100,000 Piano Time downloads in the Windows Store
Piano Time just crossed the 100,000 download mark since the launch of Windows 8! Here are all the stats I can dig up of the first 3 months in the store. Piano Time also recently won the Apptivate.ms contest sponsored by Microsoft and Stack Overflow.
Hopefully this will help some people get an idea of where the Windows Store is headed. Feel free to chime in with your experiences in the store.
Downloads
Piano Time has averaged about 1,100 downloads a day since launch with a one-day high of 3,400 which was on Christmas day. It has been close to the top of the Music & Video – Free category since launch but has started to slip lately. The US and UK have the biggest share of downloads but it has been downloaded in every country the store is available.
Money
Piano Time is monetized in a few ways; Advertising, a Pro version, and in-app purchases.
Advertising
Piano Time has one main advertisement supplied by Microsoft Advertising. As you can see below the average eCPM is a terrible 40 cents for 1,855,017 impressions. I’m hoping this goes up as more advertisers come to Windows 8.
Piano Time Pro Version
Piano Time Pro was released a couple weeks after Piano Time and doesn’t have any ads. It also has the ability to save MP3s included in the cost. I’ve slowly raised the price from $1.99 to $3.49. So far it’s had 233 downloads with a revenue of $468.48
In-app Purchases
In the last update I added an in-app purchase to save your recordings as MP3 files for $1.99, but that has only been in the app for less than a week. It’s too early to tell if it will generate any significant income.
Download Piano Time from the Windows Store:
Windows Phone Project Structure with Scheduled Task Agent
I recently updated River Flows to support some of the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) featues like multiple live tiles and scheduled task agents. The new scheduled task agent updates the background images of the live tiles every 30 minutes (great post on how to generate live tile background images)
Everything was great until I went to submit my app to the marketplace. It turns out there is a list of unsupported background agent APIs that can’t be in any assembly references for a Scheduled Task Agent project. Initially I had my Windows Phone Application project structured with a class library that was referenced in both the Windows Phone project as well as Scheduled Task Agent project. I had to re-structure the solution to this:
Once I had restructured the class libraries so that my Scheduled Task Agent project didn’t reference any unsupported APIs and I was still able to have good code reuse, the marketplace submission worked.
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River Flows lets you check the current flow of any river in the United States so you know the best time to get out kayaking or rafting. You can save your favorite rivers so you can check them quickly and also check flows of rivers nearby using GPS. Information available in the app: current flow, guage height, charts of recent activity and maps of guage locations.
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