I am currently selling two applications on the iTunes App Store. Hiragana and Katakana are educational applications aimed at the novice students of the Japanese language. Hiragana and Katakana are also the names of the two Japanese character alphabets my applications focus on.

Apple provides sales data for applications sold via the App Store, but the data is presented in the most unintuitive way possible, as plain data tables. This makes it extremely hard to get a view of sales performance, so I dropped the data files for my first three weeks of sales into my favorite data analysis application and ended up with the following insights. Click the images for higher resolution.

Sales Growth

Hiragana was first available for download from the App Store on 20th of September, with Katakana following on the 27th. In less than three weeks 266 units have been sold with Hiragana representing the majority of sales. The last week had the highest sales with a combined 126 units, 71 of which were Hiragana and 55 were Katakana.

Biggest Markets

Close to half of the sales were in the US market (122) with Germany, Canada, Japan and Australia being the other regions with more than ten sales each. The long tail of stores selling less than ten units represents 85 sold units, with 11 stores clocking in at one sold unit each. I doubt I'll ever see any profits from those markets as I need to sell approximately 100 units in a store to reach Apples minimum amount of $250 for royalty payout.

The information above is based on the weekly stats reported by Apple. Apple also provide daily statistics, but you have to grab them while they're fresh, only the last 7 days are available. I was out of town for a little over a week and forgot to download a few days worth of data. Going forward I'll try to store every day and return with a more detailed analysis. It should be interesting to se the daily trends. I would expect weekends to lead the sales since that's when people may have the extra time to play around with their iPods and iPhones. We'll see.