iPhone Developer Edovia Gets 1,000,000 Downloads of Warships
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Author:
Ben Yoskovitz
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app store apple edovia ipad iphone luc vandal warships
Edovia is a small iPhone app developer in Montreal. Luc Vandal, owner of the company, has been developing for the App Store since the very beginning in 2008.
Recently, one of his apps, the game Warships, hit 1,000,000 downloads. That’s a significant accomplishment. I don’t know of any other app developer in Montreal that can make that claim. Luc wrote a fantastic post about it here: 1,000,000 downloads for Warships! What’s interesting about it (beyond the cool accomplishment) is how Luc got there, playing with pricing (the app is free, but wasn’t always so) and how much he shares about the experience.
We thought it was a great opportunity to speak with Luc further about his experience as an App Store guru. He’s been at it a long time and had varying degrees of success. There aren’t many active app developers in Montreal, but it’s a growing, hot and very interesting space to be in.
NextMontreal: You got started in 2008 and had 2 apps in the App Store when it opened, correct? How did you get into mobile app development?
Luc Vandal: I’ve been doing software development for about 10 years and got acquainted with Macs while I was working with Corel. From that point, I always followed what Apple was doing but was mainly a Windows developer. Long story short, had to make the move to Apple four years ago and never looked back. So when Apple introduced the iPhone, the iPod touch and finally the SDK early 2008, we had to get onboard.
We got approved around April, 2008 and released Linguo and Steps on the App Store on launch day, July 11th.
NextMontreal: It sounds like Edovia is really a 1-person shop (you!) and you contract work out to others when needed. Is that correct?
Luc Vandal: Pretty much. I use “we” a lot even though I’m the only full time employee! I just hire people when they are needed. I usually get interns so I can get a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time (usually 16 weeks). Design-wise, Jacob Desaulniers (@desaulniers) is the one I trust. He’s located in Florida. I had other designers prior to him but they always end up being employed by Apple!
NextMontreal: Some of your apps are for sale in the App Store – others are free. Is your primary income for Edovia through paid apps? Do you also do contract app development for others?
Luc Vandal: TouchPad is our main app and brings most of the income. The other apps have more of a supportive role. Our current project should become our primary income, however. We used to do contract work but after the Rocket Taxi success (which was coincidentally contract work that I ended up buying for Edovia), I didn’t have to do that anymore. I prefer working on my own projects but I never close the door to outside projects if they are very interesting!
What was the success with RocketTaxi?
Luc Vandal: Some people at Apple really liked the app and the design department loved the icon. So one day I get an email from Apple asking me if I’d like Rocket Taxi to be featured in TV spots in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Italy and France! So of course I agreed! That gave Edovia a lot of exposure! At WWDC09, the Rocket Taxi icon was everywhere at Moscone Center (see photo)! I’m really proud of that, especially that I bought the app back from a customer for a large amount and sales weren’t picking up. It was a bold move that paid off but at that time I had no idea this would happen!
NextMontreal: How do you decide on app pricing? Do you experiment with pricing? I’ve seen a few games for example, Iron Man 2 and Shrek Kart drop their price to $0.99 and then skyrocket into some of the most popular games.
Luc Vandal: Marco Arment sums it up really well in this blog post. There are two App Stores: one for short term, novelty apps and games that go for 99¢ and another store for richer, developer-maintained apps. If you go with the latter, you have to charge what your app is worth if you want to keep maintaining it and build something.
I did experiment a lot with pricing over the past two years. For instance, TouchPad went from $3.99 to $4.99 and sales went up! Unless you have a huge marketing effort to back you up (like TapTapTap), there’s no point selling your app for cheap.
NextMontreal: With Warships you went from $1.99 to $0.99 to free. Going to free clearly had a huge impact. A 1,000,000 downloads is a big milestone! And you did it in only 53 days.
Luc Vandal: That really took me by surprise! I thought I’d get about 1,000 downloads a day but it gets from 8,000 to 10,000 a day! A lot of people love the game but I guess no one wants to pay for it, even at 99¢.
NextMontreal: Did you know that at 148apps (which ranks top apps by downlopads over the last 24 hours by iPhone users) that Warships is ranked #78 (at the time of this interview)
Luc Vandal: No I wasn’t aware of that! I use MajicRank to monitor rankings.
NextMontreal: Other than going free, what else did you do to promote Warships? There’s gotta be more than that to get the attention + all those downloads?
Luc Vandal: I honestly don’t know how that happened. Maybe it’s a mix of appearing in the Free section of the App Store and tweets that got Warships that momentum. All I did was tweet about Warships now being free. I got lots of retweets and I guess a lot of people just downloaded the game all at once so it went up the charts quickly and got noticed and downloaded even more.
NextMontreal: When you went free, you also put ads into the app. You’ve written that you generated $2,218.65 over a month from ads. Not a lot of money, although a huge increase over what you made when the app wasn’t free. So 1,000,000 downloads overall has generated very little cash.
Luc Vandal: The problem is that iAd is very slow to start. Still not a lot of ads. Moreover, it’s limited to the US and UK territories for now so most people see the ad for TouchPad instead. It’s still very little money for such a user base (Warships has about 300 000 active users) so I wouldn’t recommend other devs to jump in the iAd wagon too fast and hope for revenues. For instance, Linguo Free has made 52¢ over the past month!
NextMontreal: You say in your blog post that you consider Warships a success. It’s been downloaded a lot, but what value (other than a couple thousand dollars) has it brought you? And what value do you think it will bring you in the future?
Luc Vandal: Edovia gets a lot of exposure through Warships. I used to spend over $1,200 a month on advertising that didn’t really conclude into sales so now the budget dropped to $0 and I let Warships do the work. I’ll use other forms of advertisement in the future but only for new app releases.
NextMontreal: How do you decide what apps to build next? Are you planning to keep building free apps, or focus more on paid ones?
Luc Vandal: There are no plans, really. It’s either that I want an app for my own use and none of the offerings suit me or I just get this idea about an app that I’d be stoked to create. Our next app, which is currently under development, is something we’ve started working on two years ago but got put aside until the iPad came up since it makes much more sense on it.
Edovia will release free, ad-driven apps when they make sense but other than that it’ll be paid apps. Support, designers, developers cost money and for now I don’t see how an iAd driven app can sustain a business, even with a large user base.
NextMontreal: Over the last 2 years of building mobile apps, what have been the biggest lessons for you? What have been the biggest surprises and biggest disappointments?
Luc Vandal: Our biggest surprise was Rocket Taxi. It got a lot of exposure from Apple through their website, stores, newspaper ads and TV spots. That gave the company a huge break and allowed Edovia to focus only on its own products. Seeing your app on TV or in stores is always awesome. Some of our other apps also got some Apple love and we feel very fortunate about it. It gives us the motivation to outdo ourselves every time we develop a new project.
Disappointments? Not really, no. I feel very fortunate to be able to make a nice living out of something I love. The App Store enabled that and I’m stoked that I’m able to run my own company, work with talented people and create stimulating new projects without having anyone telling me what to do!
NextMontreal: For anyone looking at mobile app development, what would you recommend? How should they get into the industry? Are there certain kinds of apps they should focus on?
Luc Vandal: Don’t think of the App Store as a goldmine. For most people (99%) it’s not. Do it for the love of the platform and to create awesome apps and games people will enjoy. You should also focus on apps you care about. It’ll show in the end and make your app a better product. That’s what we do at Edovia and so far we’ve been successful!
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