Michael Yuan

As iPhone developers, we all heard of success stories of people selling 10,000+ copies of their apps per day in the app store, making hundreds of thousands of dollars in mere weeks. I always wondered what it is like to have a truly popular application in the app store. Well, now I know.

Just a week after we released Hook Mobile’s Multimedia Messaging app, it’s download number has skyrocketed to 12,000+ / day, and it is still accelerating! At this rate, we will have one million users in a quarter. Those are not your average “web users” — they are people who downloaded the application to their phone, and confirmed their phone numbers with us!

Okay, the Multimedia Messaging app is free and we are not exactly making a load of money yet. And, as the reviews indicate, there are a fair amount of problems (partly because we never anticipated this amount of traffic to hit our servers and support staff in such short time!) But to me, this is an eye opener on what a successful iPhone application can do. A lot of lessons learned that can hopefully help us market other for-pay applications.

Onward!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 12:35 am and is filed under java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.