For iPhone apps that have had relatively big launches, they typically have great sales the first month, but during the second month, sales tend to drop substantially. It makes sense when you think about it… in these cases, the buzz for the app mostly comes from the initial launch itself so after a nice run up the charts, they start to slide downward and settle down to a relatively stable sales rate that’s dramatically lower than the peak days.

This has definitely been the case with most of our apps. Here are the first two month sales for the last two apps we launched before Camera+:

	Convert	Voices
Month 1	$102,949	$205,000
Month 2	$33,424	$99,356

iPhone apps that’ve been pretty big hits for their first month tend to have somewhat of a “sophomore slump” for the second month. Of course this isn’t always the case… for example Angry Birds has pretty much been unstoppable since climbing to #1 (and its success is very well deserved because it’s truly a great game).

How did Camera+ do in its second month? If you’ve been following along, you saw that for our first month, we took in around $253,000. And based on our past apps, we were expecting sales to drop off to the point where we would’ve been pretty lucky to bring in another $100k or so for the second month.

Well, I’m really happy to say that the second month far exceeded our expectations and actually earned a bit more than the first month, coming in at a total of just over $254,000…

And here’s how the whole first two months looked…

So after two short months in the App Store, Camera+ has pulled in a whopping half a million dollars. Needless to say, we couldn’t be more pleased.

• what it is: the ultimate photo app
• number sold: 399,436
• net sales: $507,221
• more info: at the App Store

Why the rise instead of the fall this time? There are a number of things that happened during the month and while no one particular thing can be attributed to the big sales month, there’s no doubt that each contributed to the whole. In addition, the word of mouth in general for Camera+ has been fantastic overall and it’s undoubtedly been a major factor for the sustained sales.

Here are some of the more significant events that happened throughout the month. Each is indicated chronologically on the sales graph above so you can get an idea of how it possibly affected sales.

A App of the Week ends

Apple featured Camera+ as the “App of the Week” throughout most of Europe and several other places around the world. The point on the graph marks when the featuring ended and our subsequent drop in worldwide sales soon after.

B First month sales post

The twin sister to this post, born a month earlier. The post got a decent amount of media coverage and subsequently, started Camera+ on another climb up the charts.

C “What’s Hot” featuring US

Nobody except Apple knows exactly why apps are chosen for the various featurings. In this case, it’s possible that they noticed a lot of charting movement of Camera+ over the few days leading up to this.

D Touch Exposure teased

Lisa posted a video that quietly demonstrated the main feature that was going into version 1.2. Being such a cool feature that nobody else was doing, it caused a lot of buzz.

E 1.2 released

Continued buzz for the Touch Exposure feature since people could actually use it themselves now.

F Media reviews

A large concentration of high-profile media coverage. Right before version 1.2 was released, TUAW posted a very favorable review of Camera+. Once 1.2 hit the streets, we got a flood of stories, with some of the more notable sites being Macworld, MobileCrunch, and Wired.

G MacRumors forum post

There’s no better way of having the word of your product spread like when actual users are talking it up. Especially when it’s in a huge forum like the MacRumors ones. There’s no doubt that this forum thread helped things considerably. I noticed it when looking at our stats and saw that a ton of traffic was coming from it.

H 1.2.1 released

We addressed all of the major stability issues with version 1.2.1. While it wasn’t the kind of release that’d cause any buzz, it definitely went a long way in instilling confidence in our users. It’s a lot easier to recommend something to others when that something doesn’t crash or behave unpredictably.

I Creative Exposure video

Lisa created a more in-depth video showing how to get the most out of Touch Exposure and Touch Focus.

J VolumeSnap submitted

I posted about us submitting version 1.3 to Apple for review. This version was all about allowing users to snap photos using the volume buttons on their iPhone. It was rejected by Apple.

Hopefully Camera+ will be able to sustain these levels or at least something close to them for the long term. We have a lot of awesome things planned for it so it’s definitely a possibility. Thanks to all of you who’ve supported us by purchasing the app… and and extra thanks to those of you who’ve been spreading the word of it. We’re doing everything we can to try and make it the best possible photography app on the iPhone and we think you’ll be very pleased with all that’s coming up with it.

