App Store: it's a hard life

It may come as a bit of a shock to many, but the truth was already known to most independent developers for iOS: the App Store is a really hard environment to live in. This has been lately confirmed in some new figures released by mobile analytics firm Adeven, which speak of almost 400.000 (i.e., 80% of all apps) “zombie” apps: apps that are seldom, if ever, downloaded. Here what TUAW says about it:

[only] a few companies with a lot of experience, brand recognition and marketing money are able to catapult their products up into the Top 25, where they’re usually profitable as long as they can sit there.

This is definitely true, so, when I found this list of beautiful iOS app web sites, I could not resist the curiosity of checking with Xyologic stat engine how much a beautiful site can help an app.

Well, I will leave the detailed task for yourself, since it would be pretty hideous to highlight the not-so-good results of some nice and well-done apps, which fellow independent developers put a lot of effort and time into, but it seems pretty obvious that with several of them ranking below the 10k downloads overall, a nice app web site is not the most important thing to have.