Tap Swipe Pinch

When indie iPhone developer Ethan Nicholas made headlines with the $600K he made in one month selling his iShoot app, he cited the game’s lite version as his sole marketing effort.  Soon afterwards, free/lite versions became the de facto marketing technique for the indie dev to push their paid apps up the charts.  That was two years ago and the free/lite version promotion technique has been discussed again and again since then.  Is this technique still effective?  How many developers are successfully using it to push their apps up the charts?  I decided to look for answers in the Top 100.

First, how many of the Top 100 Paid iPhone apps do you think have an accompanying free/lite version?  Go ahead and render your guess…  The answer (as of March 2nd) is 47 out of 100, or less than half.  Clearly, creating a lite version of an app is still an effective technique, but it’s also certainly not the only path into the Top 100.

Games VS. Apps

I always like to analyze games separately as these make up a large portion of The App Store.  Is there a trend in games?  Do gamers need to try before they buy?  Or are other non-game app users more discerning in their purchases?  Turns out, there’s not a huge difference between games and other apps.  In The Top 100 Paid Apps there are 60 games and 32 of those have a free/lite version also available on The App Store.  Close to the same ratio as when including all apps.

Price

If I would expect any subset of the Top 100 to NEED to have a lite version it would be those with prices over $0.99 as these would have a tougher sell with more reluctant buyers who would need a free trial to justify the ‘high cost’.  I was surprised to find that only 9 out of 25 apps in the Top 100 priced at $1.99 or over have lite versions.

Well, what about eliminating the 8 apps that are $1.99?  That brings apps $2.99 and over ringing in at 6 out of 17 that include a free version, almost exactly the same percentage as when including the $1.99 price tier.

Even eliminating the 12 apps that are $2.99 and leaving only the 4 apps that are $3.99 or more leaves you with 1 out of 5 that have a free version.

Clearly, successful apps higher in price don’t necessarily need a lite version.

Indie VS. Big Guys

Last, I wanted to examine some stats on indie vs. established publishers, to see if indies mostly used the lite version driven model whereas big guys like Disney mostly threw their big names behind the titles and didn’t need to have free versions.  However, this type of labeling is very subjective with a lot of grey areas, so I decided against hard stats.  One observation I did make was that big-name publishers are certainly no stranger to the strategy with EA releasing a lite version of NBA Elite 11 and GameLoft releasing a free version of Oregon Trail.  In contrast, there were also indies that were able to climb the charts without resorting to a free version (see Tiny Wings).

Conclusion

So it appears a lot of successful developers both big and small are still using the lite-to-paid strategy.  And the biggest surprise here was that higher priced apps don’t necessarily need to incorporate a lite version to be successful.  Want analyze the data and come to your own conclusions?  The spreadsheet I used is available for download here.