In the first month sales post I mentioned that we did no advertising at all for Camera+ and that didn’t change at all for month two. I also mentioned that if there was enough interest, I’d write a post about why advertising generally doesn’t work these days for low-cost iPhone apps. And because of the big response to that, I’ve been writing that very post and should have it up here soon.

One thing I’d like to leave you with is the following…

The phrase:

…is bullshit. It’s more like:

The other day, we posted about adding a very cool feature to Camera +, VolumeSnap. For those of you who missed it, I’ll rehash it:

Unfortunately, Apple decided to reject it. This doesn’t come as a complete surprise since it wasn’t our first time being rejected for that very feature. Their exact reason for the rejection is the following:

The clause in the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines that this makes reference to is on page 59 of the current version of it:

Some of you pointed out other camera apps that make use of the volume buttons for snapping photos. But Apple suspects that these slipped through the review cracks because the developers intentionally hid the feature from their app descriptions and screenshots upon submission, but then added info about them after their apps got approved. When Apple finds out about these incidents, they tend to crack down pretty hard on them, sometimes going so far as completely banning the developers from the App Store. So this is definitely not the smart way to go. Apple recently made a change where app screenshots are now “locked” for each version that’s approved. This helps prevent crap like this from going on in the future… but at the expense of honest developers who wish to fine-tune things between versions.

So while we’re disappointed with their decision, we’re at least happy that they’re being perfectly clear about the exact reason for the rejection and that they’re being consistent about it. I was told that overriding the volume controls is one of the most common reasons for app rejection.

Apple’s app reviewers tend to catch a lot of shit from people and the press but after speaking with them at length on this, I came away overall with a good feeling about the whole process. They’re just trying to do their job as best as they can, given the constraints they have, so cut them some slack.

What was suggested to us was that we file a feature request with Apple to provide a supported way to repurpose the volume controls. This is the official way for developers to suggest changes to Apple and we’ve done so many, many times in the past. Sometimes it’s taken over a year for a change to be made and sometimes things happen almost immediately. The great thing is that Apple’s constantly evolving the iOS SDK and almost everything we’ve ever needed has made its way into it. So we’re confident that it’ll happen… it’s just a matter of when.

Look at all the recent iPhone 4 LED flashlight apps, for example. Initially, they were all rejected for a similar reason that VolumeSnap has been. But Apple did later change its policy.

Anyway, as far as the actual feature request goes, here’s what we submitted:

If you’re a developer who has any need for this feature for your own apps, it’s in your best interest to duplicate it, so do that now. And if you’re not a developer but want VolumeSnap in Camera+, please continue to put pressure on Apple by sending them feedback on this.

So what’s next? We’re moving on for now and continuing to improve Camera+. The next version will include something that many of you have requested from us. It’s worth noting that that very something was made possible by us, in turn, requesting to Apple for an enhancement to the iOS SDK.

After the So Emo Photo Contest last week, I think we all need a little cheering up. What better way than snapping shots of our furry friends!

This week’s contest theme: Animals

Any images of animals will be considered for the contest. Photos must be taken with the iPhone using the Camera+ app and shared on the Campl.us site using the Share button in the Lighbox.

Here are the contest details:

1. Follow @mostlylisa on Twitter.
2. Share your photos on Twitter using the Camera+ Share button and include the hashtag #rawrContest in your tweet so we can find you.
3. The contest ends Aug 12th, 2010 at midnight EDT.

There is no restriction to the number of entries, so feel free to enter as many fluffy cat pictures as you like! I will announce the winner on Friday, August 13th, 2010.

This week’s winner will receive a $100 iTunes Gift Certificate.

So go nuts taking photos of your pets, animals at the zoo, or critters you just happen to stumble upon in your backyard, like Mr. Raccoon above. I can’t wait to see your photos!

Congratulations to last week’s winner, Grace for her lonely emo ferris wheel.

Honorable Mentions go to: Troy Allen’s lonely mountaintop, Simon Campbell’s dewy spider web, Addison Kirk’s amazing emo set of country life, MTCP’s creepy dead bug, & Jenny Lisa’s apathetic piggies.

