Oz Weather Apponomics – Part 2

Following on from my initial report after the first two weeks of sales, we’ve now had one full month of sales. Here are the daily sales for the month of November 2008.

Summary of Sales & Revenue

Total units sold: 5,238
Estimated revenue: AUD$8,300 (US$5,250)
Estimated break-even point: 2 months or less

Daily unit sales jumped substantially around 22nd Nov, which coincided with an outbreak of extreme storms on parts of Australia’s east coast. There were a lot of great radar images to look at! Of course this also increased app usage and demand on the server, as a result of which I had to upgrade the server capacity. I guess that is one of the problems of success.

Usage Statistics

Total weather queries: 140,000
Avg weather queries per app per day: 2.2
Total data delivery: 6.08GB
Avg data delivery per app per day: 94kB

A “weather query” is one request by the app for one city’s weather data. Although a typical request requires only several kB of data in itself, the 94kB is explained by the fact that radar images are downloaded simultaneously to the weather request to ensure that the image is likely already there should the user actually want to look at it.

Upgrade Statistics

Total units v1.0 sold: 2,400
Total upgrades to v1.1 by month end: 1,860
Upgrade ratio: 77.5%

This seems to be contrary to other reports I had heard which indicated that the typical upgrade ratio for an iPhone app was low. Here are two reasons to explain why this case might be different.

The app was only 3 weeks old when the update came out, and many had purchased it only within the week prior. Hence they were probably still actively exploring new apps and would notice upgrades promptly.
In general this app is one you would use on a daily basis – as distinct from games or novelty apps where you tend to forget about them not long after first acquiring them. (Yes, I’ve got some too.)

Other Thoughts

Those of you who read the comments on my last blog may have seen an entry from one of the Pocket Weather developers. He very graciously posted their own sales trends, which so far look very different from my own, despite the closely aligned basic purpose and functionality of our apps. I also note that Pocket Weather will soon have an update to their app, and it will be very interesting for us both to see how that affects our relative sales levels. Stay tuned!