]

I know I've said this to you in a previous thread, but it's worth repeating. If you want to sell more copies of Tingalin, you need to update it and get it back on the first page of apps where people will see it.

[wholesaleneon]

Originally Posted by akacaj

This might sound contradictory but does app rating really matter when an app is free? Most of the top apps in entertainment category have a low average rating yet people continue to download them.

I would venture to say it does matter if you are offering a "lite" version of a paid app. If you have a bunch of kids writing "stupid game" in your reviews, i would think it would be a deterrent for the paid version.

On the flip side, if it's just a free app unrelated to anything else, it probably doesnt matter.

[MattW]

I've done some goofy apps just for fun and released them for free, but I went the advert route. Check out AdWhirl (www.adwhirl.com) - this has benefits over just implementing iAd because you can have ads from multiple sources, and you can set up your own ads (AdWhirl calls them House Ads) that cost nothing and advertise your other apps. You get to set what ratio of time is spent looking at which type of ads so, if you wanted to, you could only show House Ads, and you get the click-though data live as well.

For my purposes, it's a nice mix of some ad revenue and also self promotion, if you can spare the screen real estate for the ads.

[zardon]

Any possibility of giving away your content as in-app store purchases, or is there any possibility of making it a subscription model?

Thanks