December 2021 Updates

Posted on 15 January, 2022

Welcome back to another edition of Dispatches from Dropped Bits HQ! I hope your holidays were as good as they could be, given All This™.

This month, on top of a quick recap of 2021, I want to talk a bit about where I see Dropped Bits going in 2022. January marks the company’s ten-year anniversary — something that kinda snuck up on me, if I’m honest. I’d imagined some kind of fanfare, along with a whole new webpage to mark the occasion, and that… didn’t happen.

But nonetheless, here we are, a decade later, still publishing apps on the App Store. That’s pretty cool. 🔟

December In Review

There was a holiday sale between December 24^th and January 1^st, which didn’t really move the numbers much from the month before:

Per: 5 downloads (last month: 4)
Thought Detox: 6 downloads (last month: 6)

Revenues and proceeds on sales are estimates based on the information I get from Apple, in US dollars.

App Sales (what customers paid Apple): USD$8.98
App Proceeds (what Apple pays me): USD$7.62

2021 In Review

In lieu of the usual App Updates section, I wanted to give an overview of how last year went.

As I mentioned last month, 2021 was a marked change from the first eight years of the company’s existence. For one, I actually put a bit more time and effort into marketing, getting write-ups in iMore for the launch of Thought Detox, which I announced on Product Hunt. I put more intention into cutting unnecessary business expenses, to get me to my goal of breaking even (I will be reviewing this on a quarterly basis going forward, and there are already a couple of new services I plan on cutting).

Total app sales for the business (i.e., what customers paid Apple) amount to USD$336, with app revenues (i.e., what Apple paid me) of USD$274 — a little more than the 15% App Store cut for small businesses, due to foreign exchange fluctuation, I guess.

Actual cash deposited to my business chequing account was CAD$331, which is interesting: I can pretty much count USD$1 in gross sales as CAD$1 in net revenues. Of course, that will change depending on the USD/CAD foreign exchange rate.

Anyhow, that’s all driven by Thought Detox — primarily, from the launch (USD$178 in proceeds for 127 downloads, or 65% of total proceeds for 2021). Maybe it was silly to set pre-orders at USD$0.99 for a week before launch, though that only really accounted for 31 downloads.

Obviously, this isn’t close to the kind of money that can support you, but looking back on the last decade, there was only one other year where I had any net revenues: in 2015, when I launched Per, for a total of USD$2.78.

That’s right. App sales in 2021 made 100 times more income than they did for the rest of the company’s existence until then.

(A note to any iOS developers reading this: marketing works.)