Yes – it’ll be interesting to see how that changes with the next study :)

The main reason sales are so poor is the store’s poor organization. it resembles Filene’s basement after a sale – look it up if you don’t know about Filene’s famous basement – and the teenagers over at apple have yet to visit a real bookstore and see the wonderous new concept called categories. Dewey was a major asshole but the Dewey decimal system was quite logical and imagine if apple organized their store in that manner instead of the crazy system they have now.

The sales per title will continue to drop over the next year as another 50,000 apps get loaded up. Until the store is reorganized unless you have external marketing (and only a few percent of developers do), sales will be miserable except for the 1-2% who penetrate to the “top 100″ list who by virtue of being on that list will stay on it. Kind of like the billboard top 40, maybe we will see massive shilling by companies who create 1000 fake itunes accounts to buy an app for $1 then jack up the price to get on that precious list. It happens in the music biz where artist’s promoters buy their own records in the first weeks to guarantee a top 40 listing…. so we may see this on the iphone soon enough maybe it already has happened. Good luck everybody it beats getting ripped off by the Asian pirates…. oh but actually this is starting to happen more than you think….

The results are particularly interesting because the iPhone has brought in so many fledgling developers who have no or very little programming experience which explains the small amount of those who have marketing plans.

The other very interesting stat was that only 5% of people responded “Yes” to “have marketing”. I assume that means the activities of promotion, advertising (not just has a marketing background or something). I guess this is not surprising considering most of the respondents were 1-5 person teams probably made up of programmers. But, I wonder if the future opportunities for dev teams will be in more effectively promoted apps.

CS == Customer Support / Customer Service
QA == Quality Assurance / Testing

Each “engine” question was separate. So, “own engine” tells you how many people are using their own engine, whereas say SIO tells you how many people are using SIO. “other engines” is just an optional “if you’re using non-private engines that aren’t listed here, what are they? – 52% said they weren’t using any other engine.

For example, i have no idea what is meant by “Have CS?” … Counter-Strike? Computer Science? CS Gas? It’s probably something i *should* know but i just can’t wrap my head around it. Please clarify this, i would appreciate it.

I also have a hard time figuring out how “Own engine?” and “Other Engines?” go together with the engines mentioned by name. Are “other engines” and the named engines only options that those people could select which picked “No” for “Own Engine”?