Can an app sit 8 months idle in the AppStore, and all of a sudden become the #2 app? With no updates? No advertising? I guess the answer is yes! My coloring book app, Coloring Fun, is now the #2 app in Games/Kids category in the UK AppStore. Moreover it is indeed #43 in overall games category and #79 in the general apps category!! And the fun does not stop there. It is #3 in France, #5 in Italy, #7 in Canada, #7 in Australia and #17 in Germany… After 8 months?? And more importantly is there really a significant market for applications for kids in the AppStore?
So how did that happen? I have pretty much stopped checking my iTunes reports after 8 months of steady but lackluster performance. But then it all changed. I was writing a reply back to my friend about how my app was doing, and decided to include actual stats and so I logged in and downloaded my daily report, and immediately got struck by a WTF moment. All of a suddenly there was this “huge” spike and it was all coming from outside US.
I first thought it was a glitch, but then I realized it was not. It was indeed happening for the last 3 weeks, without me knowing anything about it. In fact the funny thing is, I stopped checking regularly around the time just before the spike seemed to have happened.
Anyways a good colleague of mine pointed out that it was indeed featured in the apps for kids category over in Europe.
This mainly speaks to the power of Apple’s marketing. Below is a pie chart that shows country distributions for Coloring Fun’s sales. US is still the second biggest but it took 8 months of sales to get there, whereas UK got to %26 in just less than 3 weeks.
Frankly I was never really sure for the potential for an application for kids. I used this more as a learning tool for understanding the iPhone SDK, something I can relatively quickly build and post it to the appstore. I did not really spend any time marketing it, even to the extent of submitting it to review sites. I guess this demonstrates that there indeed is a market for kid’s games. Especially the fact that being #2 in a kids game translates to #43 in overall games category and #79 in overall apps category shows that kid’s games are actually a substantial piece of the overall application sales traffic (at least in UK). And it also shows that a substantial group of people are indeed comfortable letting their young children play with their iPhones or iPod Touches.
Well now I am interested. I am currently working on updating the app as a first step. And we will see how this goes…
at 6:20 pm