I attended an online seminar by Nokia’s Jure Sustersic on Windows Phone 8 development. It was a high level session so not much new, though Sustersic says the 7.8 update for existing 7.x Windows Phones is coming very soon; he would not announce a date though.
The slide that caught my eye was one on how to make more profitable apps, including some intriguing statistics. In particular, according to Sustersic:
- Freemium apps (free to download but with paid upgrades or in-app purchases) achieve 70 times as many downloads and 7 times more revenue
- The top 50 apps are 3.7 times more likely to have Live Tiles
- The top 50 apps are 3.2 times more likely to use Push Notifications
- The top 50 apps are updated every 2-3 months
- The fastest growth is in new markets, so localize
Of course what Windows Phone developers want most is a larger market, so for Nokia to sell more phones. Random reboots aside, Windows Phone 8 has been well received, but it an uphill task.
I covered the Windows Phone 8 development platform in summary here.
I’m not familiar with Windows Phone, but it makes total sense that if someone is looking for alternative apps to view anything where live data is involved – they are going to want a live tile to tell them when new data has come in. That is just common sense.
However, just slapping a live tile on any old app isn’t going to instantly make it a top 50 hit, or more importantly it might but also alienate future customers if its shovelware that the user then promptly uninstalls again.
Far too much stock is put into being a top downloaded app, it seems nobody is looking at the bigger picture of which apps people are keeping installed and which are just 5 minute wonders where they are launched once and then forgotten.
Again I’m not sure how Windows Phone works, but I know there are apps I actually remove from my Android phone purely because they are badgerware. Freeware games especially where they fire up a notification every five minutes to try and get me to view more adverts or indulge in some micro transactions.
Perhaps the more ironic of all this is that its coming from Nokia, the company who completely screwed over the Maemo community and delivered far from excellence there. Should I ever switch to Windows Phone from Android (unlikely), it certainly wouldn’t be a Nokia.