TableFlip Mac App Store Experiment Stats: Sources

Here’s some more background info for indie devs. To follow up the release of TableFlip on the Mac App Store and me noticing that yes, people buy the app without any marketing, I wanted to share sales origin stats today: according to the available data collected by the App Store, 100% of purchases were made after a search inside the Mac App Store so far.

Nobody was referred to the App Store from a website. 0 impressions of the App Store listing (e.g. search result items), 0 purchases, 0 App Store page views (the actual product page). The App Store Connect developer dashboard does admit that only 1/3 of the sales can be assigned to one of its categories (App Store Search, Web Referrer, or App Store Browse). The remaining 2/3 are “Unavailable”, whatever that means!

I run a weekly sponsorship at Brett Terpstra’s blog now (see the post), so the numbers might change beginning today. That’s the first public mention of the app being in the Mac App Store, I think. I’ll keep y’all posted how that affects the stats.

In the past month since putting the app on the Mac App Store, I was quite surprised about the steady stream of sales, especially since nobody knew about the app listing, so I expected people to find it via the App Store search. The Mac App Store was called a “warehouse”, where your stuff is shelved away together with all the other stuff, and there’s no real shopping experience or product discovery. With the changes to the App Store introduced with Mojave, including a stronger editorial voice, this could change. We’ll see!