Think of your local apps market

I thought it might be time to share some of my numbers for some of my applications and share some of my thoughts.

In a previous posting, I shared why I created a torch app (otherwise known as a flashlight app) for my wp7 (windows phone 7) device.

Torch is a completely free application and has been in the marketplace just after PDC10 (early November), so far to date (January 2010), it has had around 2000 downloads (which isn’t bad considering there are no shortage of flashlight apps.  Here is the graph

What does this graph tell us?

Underneath the actual trendline.  I’ve drawn 3 colored lines to show how the trend pattern has changeid at 3 different points.

As we can see there are 3 trends, blue, green and orange.

• Blue Trend – Before and around Windows Phone 7 US Launch
• Green Trend – After the US Launch
• Orange Trend – Since Mid December

So what happened Mid December?

Was there a massive increase in phones and sales are now levelling off?  Nope, it’s much simpler than that, and too explain it you need to understand the numbers.  I think page 2 of my numbers will make things clearer

Yup, more than 50% of my downloads come from the UK

Why so many UK downloads?

This is an issue of local markets.  People in the UK don’t call flashlights, flashlights, we call them torches.  I never thought about this when I built the app.  I just called it the name, I would naturally use.

So in a marketplace of flashlights my torch app stood out because it had the right name.

Gotcha, but what happened in Mid December?

Before Microsoft released the sales reports, the only way to check downloads was to look at the marketplace.  Now because I’m in the UK I get the UK marketplace (which is quite different from the US marketplace), will probably talk about that in the next post.

Because I was tracking this, I know that Torch appeared in the top 7 or so free items on the phone (i.e you could see it without loading more date on the scroll).

From Mid December, more free apps entered the tools free category, pushing torch lower.  This has resulted in the move to the orange trend.

In the US marketplaces, torch didn’t appear because flashlight apps dominated.

So what can i learn?

I guess you can learn a few things.

• Think about the name of your app and the various locales
• Life exists outside of the US
• Different Marketplaces have different charts

I hope this post has been useful, and will follow up soon on some other points.