Apple just sent us an email regarding our recent submission of Camera+ 1.3 with the VolumeSnap feature.

We don’t know exactly what the implications of this are yet, but it’s obviously better than a flat-out rejection. We all have our fingers crossed.

If you want this great feature in Camera+, we continue to urge you to let Apple know.

Dreams do come true.

Nick Keating was the winner of our Ultimate $10,000 Canon 5D Mark II Camera Rig launch promo for Camera+ and all of his gear has arrived.

We’re glad that someone who can really appreciate the gear won it. Check out Nick’s Flickr stream to see some of his photography work.

Be sure to keep following us for more great promotions coming up very soon…

Fresh off the heels of our Camera+ 1.2.1 release, we’ve just submitted a new update to Apple for approval. Unlike our previous updates where they’ve included several new features and bug fixes, this update includes just one new feature. But it’s a big one.

Here are the release notes:

Yes, we’ve added the very feature that got Camera+ 1.0 rejected by Apple. But we’re doing this with a bit of confidence that it’ll actually be accepted this time. After we discussed the VolumeSnap situation and asked you to tell Apple that you definitely want this awesome feature, many of you pointed out a bunch of apps in the App Store that actually have something similar.

So did Apple have a change of heart as a result? Hopefully, and we’ll soon see if this is really the case.

Beware that there’s absolutely no guarantee that this update will be approved and if VolumeSnap is something you really want in Camera+, then I advise you to hit-up Apple and keep the pressure on. It’d probably be a good idea to reference this blog post in your message. If it’s something you really want in the app, spread the word and encourage others to do so, too.

I’d like to point out that we were completely open about this with Apple this time and we pointed the past rejection out in the review notes. I’d also like to point out that the way we implemented VolumeSnap doesn’t rely on any private methods or functions, but does rely on something that’s not documented, along with some pretty clever engineering by Karl.

So hopefully Camera+ 1.3 soon gets Apple’s blessing and all of you can start snapping pics in a way that feels just like a real camera. We’ve been using the feature internally for several months and the one thing we will guarantee is that once you try it, you’ll never want to go back to the on-screen shutter button.

The newest version of Camera+ offers some powerful tools to take great shots with your iPhone. I’ve seen some breathtaking shots from budding iPhoneographers through our weekly photo contests.

In this video tutorial, I demo some creative ways you can use our new Camera features, Touch Focus and Touch Exposure, to take your iPhone photos to a whole new level. I can’t wait to see your photos!

Here are some of the pics from the shoot:

For this release, we’ve gone into bug-fix mode in order to make Camera+ as stable and reliable as it can possibly be. Here are the release notes for version 1.2.1 (app store link):

•  greatly improved usability of our exclusive Touch Exposure and Touch Focus features so that you can now move around the controls once you lift your fingers, hopefully resulting in far fewer cases of pretzel-finger
•  fixed a bug where the camera shutter button would stop functioning (again)
•  fixed a bug where the whole app basically wasn’t working if you were using the app on a certain beta version of a certain OS (special thanks to the several people who 1-starred us for not being completely on the bleeding edge while we devlop… it’s payback time and you owe us stars… staaarrrsssss!)
•  fixed a bug where double flash & flip controls would appear in the camera screen
•  fixed a bug where there was a dead area with Touch Exposure and Touch Focus
•  fixed a bug where the main screen shutter button wasn’t working
•  fixed a bug where copying photos that were zoomed would result in unzoomed photos when pasting them
•  fixed a bug where Touch Exposure and Touch Focus were using incorrect touch points if the camera was zoomed
•  increased maximum zoom amount to 6× “You want the zoom? You Can’t handle the zoom!”
•  various minor bug fixes and enhancements

The first item on the list isn’t actually a bug fix, but a usability enhancement that we decided to make after watching some people use our new Touch Exposure and Touch Focus features. It definitely makes an awesome feature even more awesome. We’re ecstatic over the response that we’ve gotten from you regarding being able to adjust exposure and focus separately and you’re going to love it even more with this release. We also have a special treat for you coming up shortly where Lisa Bettany will be showing you how to get the most out of Touch Exposure and Touch Focus. Stay tuned for that…

And the last item on the list is also a slight enhancement… because we use a very high quality zooming algorithm, we felt confident enough to bump the maximum digital zoom up a bit from 5× to 6×. Of course since it’s digital zoom, the more you zoom, the more artifacts you’ll get. But there are just some times when you can’t get any closer… like at a concert, and it really comes in handy.

