7,600 apps came under the study.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A new study led by Indian American professor Raghu Santanam from Arizona State University’s W.P. Care School of Business has attempted to decode the secret to an app’s success in the digital marketplaces.
Over 8,000 apps are made available each week, but only a small fraction will endure long enough to truly hit it big. According to Santanam and Ph.D. student Gun Woon Lee, offering the app for free, continuously updating it, and earning praiseful user-reviews are all key to an apps success.
In order to fulfill their research, which was published in the Journal of Management Information Systems, Santanam and Lee studied 7,600 apps offered by 4,000 sellers. Since Apple doesn’t release sales figures to the public, the researchers tracked individual apps and their presence on the “Top 300” charts in Apple’s App Store over 39 weeks.
The researchers concluded that free apps generally stay on the charts up to twice as long as paid apps, while updating and improving the features in an app helped it maintain presence on the charts up to three times longer.
Santanam said that the App Store launched with 500 apps in 2008, and now offers 1.2 million different apps.
“We’re hopeful this new study will provide them with useful information about how to make adjustments to benefit both consumers and their own company bottom lines,” he said.
Aside from his research, Santanam has co-edited two different books on e-business and cyber security. His other research interests include Business Process Change, Health IT (EMR and PHR), Consumer Information Systems and Information Economics.