iPhone App Piracy - a direct noticeable affect on niche market app sales

I've had a niche market app, called Artificial Life, for sale in the iTunes app store for over a year now. As the name implies, it's a simulation of artificial life. Given the subject matter of the app, I never expected to make a lot of money from it. There's a limited audience of the type of people who find the topic interesting (mainly tech people), and a smaller number who own iPhones and would enjoy watching such a sim on their phone.

But, there was a small niche market, and those who used the app tended to use it on average for about 45 minutes per day! The app had been slowly gaining sales over the past year increasing from single digit daily sales to over 20 sales per day. Then, back on April 18th, the app was cracked by pirates and was posted on a web site for jailbreak users to download for free.

I discovered this piracy when a saw a huge spike in app usage (via Google Analytics stats). The stats showed an increase in app usage by about 13 times the normal usage in just one day (over 3200 daily users vs. the previous days average of about 250).

At first, I assumed this would have a negligible effect on my daily apps sales - I was only selling 20+ copies a day and general wisdom say says the piracy numbers are people who would never buy your app in the first place anyhow. Well, sad to say, several months later I can say this general wisdom appears to be wrong, at least for my market.

Here's the graph of daily sales for the past year (you can click on the image for a larger view):



The red line denotes when the app was first cracked and posted on a pirate website. As can be seen, app sales had been steadily climbing, however shortly after the app was cracked app sales began to decline and now are back to single digits for daily sales. It could be coincidence, but it does seem fairly compelling that a couple weeks after the app was pirated, the sales for the app were more than cut in half.

One other interesting point that can be observed from the graph: Up until early April, the app included anti-piracy code to try to make the app a bit more difficult to crack. When I published an app update in early April, I discovered I had introduced a critical bug which was causing a false positive for the piracy detection on some devices. I immediately pulled the app from the store to prevent any existing customers from getting the new update and I was able to get Apple to push through an emergency bug fix the next day. This can be seen in the graph when there was one day in early April with zero sales. Because I wanted to get the bug fix out as quickly as possible, I simply disabled the piracy detection.

Much to my dismay, it only took a week for someone to then pirate this new app update since it no longer included any anti-piracy measures. And then a few more weeks and daily sales were cut in half. And the rest is history.

Apple currently featuring "radio apps" and Stormy Productions has a strong presence on the list

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to discover Apple currently has a list of featured radio apps on the iTunes store, and Stormy Productions was involved in the creation of 10% of those apps.

There are two lists, one for iPhone apps and one for iPad apps.

The iPhone list contains 30 apps, and I've had a hand in the creation of 4 of those apps. Specifically, I wrote all the code for both the Tunemark Radio and JAZZ.FM apps. I also wrote all the radio streaming code and the "now playing" portion of the user interface code for the Public Radio App. And finally, I wrote the radio streaming code used by the PRI app. (A good friend of mine wrote the rest of the code for the PRI app - congrats Rob!).



For the iPad list of featured radio apps there are only 11 apps listed, and Tunemark Radio is one of them!



As an iPhone developer, one always hopes to some day have an app make Apple's "featured" lists on the front page of iTunes, so I am unbelievably happy today to have several make one of Apple's lists.

As for what effect this exposure has on app downloads, I only have access to the stats for the Tunemark Radio app (the rest of the apps are under other developer accounts), but I can say, for my Tunemark Radio app, after one day being on this featured radio app list, the number of downloads have more than doubled. The average daily download count jumped from 500 to over 1100.

Tunemark Radio iPhone app visualizer demo

I put together a video demo of what the Tunemark Radio app music visualizer looks like. I've gotten a few queries from people who didn't realize the app included a visualizer, so hopefully this will give a little more visibility to the feature:

Tunemark Radio visualizer demo from Brian Stormont on Vimeo.
Music in the demo is "Not Hip Hoppie" by Digitube (http://digitube.us)

I'd like to stress this this visualizer will work with any audio stream being played in Tunemark Radio. It looks best when the stereo channels have distinct volume levels.

Also, it should be pointed out that the visualization is not using the local microphone to pick up the audio signal, so will also work if you are using headphones or a dock connector. It's not a responsive as a full desktop-based music visualizer, but this is because the iPhone SDK does not provide access to the decoded data packets of MP3 or AAC audio as they are being played. So, instead, I have to only use the audio chaneel gain status words returned by the SDK.

You can download the app for free from iTunes.