Taptitude - a Windows Phone Success Story

There's probably a decent amount of money to be made on Windows Phone apps. A smaller market, but far less competition- and lord knows the current batch of apps aren't up to much.

&#62;We've asked our users why they don't update to Mango, considering it's free, and most of the responses were because they didn't have a computer to update their phone with. Unfortunately this can't be done over the air.<p>Wow, this is very interesting. I was always under the impression that the smartphone crowd always synced their phone to their computer first. Maybe the way apple does it has ruined my perspective.

This is the app story that all my Windows Phone friends talk about as "a success story". It's really "the success story", as it's the top downloaded free game (except for XBox Live Extras).<p>I wonder what the revenue numbers for the top free iPhone and Android games are? Tapitude looks like it's doing about $3,000 a week / $400-500 a day. (Am I reading their chart right?) Didn't we hear plenty of stories about how Draw Something was doing $100,000 a day (now that's probably combining ad revenue and in-app purchases from the free version plus the sales of the paid version).<p>I'm not saying that there isn't money to be made on Windows Phone, but if the top free game is only doing $400 / day, it's orders of magnitude less than on iOS. Is it worth it to have your app in the "smaller pond" of a less-crowded app store? Maybe.<p>I suspect their huge spike over the past 2-3 weeks is due to the Lumia 900 - everyone trying out some new apps on their new phone. Time will tell if this is the phone that really sells the public on Windows Phone, but it's clearly their best success yet (top selling phone on Amazon).

Is it just me, or is a 1$ eCPM average unusually high?

As a Windows Phone user and developer, I've noticed frequent updates help promote app usage tremendously, which is confirmed by the analysis. With so many apps installed on my phone, I tend to forget about 70% of them until there's an update notification and then I'd want to check out what's new. So this is a perfect model as long as there's no shortage of content ideas. This is reminiscent of one of the most successful PC games today, League of Legends, which has had new content released every two weeks since launch couple years ago.<p>Devs, have you considered microtransaction for Taptitude? You did mention "coins to purchase game updates." Maybe some users prefer to pay for those updates instead? Congratulations on the success!