Revealed: Secrets of the App Store (and iPhone User Engagement)

Pinch Media, an iPhone developer tool company, is the developer of Pinch Analytics and Pinch Advertising. Pinch Analytics is designed to help you see how users use your iPhone apps and see your download numbers in real time. Punch Advertising, on the other hand, lets you add advertising in to your iPhone apps easily (ideally making you some money!)

With 30,000,000 app downloads under their belt (on the hundreds of apps that use Pinch’s tools), Pinch has managed to collect a lot of data that they’ve analyzed and wrapped up in this neat presentation:

(If you can’t see the presentation above, click here.)

Some of the observations made (there are a lot more, so make sure to check out the presentation):

• App Store rankings tend to depend on a 24-hour rolling window of units downloaded
• Appearing in a top 100 list increases daily new users by an average of 2.3x
• The average price increase drops demand to 25%
• You need 20,000 downloads to get into the top 25 now, versus 10,000 six months ago.
• Only about 20% of users will keep using a free application beyond the first day.
• After a month, only about 4% of users will still be using a free application.
• Advertising is not a solid business model (it works, but it can’t replace paid sales revenue)