The Art of the App Store: The Business of Apple Development

BUSINESS REASONS BEHIND REVENUE MODELS

Obviously, you want to make mountains of money. The best approach to this end depends on both your long- and short-term goals for the app, as well as strategy for maintaining it (app awareness, updates, fixes, and so on), which will be the topic of discussion in Chapter 11.

Let's spend some time going over the business reasons and considerations behind choosing which pricing/revenue model to go with for various types of apps. If it turns out that none of these types of apps is for you, Chapter 8 examines the different paid models.

Free App Considerations

Following are some (but certainly not all) of the key business-motivated reasons to make a free game, regardless of whether you turn it into a freemium model:

• You're hoping to generate ad revenue — This is but one method to generate revenue in a free app, and results can vary greatly. Because of this, generating money through ads should not be the main driving factor in choosing a model; more lucrative methods certainly exist, as you learn later in this chapter.
• You're cross-selling other apps, some of which might be paid — For example, you might have a series of storybook apps, several of which are free, but a few others with more features and/or tie-in to a license/popular story that are paid. In other words, you might want buy-in to a series or your company's brand awareness (which is a very good thing), or these features could even be unrelated. Essentially, similar to how lite versions ...