Overnight Success in the App Store?

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In the Apple App Store, the titles that make it big seem like overnight success stories. After all, who hasn’t heard of Snapchat, with the rumored Facebook acquisition offer and the subsequent competition from Facebook (Poke)? Within the gaming space, Ruzzle, the first hit title of 2013, also seemingly came out of nowhere and is currently riding high as #2, overall, within the iOS leaderboard. 

But, digging deeper, with services such as AppAnnie, you’ll find that it often takes numerous app versions over the course of months to come up with an “overnight success”. I chose a small sample of four hit apps - Snapchat, Video Star, Ruzzle, and EyeEm. It took these titles, respectively, 198 days, 274 days, 274 days, and 530 days to hit the overall leaderboard within the US. And, all of these products, with the exception of Snapchat, needed at least 10 versions of the app to get there. 

Although press publications such as TechCrunch and Mashable focus on the metrics once success hits, it would be useful to also explore what these products did leading up to their success. For example, in Mike Butcher’s recent TechCrunch article about EyeEm, outside of organic growth from “some high school in Texas” it would be interesting to note which of the changes the app’s developer made, in its 25+ versions, actually had a sizable positive impact on the metrics. After all, there should be a way to correlate the changes that an app describes in its “What’s New” text (which is public) and the application’s subsequent movement up the leaderboard (which is also public). 

In the meantime, developers battling it out within their individual categories, with the goal of hitting the overall leaderboard, should not despair. Overnight success within the App Store is, in fact, often a matter of many days and numerous app versions.