This post provides an update to the progress of Oz Weather in the Australian app store.
First, here are some of the most recent milestones, highlights and points of interest.
- Total app downloads: 34,800
- Net app revenue: AUD$52,500 (US$37,000)
- Highest paid app ranking: #1 (for 12 consecutive days)
- Lowest paid app ranking: #17 (excluding app store technical glitch)
- Average paid app ranking: #6 (over app lifetime)
- Upgrade uptake half-life: 5 days (average time for 50% of existing users to update to new versions)
- Total weather queries served: 3.8 million
- Split between iPhone / iPod Touch user base: 89% / 11%
And here is the complete history of daily sales to date (ie. from 1st November 2008 to end of first week of April 2009).
I have listed some probable causes for some of the ups and downs in my previous posts, but the newest “feature” here is what looks like a downward trend since the peaks of early February, although the last 20 days or so could be showing a leveling off – perhaps to some kind of base sales level around 100 to 150 sales per day. This is lower than the figure of 150 to 200 I had suggested in an earlier post, but the correlation between daily sales and weather queries per day seems to have become even clearer, as evidenced by the following updated graph.
If you compare this graph with the earlier version from a month ago, you will see that the more recent, lower level of daily sales on the leftmost part of the graph correlate well with decreased level of app usage by existing customers – which was down to about 0.75 queries per day per app in some cases.
This suggests two possibilities to me
- Long term users may be experiencing app fatigue, overload or dilution, and are no longer using older apps as much as they used to.
- During this inter-seasonal period with less weather extremes, the weather is of less interest to people in general, and hence existing app owners use the app less, and new iPhone owners are less likely to want to buy a copy.
It is worth noting that sales of other Australian weather apps appear to have experienced broadly similar trends to those of Oz Weather, as evidenced by their rankings which have broadly followed the movements of Oz Weather’s own rankings. Therefore it seems that competitive factors are not a significant factor here.
Based on the evidence to hand, I suspect that the issue of less interesting weather is the most significant one. If this is indeed so, then sales can be expected to increase again when bouts of extreme winter weather start to hit Australia.
So that is my hypothesis, and I will report back later with further data which may support or refute it.
Ajnaware's Weblog 
Hi,
As a buyer of your app (I really like it by the way), I would definitely think that it might be down because of the “less interesting weather”.
I also live in Brisbane and without the storms, (I was always checking the radar) during the autumn and winter our weather can be basically low 20’s, high teens for weeks in a row.
It will be interesting to see if there is an uptake once the temps start to really drop. You might get a few skier’s downloading it!!
I realise that you’re not a tax consultant, but I would be very interested in a post that details how you are going to handle the GST implications of being an iPhone developer in Australia? You look like you’re well on the way to being over the ATOs threshold, and having to pay the government the GST that Apple has been paying you?
I ask because I’m also an iPhone developer in Australia and haven’t really looked into that side of things yet.