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App Rewards Club reports on what going free can do for developers
App Rewards Club is an app and service put together by a few iOS developers to help their fellow app devs with user discovery on the App Store. Like the Free App a Day service, App Rewards Club highlights free apps every day, which benefits users because they can grab apps for free, and then benefits developers because they can grab users to monetize off of. App Rewards Club also offers a monetization service, teaming developers up with other promotions that let users earn rewards in apps. The club has been keeping a tally of how it all works when various apps go free, and they've posted a very interesting report over on the official blog, talking about that very subject. What's perhaps most interesting is just how organic the App Store is: The apps that ARC saw do best with a free period spent exactly zero marketing dollars on their sale, and were instead just propelled by being featured on the App Store or mentioned in the press. As ARC says, "some apps have a natural propensity to get attention and move downloads without getting a big marketer involved." That's a fascinating result, and it's likely one that Apple will be thrilled to hear, given that the App Store was designed to be a relatively open marketplace, where individual developers can compete up alongside much larger companies like EA and Activision. This study finds that a marketing budget doesn't matter so much as just how "sticky" the actual app is. Elsewhere, the company also found that switching from paid to free, while having an (obvious) negative immediate effect on revenue, will actually raise the average number of purchases after going back to paid. It's not by much, and downloads go very high when flipping over to free, but developers looking for a spike in app interest can definitely consider a temporary free giveaway to do so. There's a lot of interesting information here, and the company says it still has a lot to learn going forward. But the main takeaway here seems to be that, for now, growth on the App Store is still fairly organic. Some apps can do well when they get attention, regardless of how much money they spent to get it.
NCSoft's iOS Gem Keeper goes free for now
Perhaps our recommendation of NCSoft's Gem Keeper last year piqued your interest -- but your interest didn't reach a 99-cent level of piquedness. Luckily, thanks to a Free App a Day partnership, you can now download the iOS tower defense title for free!
Take a free Jetpack Joyride on iOS today
Did you miss the offer of a free copy of Jetpack Joyride back in October? You have another chance to avoid the exorbitant 99-cent price, and you don't even have to go through Facebook. Free App a Day is featuring Halfbrick's coin-grabbing test flight, so you can just go into the App Store right now and download it at no cost. To be absolutely clear about it, you should go get this free game. We were quite fond of it even when we thought of it as a 99-cent game.
C64 to stay free, KaleidoVid also free
A little while back, the C64 app in the App Store (a C64 emulator with officially licensed code from some old Commodore 64 games) announced that it was going free for a day with the Free App a Day promotion. That was a few weeks ago, and you might have noticed that the app is still free in the store. We contacted Manomio's CTO Stuart Carnie to ask him if the app was still free, and he confirmed that yes, C64 is staying a free download. The reasoning is pretty interesting -- the way the app works is that you do get some games for free, and then you can buy more using in-app purchases. Carnie tells us that when the app went free, they saw a spike in games being bought -- twenty times what they were selling previously. Making the app free also vastly increased their user base, and since they're constantly trying to get the licenses for older C64 games, going to code owners and saying that they've got almost 1.5 million downloads of the title gives them a lot more attention. In fact, because of the free promotion, Carnie says they've secured rights for International Karate, all the Last Ninja games, and Myth -- those should all be out on the store soon. Very interesting. C64 isn't the only app to go free lately -- David Barnard, the creator of KaleidoVid, an app that our own Dave Caolo enjoyed, has made that app free as well today for "a limited time," though we don't know how long yet. Barnard tells us that sales on the title weren't spectacular, it was designed more for fun than anything else, and that maybe sending the app free for a while will help it pick up some extra attention. Certainly there are apps that work better at different prices, but even if the goal is to make money, selling an app for free sometimes is actually the way to go.
