How to Shake Up Zero Downloads on App Store

Jun 30, 2024 · Alexander Deplov

The Problem

You have a paid iOS app that you want to publish to the App Store, or it’s already published, but sales are dropping to zero.

Today in the App Store have about 4 million and 1 million of games according to statista. With such huge competition each new app will be hidden to a user, and according to PhoneArena:

400,000 apps in the App Store have never been downloaded says report - PhoneArena

Solution

If you have an iOS or macOS app that has zero sales on the App Store, here is a trick to shake it up:

Set the price to paid for a few days.
Set the price back to free for a few days.
On the next iterations, try playing with the price to find the one that makes more sales for you.
Find the better range when the praise should be paid and free,
If you have a free app with in-app purchases, during the promo period you can set the in-app to free when you set the app price to paid and vice versa.

In my tests, setting the price to free gives me from 1K to 5K free downloads. I can’t set the price more than once or twice a month. More sales can be made when I have biggest free downloads on a peak. If you lose the moment you don’t switch the price back to paid, sales will be less and you can’t bring it back quickly. The key indicator that I’m going to have many free downloads is when people are talking in Twitter about my apps for latest 24 hours.

I also tested free price to be set only in the United States, and it works better too. I think the reason is that states are trendsetters for other countries. Free price in the US makes hipe that spreads as a free advetisement for an app.

Negative effects to keep in mind

During the promotion period, your app will be excluded from the paid category.
Some users don’t see value in free apps and reviews may not be positive enough.

The hidden cost of free

People who downloaded apps for free were willing to give more negative reviews compared to people who actually bought the app. My theory is that paid users are thinking before they buy, so they are trying to answer a question on “why” they actually wanted this app. Free users was on a hype of a blog, seeing that an expensive app become free, they get it not because they need it, so their meaning to use the app was low.