Developer earns 5 times more on Marketplace than iPhone

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George Karavias from Anlock, a software vendor who creates educational games for children on the iPhone and Windows Phone, has posted an interesting blog post in which he contends that Marketplace is very fertile ground for developers, while for them at least, iOS has become rather less productive.

Anlock has 13 applications on the Windows Phone Marketplace and 12 on the App Store, across six different languages, all fully localized. The applications are educational, for children aged 3 to 6 and help them learn the letters, words and spelling.

Their blog post refers to a specific app, the English versions, “First Words with Phonics: Learning Animals” in the App Store and “First Words: Learning Animals” in the Marketplace, which were both released in July.

They note the iPhone version had more features and a lot more promotion.

The App store version is more enhanced than the Marketplace version, including phonics. We executed an extensive marketing plan for the iPhone app that unfortunately went south, as it was not coordinated properly. Setting up the campaign and executing it took a lot of time and used up significant resources (including money).

On the other hand we had little to none marketing activities set up and executed for the WP7 app.

The result:

In terms of ranking, our WP7 app has been number 1 in the US in the Kids + Family category for the past three months in the Marketplace. As for the iPhone app, it has been ranked in the top 400 in Games\Educational for more than 2/3 of the entire time frame, reaching the top 100.

The final outcome is that the Windows Phone 7 app, with less resources, was earning 5 times more than the iOS app.

George believes this is for obvious reasons – much less competition on Windows Phone 7 (with 40,000 apps) than iPhone (500,000 apps) which makes it difficult to stand out.

The reason resonates with a claim make recently by Josh Martin, Director of Apps Research at Strategy Analytics, who said “The app market is already maturing. Developers are tired of a few making the lion’s share of revenue. Thus, we see strong interest in fresh, emerging platforms …”

Certainly in the case of Anlock it is turning out to be a lot more profitable to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in an ocean.

They conclude:

So, provided you have a killer app and unless you have a solid, well coordinated marketing plan in place for the App Store that you will execute with diligence along with a twist of luck, you stand a pretty good chance of having your app buried in the rubble.

On the other hand your killer app will stand out on the Marketplace and will reward you accordingly. And with all the Nokia devices hitting the market soon, it can only get better. Of course, the later you decide to join, the better it is for the rest of us that are already in… 🙂

Read the full article here.

More about the topics: developers, iphone app store, marketplace, windows phone 7.5