Thanks to everyone who reported bugs and provided feedback. We really appreciate it and it helps to make Camera+ better and better. We do have a couple of known issues and we’ll be addressing them in an upcoming release (some of you are having difficulties sharing several photos on Facebook and some of you are having trouble seeing previews when importing into iPhoto).

And now we’re going back into feature mode. Stay tuned for some really cool things coming up soon in version 1.3 and beyond…

This week I really want you to go deep within your soul, find your inner sadness, and express it through your iPhone Photography.

This week’s contest theme: So Emo

The second contest’s theme is So Emo. Any images using the So Emo FX will be considered for the contest. Photos must be taken with the iPhone using the Camera+ app and shared on the Campl.us site using the Share button in the Lighbox.

Here are the contest details:

1. Follow @mostlylisa on Twitter.
2. Share your photos on Twitter using the Camera+ Share button and include the hashtag #SoEmoContest in your tweet so we can find you.
3. The contest ends Aug 5th, 2010 at midnight EDT.

There is no restriction to the number of entries, so feel free to enter as many times as you like! I will announce the winner on Friday, August 6th, 2010.

This week’s winner will receive a $100 iTunes Gift Certificate.

Listen to Death Cab for Cutie, read some dark poetry, visit your ex-girlfriend’s myspace page, do what you’ve got to do to get in the Emo Zone. I can’t wait to see your photos!

Congratulations to last week’s winner, Paul Gibbons for his awesomely composed Hipster FX shot.

Lately, we’ve been showcasing the new amazing camera features in Camera+ 1.2, but there is so more to this app than just snapping shot. I personally have the most fun editing my photos and adding FXs. This week I thought I’d do photo contest theme using my favourite FX, Hipster.

This week’s contest theme: Hipster

The second contest’s theme is Hipster. Any images using the Hipster FX will be considered for the contest. Photos must be taken with the iPhone using the Camera+ app and shared on the Campl.us site using the Share button in the Lighbox.

Here are the contest details:

1. Follow @mostlylisa on Twitter.
2. Share your photos on Twitter using the Camera+ Share button and include the hashtag #MLPhotoContest in your tweet so we can find you.
3. The contest ends July 29th, 2010 at midnight EDT.

There is no restriction to the number of entries, so feel free to enter as many times as you like! I can’t wait to see your Hipster pictures! I will announce the winner on Friday, July 30th, 2010.

This week’s winner will receive a $100 iTunes Gift Certificate.

Congratulations to last week’s winner, talented photographer, Adam Miller for his awesome action beach shot.

Camera+ 1.2 is fresh off the presses and it’s got some very cool things in it! Get it now in the App Store.

Here’s the big list:

• [Camera+ exclusive] Touch Exposure: set exposure separately from focus for the ultimate control of your shots (touch with a second finger to control exposure)
• [Camera+ exclusive] Touch Focus: better than tap to focus because you can continuously drag the focus box around until your shots are in perfect focus
• [Camera+ exclusive] Photo Flashlight: use the iPhone 4 LED flash as a continuous fill light to improve photo quality, especially for portrait and macro shots
• speed of photo taking is now lightning fast
• the high quality zoom control now works on iOS 4
• stabilizer improvements
• detailed metadata is now uploaded to photos shared on Flickr
• fixed a bug where the camera shutter button would stop functioning
• fixed a bug where photos wouldn’t display in the Lightbox on an iPad when in 2× magnification mode #weird
• various minor bug fixes and enhancements

Touch Exposure (and Focus)

The biggest and best thing in this version is our exclusive Touch Exposure feature (along with a big improvement over Apple’s great Tap to Focus, which we call Touch Focus). I’ll allow the lovely Lisa Bettany to demonstrate this awesome new feature which will help you dramatically improve your photos…

So, you basically touch with a second finger to show the exposure control, then drag it until you get your shot exactly the way you want it. Dragging to a dark area will make the overall photo lighter and vice-versa.

