Harrison 
This is a guest post from fellow software developer Simon Kravis.
It’s often said that software development is only 10% of the cost of making money with software, and I can attest to that. Since 2018, I’ve been developing photo captioning and related software more as a retirement pastime than as a serious source of income (after a career primarily creating analytical software for science and engineering). We hope that the sales proceeds will at least cover running costs. . My best marketing tool is writing reviews of the types of software I create, and my hosting site (hub page) provides useful analysis of the frequency and duration of these visits. Below is a graph from an article about tagging.
The decline from the beginning of 2022 is difficult to explain – articles are updated regularly, so the steady decline is not due to a decrease in “freshness” – for Google this is probably the file update date.
Below is a profile (multiple photo scans) of another review article showing a similar reduction.
But another software (Best Photo Caption Software) also holds up, albeit at a lower level.
I offer digital photo captioning software (Caption Pro) on Windows and Mac platforms. The Windows version also offers an iPhone captions app (CaptionEdit) dating back to 2017. It also offers some of Caption Pro’s features for automatic cropping on Windows. Scanning multiple paper photos (ImageSplit). On Windows, Caption Pro software downloads and sales do not seem to correlate with review visits, even though approximately 1/3 of website visits are due to reviews. However, downloads do show some correlation to Caption Pro website sessions, as shown in the graph below.
There is no correlation between sales and number of downloads. This probably explains why most ads for niche products are not successful. The number of downloads may increase, but it doesn’t seem to increase sales. ImageSplit and Caption Pro’s download conversion rates were 6% and 9%, respectively. The lack of correlation between sales and downloads may be due to the small number of sales per month, resulting in random fluctuations dominating the results.
The decision to enter Apple’s “Walled Garden” software was partly due to recommendations from friends rather than commercial evaluation. To avoid being blocked from installing software from unknown publishers, an Apple Developer membership (~$100 USD annually) is required. The App Store only accepts software developed using the latest version of the Xcode development environment and will only work on fairly recent hardware, so purchasing a fairly modern Mac on which to perform your development requires It was expensive. The App Store takes a 15% commission on sales, which is quite reasonable compared to the difficulty of implementing e-commerce on Windows. On Windows, a PayPal account eases the problem of small foreign currency transactions, but e-commerce is a plug-in. -ins may stop working for no reason after many years. The review process for software acceptance into the App Store is usually quick, but seemingly minor issues may require resubmission. Features that pass one review may be rejected in subsequent reviews. The review process is usually quick, but in some cases it took four weeks.
Caption Pro for Mac is now available exclusively (via the App Store) starting in September 2021. Appears in the top 6 of searches using “Caption Photos” which is the source of most downloads. Approximately 3.5% of downloads result in sales. Despite Mac users’ reputation for paying willingly for software, this figure is much lower than his Windows version of the same app. When I searched for “Caption Photos” in the App Store, I didn’t initially see any iPhone apps. After 6 months, it has 360 downloads and appears in result number 140. This poor ranking performance is probably because “caption photo” is a very popular keyword used by many apps, including apps that only caption videos. Despite Apple Search Ads and Apptimizer campaigns, there were very few downloads or sales. Although the number of downloads increased dramatically during the Apptimizer campaign from January 24th to February 2nd (due to purchases being made), the changes in rankings due to these downloads did not translate into sales. Probably because the installation was not purchased. Apple’s search ad campaign (where an app appears as an ad 1 in 50 times when the search phrase “Caption Photos” is used) had no significant impact on downloads or sales. Facebook’s advertising campaign, which displayed a link to the app every time someone searched for “genealogy” or “genealogy software,” also failed and was prohibitively expensive because Facebook charges by impressions, not clicks. Additional backlinks to the website were purchased from Links Management in his September 2022 with the aim of improving the website’s Google rankings, but this did not appear to have affected web traffic.
The experience levels of Mac and Windows users who contact me with problems range from complete novices to former programmers. Most come from the United States, which reflects the geographic distribution of sales. There are many downloads to non-English speaking countries, but very few sales.
Some results for Mac and iPhone apps are shown below.
As it turns out, developing for the Apple platform wasn’t a good commercial decision. I don’t think the benefit of mostly capturing the audience (or, in the case of the iPhone, completely capturing it) translates into higher download or sales rates. Competition for iPhone apps is so intense that niche products without huge advertising budgets are unlikely to succeed. The same is likely true for Android smartphone apps, but anecdotally the review process is less rigorous. In my experience, advertising and buying backlinks on any platform are not effective at increasing sales for niche software.
Simon Kravis runs areca consultingis a small software and consulting company located in Canberra, Australia, specializing in information management and offering a number of software products. We have mainly developed science and technology programs since the days of paper tape..
