One of the questions my fiancee asks me when I’m working on WebOS applications is “Are there even enough people that use that phone?” It’s a genuine concern, and one that I’ve had to wrestle with many times - is developing paid applications for WebOS going to be worth all the effort that I put into it? PreCentral just posted a great analysis of how much money developers in Palm’s App Catalog have been making, and to me it looks very promising. Let me explain.
The Numbers
I admit, at a first glance the results are discouraging (I even used that exact word when I retweeted the PreCentral post earlier this evening). Tweed, a native Twitter client for WebOS, is the most downloaded paid application with 4,946 downloads as of Wednesday evening. At $1.99 and with Palm taking 30% of the earnings, this comes out to $6,889 for Pivitol Labs. That’s the highest selling app. However, Absolute Fitness, a $4.99 app, has sold just about 3,500 copies which has made the developer $12,218 so far. While these numbers seem low for the best selling apps, there are a number of things to take into consideration.
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The paid app catalog has only been open for roughly two months, which means that statistically, Tweed has made about $3,500 a month and Absolute Fitness has made $6,000 a month. Keep in mind that a bulk of those numbers were probably from when the apps first launched (as thousands of Pre owners were starving for new applications to use).
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WebOS devices are only active on Sprint (in the US, anyway). As we all know, Sprint isn’t exactly the most popular network nowadays. As WebOS matures and devices get released to other platforms such as Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, the userbase for the Pre will grow exponentially.
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There is an app limit on WebOS phones right now. For some asinine reason Palm decided to limit the storage partition on the Pre to 256 MB (even though there are 8GB of internal storage). Eventually this comes out to somewhere between 20 and 50 apps. This needs to be fixed - there are a number of users who can’t purchase any applications at all. This kind of relates to the next point, as well.
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The App Catalog is still in beta. A number of developers and consumers aren’t even touching the catalog yet until it comes out of beta. Some people just don’t want to enter their credit card information into a service that is labeled as “unfinished.” The beta tag is supposed to be removed by December, and hopefully that app limit will be thrown out with it.
What this means to potential developers
There are a few important things to take away from this information and how I feel you can be successful in Palm’s App Catalog.
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Hone your craft. Make sure your application is the best it can be before it is released to the App Catalog. Quality sells, and smartphone users are typically, well, smart. They can recognize crap apps when they see them.
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Don’t be a one-trick pony. It’s true that the average app might not see more than a couple thousand downloads. If you’re doing this for a living or for some serious extra cash, don’t stop after you’ve released your first app. Once people know that you’re a talented developer they will recognize your brand and seek other apps that you’ve developed. Think, if you have 4 or 5 $1.99 apps out there in the catalog and each one is selling roughly 500 copies per month, that’s some decent cash right there. And I’m being modest with this hypothetical situation, your app could very well sell thousands of copies per month once these phones are on every network.
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Build a brand. Sure, this is getting into Vaynerchuk territory, but it’s a proven fact: using similar product naming conventions or iconography will increase sales. It definitely can’t hurt it. How do you think Apple is doing so well lately? iKnow one reason.
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Listen to your customers. This is probably the most important tip for any business. Read every review of your app, check out forum posts and blog posts. Search Twitter for people talking about your app. If people think you’re charging too much for your app maybe it’s time to consider a price reduction. If people think that they should be able to set a particular option, you darn well better have an update on the way that enables that for them.
I could go on and on about this stuff but I’ll save it for another day. The numbers are looking promising for me and they will only get higher. I know I haven’t revealed anything about the apps that I’m working on but in due time I’ll have some public betas out there for anyone to try.
As always, thanks for reading. I answer any comments, tweets, or emails that come my way (david at rmxdave dot com)!
