5 Years On The App Store: Part II


Part II: 2009

Here’s the the second chapter of our series of 4 blog posts about our 5 years on the App Store. You can read about Part I here.

Currencies

Currencies

Released: Spring, 2009
EOL: June 2013

I don’t recall ever needing a currency converter that bad but noticed that most of them sucked and saw an opportunity in that fact.

I knew I needed a top notch designer for this project and was finally able to afford one, thanks to Rocket Taxi’s success. So I approached Sebastiaan de With and to my surprise he was available to work on the project!

The app was pretty popular and even got featured on the App Store (along with many of our apps) and even had a store presence in France!

Currencies filed for bankruptcy in 2013.

TouchPad

TouchPad

Released: Aug, 2009
Sold to BitBQ in Dec 2013

The app that almost never saw the light of day. It’s been so long ago that I honestly cannot even remember why it didn’t get released earlier.

I think it had to do with the fact that I bought an HDTV and hooked a Mac Mini to it and finally had a need for the app.

For those of you who don’t know, TouchPad lets you control your computer just like you’d connect a keyboard and trackpad to it.

The app was a major success and brought a lot of attention on Edovia but got neglected over time. It now has a new home at BitBQ along with NumPad. I also wrote a blog post explaining the transaction.

Warships

Warships

Released: Dec, 2009
EOL: 2013

This was the second project where Sebastiaan got on board. Make sure that you watch the video he made about designing the app.

The app was set at $1.99 at first but aside from the initial sales spur, it did not do well so the price went down to 99¢ in an afford to bring some interest over the game. It sold an average of only 4 copies a day. Do the math: 99¢ x 4 copies x 70% revenues is not a lot of money to maintain and develop a game!

So I decided to make Warships free and ad-based (Apple had just introduced iAd during WWDC’10) in July 2010 and Boom! Over one million downloads in only 52 days! I guess people don’t want to pay for a battleship game…

While iAd revenues were ok at first (around $120/day), they slowly declined to just a few bucks so it wasn’t worth the effort to make the app Retina and iPhone 5 ready.

Hit and Sunk. Game Over.

As you can see, none of the apps I’ve mentioned so far are still part of Edovia. But that’s about to change…

Next on Part III: 2010-Present