We know you’re going to love this new addition.

Photo Flashlight

In addition to the standard LED flash controls that your iPhone 4 has, we’ve added a nifty mode where you can use the light in continuous mode. This is great for those times when the full flash is just too much and works perfectly for “fill lighting”.

Oh, and what the hell… for those times when you just need a flashlight to light your way, simply switch it on and save 99¢ on a dedicated flashlight app!

Much faster shooting

We’ve dramatically sped-up taking photos in this version. If you felt that the previous versions of Camera+ were a little laggy in that regard, you’ll have a whole new opinion on it with this new version. You can take a whole string of shots in a row and hardly notice any delay.

Whoopsie!

It seems that some of you noticed in our recent teaser video that Lisa snapped a pic with the volume buttons on the camera. We were trying to highlight Touch Exposure, but a few of you with keener eyes picked-up on this little mistake of ours… and tweeted and retweeted about it. This is actually a feature that we had in the first version of Camera+ that we submitted to Apple. The very version that some of you may remember got rejected. You probably realize now that that was the feature that actually got the app rejected.

We’re still using the feature in our test builds of the app and we love it. We call it VolumeSnap. But we’re not able to include this great feature in the app because Apple doesn’t allow us to change the functionality of the volume buttons, unfortunately.

So our plea to you, if you’d like to see this great feature in a future version of Camera+, is to tell Apple that you want it. Here’s the link to use (“Enhancement Request” is probably the best feedback type to choose for this):

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Keep the feedback coming

Our goal is to make Camera+ the best photo app ever. We greatly value your feedback and it definitely helps to make the app better and better. So be sure to keep it coming, whether it’s via a comment here, a review on the App Store, or simply through our feedback form.

http://campl.us

This one begins with a story.

Many years ago my business partner John was embroiled in deadly competition with Paul Haddad, lead developer at PTH Consulting, over the Mac OS X shareware clipboard app market. (Their main livelihoods at the time.) iClip battled PTHPasteboard for marketshare supremacy, and it was like Coke vs. Pepsi all over again except on a scale of much tinier and pettier proportions, with just as much shit-talking and drama.

Angry emails were shot back and forth, egos were bruised, and competitors became enemies. Or at the least, John really disliked Paul, and vice versa. 

Then in 2008, the App Store opened to developers, and John and Paul dived in from the start, excited about the potential in developing for iPhone and sharing the same goal of creating kick ass apps. On one side John founded tap tap tap with Scott and ex-partner Sophia (I would join tap tap tap after Sophia left). On the other, Paul and designer Mark Jardine partnered to start Tapbots. While things were rosy at first, it was only a matter of time until the two were butting heads again, this time with competing iPhone utilities Convert and Convertbot.

But this time, instead of repeating the old cycle of fighting and drama, something clicked and John and Paul realized they were actually on a pretty similar page.

Despite a somewhat checkered history, time, as they say, heals old wounds. It wasn’t too long before we found ourselves talking about teaming up on a project together, on a foundation of mutual respect and shared design sensibilities.

Today you can check this project out. It’s called Calcbot, and it is a beautifully designed calculator for your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Calcbot does exactly what you imagine, with style to spare, and it’s available now on the app store for just 99¢ as a universal build. It’s perfect for your calculator-less iPad, and a fantastic upgrade from the built-in app on iPhone. 

Credit goes fully to Paul and Mark at Tapbots for creating their latest piece of gleaming software machinery (you can read their thoughts about Calcbot and this partnership on the Tapbots blog), with a tip of the hat to our Wolfgang for coming up with the ‘SwipePad’ UI idea for revealing advanced functions (you’ll be seeing more of this in another one of our apps soon ), and to Scott and Karl for cooking up the promotion page.

Check it out and let us know what you think! (And if you’re a Mac user… you’ll want to swing by our MacHeist launch promotion page and grab a copy of Realmac Software’s Socialite for free!)

How do you launch an iPhone app that’s not a game and have it succeed? It’s definitely not easy, given the current atmosphere of the App Store. But we recently did with our app, Camera+, and it’s gone on to be our most successful launch to date, earning over a quarter million dollars in its first month.

