It’s been over a year since I released both iOS and Android versions of Little Alchemy so I feel like it’s a good time to share some thoughts and numbers.
Mobile versions are free, mostly because I didn’t have much choice. I actually thought that mobile versions could monetize the game but I didn’t have a company set up yet and so I wasn’t able to release paid apps. Why I didn’t have a company? Basically I’d have had to pay 30%-50% of what I was making at the time in taxes and other bullshit so it didn’t make any sense. That dictated the price: free.
Also there are no ads because I wanted to avoid them in the game and because of the technology I used (HTML + JavaScript packed tightly in PhoneGap). To this day there isn’t much choice when it comes to ads for packaged web apps. So mobile versions were created mostly to increase the reach and to give users what they wanted. If that was a good choice is a subject for a whole different post though.
Numbers
Android Daily Installs
Android Total Installs: 240,328
Android Cumulative Rating: 4.33
iOS Daily Installs
iOS Total Installs: 417,014
iOS rating: somewhere between 4.0 and 4.5
Other facts and thoughts
As you may already know Apple is pretty bad when it comes to keeping your stats. I didn’t know that and before I realized that I should do something about it I didn’t have much choice – that’s why the iOS chart looks so weird. If you have an iOS app I highly recommend using some sort of tool for your stats. I’m using App Annie and so far it works just fine. On the Google’s side though there’s no need for any additional actions since available statistics are satisfactory.
Mobile platforms are only a fraction of the Little Alchemy’s user base. But this fraction is becoming big enough to care about. The Ad income balance, from the cheats page, is quickly shifting from computers to phones and tablets. Over the last 30 days 40% of the revenue came from those, even though the cheats page is not optimized for mobile users yet.
I was expecting to see better performance on Android and I’m not entirely sure why the iOS version is performing that much better. It might be caused by the constant presence in the top 100 for some categories (especially Educational > What’s Hot) in many countries.
I’m not publishing stats about Android fragmentation since these are close to the average numbers. It’s worth noting though that 26% of our Android players are on the OS version prior to 4.0.
At the beginning both apps were promoted directly on littlealchemy.com. Surprisingly, when I removed those links, downloads didn’t drop. It means that a solid number of new users is coming directly from stores and those who used the web app first don’t need to be encouraged to check for the mobile version.
In general I’m really happy with those stats. Even though we didn’t get featured anywhere we’re still getting a steady flow of new users. Not bad for a game that for over a year exists just as a temporary solution before the real version comes out. ;)