Anyone Else's Sales Drop With iOS6?

taylor202 · September 2012

My sales have been down about 20% which is shocking since a new device just came out.
I picked up a new iPhone 5 yesterday and got so frustrated trying to find all the apps I had on my old device to download. Looks like the beginning of the end :(

J · September 2012

Yes same here, and worst, my ranking actually goes up, this means, to me, less downloads globally.

unruhschuh · September 2012

My sales didn't change, but then again I only sell two apps a day.

On the iPhone 5 the App Store works quite well but on the iPod Touch 4th gen scrolling is a pain and it crashes all the time. (Both on iOS 6.0).

ilmman · September 2012

it has remained unchanged for me for paid apps, though free apps seemed to have improved.. lol

LEARN2MAKE · September 2012

Pretty much the same, with a slight improvement in free apps like @ilmman.

One thing to note though, a new app launched this week was the worst new app launch ever. It launched the day that iOS 6 went live. Not sure if it just didn't show up in lists (it wasn't in any lists on iOS 6 but I would assume was still visible on iOS 5 and also desktop iTunes). Maybe it was just a fluke time to release with everyone just thinking about the new iPhone coming out or something.

Paul Slocum · September 2012

I don't sell a ton, but my sales are up a little from previous weeks.

chemistry · September 2012

definitely an UP for me

ziocleto · September 2012

Constant for us, which is depressing cos normally it's about 100% up on a release day.
On iOS6 release day (3 days ago) we've got a 20% bump, up. Then nothing on release day, very very suspicious.

I start to think Apple didn't sell that many phones, or everyone with a new phone didn't buy any app, or they've bought only a selected few. Still, I smell something fishy here...

Touchmint · September 2012

Yea mine were down about 20% too. :/

ilmman · September 2012

ahh well.. lets hope iPad MINI does something.. seems promising :)

kkkkkkkk · September 2012

ziocleto said:

I start to think Apple didn't sell that many phones, or everyone with a new phone didn't buy any app, or they've bought only a selected few. Still, I smell something fishy here...

nothing fishy, 99% of people who bought the new device previously owned an iphone, therefore they just re-installed what they already owned on their device.

The problem is the general structure of the app store that does not remove the already purchased apps from the lists to promote new ones. it keeps featuring the same old same old same old.

as a result people stop buying new apps and the revenue shrinks and shrinks progressively. And who can blame them? How could they know other apps exist? apple does an excellent job to keep them away from them

They need to find a way to feature more apps. People should see new apps each time they launch their app-store

ziocleto · September 2012

kkkkkkkk said:

nothing fishy, 99% of people who bought the new device previously owned an iphone, therefore they just re-installed what they already owned on their device.

Agree on everything else you said but not on this.
Recent polls show that at least 20% of people were considering buying it as their first iPhone. Which still gets you 400k people that didn't buy much, which is odd.

Moreover, this being a "new" iPhone should have driven more first time buyers, we've seen a good spike on the 4s, which had less penetration.

Yeah the thing is, we are selling exactly the same amount of copies, so people do find our app, but somehow they don't increase linearly as more people buy new phones, which I think it's a _huge_ part of the daily sales.

Everyone here seem to have lost sales in recent months, mainly due to the fact that people were buying less and less iPhones waiting for the iPhone5, well or they were buying the Samsung Galaxy S3, hence first "days" buyers account for a lot of app sales in my opinion, as it's normal that the longer you have your phone the less often you buy apps.

fouldsc · September 2012

Strange I have had a 20% increase on iOS6 , moving to 24% since iPhone5 launch.

kmk · September 2012

My rank has improved tremendosly since the release of iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 but my sales have not really increased - maybe 5%. I do think most of the people that got the iPhone 5 this week are existing iPhone users.

FDApps · September 2012

Sales have been going down because less people were buying the iPhone. Sales continued to drop because of the new search algorithm that favors free apps.
Now more people are buying the iPhone but the new ios6 search only show one result per page so sales will continue to fall unless they change it back to list view. The reason that has not happened yet is because there are a lot of people who are not yet on ios6. Not good.

merlin · September 2012

Guys, I just linked to this thread in my article on Gamezebo, hope nobody minds :) http://www.gamezebo.com/news/2012/09/24/why-new-app-store-good-indie-devs
(feedback welcome)

AnthonyPham · September 2012

Hi @merlin,

Great article, I can learn a lot from it. The first screenshot is very important now.

But the most important factor is the rank in the searching result. In your article you don't mention any change in search algorithms, does it work similar with earlier version of App Store?

Thanks,
Anthony

merlin · September 2012

Anthony - since the Chomp update Apple is doing small fixes here and there, but we didn't notice anything radical.
The iOS6 results are the same as iOS5, and the algorithm didn't change within the past 2 weeks as far as I know (I was on vacation though, so I may have missed some smaller changes).

A thing worth remembering - since 2-3 months iTunes show slightly different results than the devices (!). So if you use iTunes to track your position, don't - either do it on device, or using AppCod.es ;) One of our users noticed just today that while iTunes shows his app on the first position, he gets no rank on the device (although it's seldom that big of a difference).

mlfarrell · September 2012

Same it's always been since ipad release. iPad sales are fine/stable. iPhone sales are disastrous/dead.

Profile · September 2012

OK, since I updated my new iPad with iOS 6, I can't download apps. (I hit install and it does nothing, but updates work.) No wonder sales are down!

Profile · September 2012

Just found this thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4315893?start=30&tstart=0 . . . . I'm not the only one. :-O

Zuningo · September 2012

Thanks merlin, great article. And I love your Goal Setting Workshop App. It's really great and brings a feeling of that lifestyle or how I should describe it. :-)

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Anyone Else's Sales Drop With iOS6?

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