
From 15 to 55,000: A 24 hour experiment on the App Store - redbluething
http://www.glasshouseapps.com/2011/04/from-15-to-55000-a-24-hour-experiment-in-the-free-app-market/
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nethsix
Summary: App sales dropped to 15/day. After changing to free for the next 24
hours, it shot up to 55,000. Mainly due to tweets/reviews from people keeping
track of free apps, etc.

Take away: Apps need some publicity to break into the market and making them
free gives you some leverage. Which is not too surprising.

Letdown: According to the blog comments, the authors won't be sharing the
results of the app sales when the price is raised to 0.99 after the 24 hour
period =(. Something which most of us will be keen to find out.

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gojomo
Re: 36K downloads of the 55K total were from France

Is there some gift-giving holiday in France coming up? Was this traceable to
some specific site/list/opinion-leader endorsing the app?

Does the app have a french interface option?

~~~
masklinn
> Is there some gift-giving holiday in France coming up?

Not that I know of. There are many holidays in May, but none specifically
related to gifting.

> Is there some gift-giving holiday in France coming up? Was this traceable to
> some specific site/list/opinion-leader endorsing the app?

I don't know, but I can tell you the current version (1.2.1) has basically all
the reviews on the french appstore (30 notes out of 31, 27 reviews out of 29)
and they are very positive overall (16 ★★★★★, 9 ★★★★, 4 ★★★, 1 ★)

> Does the app have a french interface option?

Nope, that's the number one complaint about it.

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adrianmeasures
The downloads in France all come from this blog which picked up the free
promotion: <http://appgratuites.com/2011/04/04/app-gratuite-gift-plan/>

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metageek
This is something you can't really do on Android; the Market doesn't let you
change an app from free to paid.

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Krshna
The is barely readable in the act of make it look elegantly crap.

