The Mac App Store saw over 1 million downloads in its first day of availability. That’s a terrific number, but pinning down the effect it’s had for individual developers is a little trickier. Virtual notebook and productivity software Evernote‘s experience sheds a little light on what that success has meant for some apps.
A graph of new Evernote users since New Year’s Day tells a much better story than words ever could. In the chart below (from Evernote’s blog), each column represents the number of new users per hour, beginning at midnight on Jan. 1. The red portion shows new users coming from the Evernote Mac client. The massive spike is where the Mac App Store launched.
Since the App Store launch, more than half of new users are coming from the Mac client. And that’s only new users. Evernote says it’s seen 90,000 client downloads between store launch and midnight Jan. 7, but many of those users already had an existing Evernote registration. Evernote CEO Phil Libin had this to say about his product’s success in the Mac App Store:
“It’s a very big deal [...] We initially thought that since so much of our user base was coming from mobile, that was the key distribution platform. But maybe it isn’t mobile that’s important, maybe it’s the well-designed app store.”
In the future, as adoption increases and the App Store trickles out beyond early adopters to the general public, Libin sees the Mac App Store as easily becoming the default way to get software onto the Mac. He predicts that we could eventually see 95 percent of all Mac software distributed this way in near future, and that eventually there might be no longer be any reason to offer direct downloads via the web at all. Overall, this is very promising news for developers eager to reach broader audiences.
Cool.
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