Friday 16th December 2011
Our App Sales Say Kindle Fire is Outselling the iPad
Several months ago we released a version of our first game, Happi Reads, for Android Market. This was more of an experiment than something we actually thought would make us any money. At the end of September we released Happi Reads also on the Amazon App Store. Again with no expectation it would sell much but why not since we had done most of the work anyway when we did the Android Market version.
What Happened Nov 15?
At first we were right about sales being more or less non existent but on Nov 15 something happened to our sales on the Amazon App Store. Sales of Happi Reads increased over night by 1000%. It must have been a one time thing, a school or something testing tablets we thought. However, the next day sales increased 100% over the previous day’s enormous gain. Day three – 50% over day two. Day four 25% over day three and so on. After a week we were up to a 10 000% gain compared to day one! At the time of writing, sales are steady at about 10 000% above the pre Nov 15 level.
Since we were (are) still selling very few copies/day of Happi Reads on Android Market the natural question was: What happened on the Amazon App Store around Nov 15? For our US readers the question is a simple one and the answer spells – Kindle Fire!
For our readers in the rest of the world who might not even have heard of Kindle Fire, here is a brief explanation:
Kindle Fire is a 7” color tablet made by Amazon. The device runs Android and costs $199 compared to the low end iPad which costs $499. Kindle Fire is not quite as good as the iPad but for less than half the price and with Amazon’s enormous online marketplace in the US, the Kindle Fire definitely has the potential to become a game changer.
Outselling the iPad?
Looking at Happi Papi’s sales figures over the last month, the Kindle Fire might be well on its way of becoming that game changer. Consider the following:
Happi Papi currently has 2 apps available on the Apple App Store, Happi Reads and Happi Spells. These two apps exists in both different device versions (iPhone and iPad) and in different language versions for a total of 27 different versions (apps) on the Apple App Store. On the Amazon App Store we have one app: the English tablet version of Happi Reads.
Still there have been several days over the past month when we have sold more copies of this one version on the Amazon App Store than all our 27 versions combined have sold on the Apple App Store. And this is not all. We can also see a general declining sales trend over the last 30 days on the Apple App Store. This trend started right around the time the Kindle Fire was released. Is this a sign that there has been more Kindle Fires sold the last month than iPads? We don't know but it is at least not a totally outrageous suggestion.
We, of course, understand that there might also be other factors affecting our sales numbers and that 30 days of data is hardly enough to draw any real conclusions. Nevertheless it is very interesting to see that a six months’ trend of steadily increasing sales on the Apple App Store is suddenly broken. And that this happened to happen more or less at the exact same time as a 2 month hiatus in sales on the Amazon App Store suddenly burst into, pardon the pun, Fire!
A few days ago (Dec 11) we submitted our latest app, Happi Spells, to the Amazon App Store. This release was not planned for now but who wouldn’t try to capitalize on a great opportunity. In fact we simultaneously released both games also for Barnes & Nobles Nook color. Not that we have any expectations for the Nook Color but we all know now how suddenly that can change…
