Piezo Generates More Money After Leaving the Mac App Store

Paul Kafasis, Rogue Amoeba:

Our charmingly simple audio recording app Piezo was originally distributed in both the Mac App Store and via direct sales, but it has since left the App Store.

After seeing Kapeli’s chart, I was curious about the App Store’s impact on Piezo’s sales. The restrictions and limitations of the Mac App Store ultimately led us to remove Piezo on February 12th, 2016. We’ve now been selling it exclusively via our site for a year. This has provided about as perfect a real-world test case as one could hope for. Piezo’s removal came with minimal publicity, the price has remained constant at $19, and we’ve had no big updates or other major publicity for it in either 2015 or 2016.

This is a really interesting case study. They saw a small decrease in unit sales, but an increase in revenue because they were no longer paying Apple’s 30 percent App Store tax on any of the remaining sales. As Kafasis concludes:

I certainly won’t state that every developer will have this same success if they remove a product from the Mac App Store and distribute it exclusively through their own site. Your mileage will undoubtedly vary. In our case, however, it’s clear that we were serving Apple, rather than Apple serving us.

★ Sunday, 12 February 2017