Windows Phone 7 App Sales

I wanted to make my app experience as open as possible, so now that reporting for Windows Phone 7 app sales is out, I’m going to share my details with the world for those interested in developing for Windows Phone 7.  First: device sales, as of this writing, have not been released by Microsoft.  I don’t know them, and won’t speculate on what that means.   As Joe B pointed out in his interview with Walt recently, it will be a process over time.    But, now that reporting for trials/purchases has been implemented in the developer dashboard, let’s take a look at how SqueakBox is doing. 

SqueakBox is generally in the upper third of the entertainment section, getting good feedback, and providing a trial.  Providing a trial is a key element that developers really should take advantage of.   So, let’s log in at take a look-see:

First up, when you log in to the reports you’ll see the following daily download stats:

Overall I’m happy with the trend.   We can also look at cumulative downloads, which is helpful to understand the trend which shows a fairly linear distribution:

Next is purchase/trial information.  Obviously this is important for conversion rates and, naturally, how much money I’m going to get.

This is the second page of detailed sales data – the first page has more international usage, but decided to show only 1 screen above because it shows consumption in the US.  As you can see, I’m doing best in my home turf and that’s not surprising.  It’s an indie app, not internationalized, and while there are some sales abroad, it’s a small percentage.

Now – what is the conversion?   Here, we need to make an assumption the user downloaded the trial first.  This may or may not be the case.  A user could just click purchase (hey, it’s only 99 cents), particularly if they used the app on another phone.  In that case, it would show up as a purchase – not a trial. 

Assuming folks downloaded a trial first, based on this page alone, we had 289 trial downloads, and 115 sales.  That is a very good conversion rate if you ask me, since I download TONS of stuff with trials and many I haven’t even tried yet.  I have to assume many users are doing the same. 

The big question I’m pondering is this: do I implement an ad in the trial mode?  Currently, the app limits features/sounds hoping users will unlock them by purchasing.  Optionally, I can unlock some of this, and implement the ads to bring in perpetual income, albeit much smaller.   I’ve been cautious of the ad approach for the reasons I outlined in this blog post.