First off, the numbers…

The total number sold for the first month was over 217k. Our total revenue after Apple’s cut was just over $253k. Our strongest revenue day occurred about a week after launch with us taking in $15,488 that day and we averaged around $8,440 daily for the first 30 days.

• what it is: the ultimate photo app
• number sold: 217,720
• net sales: $253,215
• more info: at the App Store

It’s definitely worth noting that unlike in our early days in the App Store, we don’t do any advertising for our apps anymore. I feel I need to make this distinction because it was definitely part of our recipe for early success and we still get a lot of traffic on posts that talk about it. But ad costs have simply become too prohibitive to be effective for a business like ours now.

So, in a nutshell, the only real expenses we had since launching Camera+ were for the launch promo prize (around $10k) plus a few hundred dollars for our “photo of the week” contest prizes.

The current state of the App Store

Taking a quick snapshot of the current Top 25 Paid chart in the US, you see that all but 5 of those apps are either games or in the entertainment category. 20 out of 25 (and one of them actually gamed the system to get there). Considering that there are currently 20 different categories in the App Store, it’s easy to see that games completely dominate the App Store.

If you’re an iPhone developer, this may be a big red flag if you’re creating productivity apps, utilities, and other non-game apps and you’re looking to develop the next big hit. But, as we’ve proven, it’s still possible to cut through and get a non-game up the ranks.

Be absolutely meticulous

We obsess over details. It makes for better apps. Camera+ was no different than any of our other apps in this regard and it’s taken literally dozens of design sessions to get it in the state that it’s currently in. I’m talking about hundreds of hours just for the app design.

But we’re passionate about this and love doing it so it hardly feels like work to us. Spend substantial time making your app look and feel good to the user and it’ll likely pay off.

Add some fun touches

If the market dictates that people want games and entertainment apps, but that’s not exactly what you’re creating, you can consider meeting at a midway point…

One of the things we set out to do from the start with Camera+ was to add some fun touches to it. This isn’t to say that we wanted to let the fun become a distraction, but by adding things like transition animations and such, it’d both make the app feel more fluid to the user, while also making using it be a little more entertaining.

So, on Camera+, you see cool little animations when you go from the main “SLR camera body” screen to the photo taking screen and the Lightbox. Add to that a few Easter eggs here and there and users can get a bit of delight out of an otherwise utilitarian app.

Consciously social

In order to have your app spread via word of mouth, it’s a good idea to include some sort of sharing in it when and where appropriate. The more “social”, the more potential it has to be viral.

I’m definitely of the mindset that if you give people too many choices, it significantly decreases the chance that they’ll actually pick one of them. So carefully choose the most popular services that are actually relevant to your app. For Camera+ this was Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and of course email.

And don’t just throw a sharing service in half-heartedly. For our Twitter sharing, we worked hard to make it better than any other Twitter photo sharing service out there. For example, we enable our users to upload larger photos than most other services and also upload several photos at a time. It’s definitely worked out for us as we have tons of people sharing their photos through Camera+ as this quick search on Twitter shows.

Go BIG on the launch

As Phill posted after our Voices launch, there’s hardly any substitute for a huge launch promotion and a giant mailing list to push it to. For Camera+, we did this by having the promo prize be over $10,000 in high-end camera gear. But the big difference between the Voices launch and this one was that for Voices we used the MacHeist list with around 600,000 members with a Mac-related giveaway, while for Camera+ we went with our more targeted tap tap tap-specific opt-in list with around 70,000 people on it.

Granted, not every developer has access to such resources, but there’s no reason that anyone can’t build-up resources of this sort over time… it’s taken us years so patience and persistence is key.

Note: Hopefully some of you will appreciate that the words “rocket” nor “balloon” never come up in this post. I’ll be forever grateful to Phill for making it so that we had to change the beginning of our phone menu to, “Welcome to tap tap tap. For rockets, press 1. For balloons, press 2…”

Don’t depend solely on domestic sales

The US iPhone market is huge. For our past apps, we generally saw figures between 60% and 70% for US sales compared to the rest of the world. This is for apps that weren’t translated to any other localization than American English. I had a recent conversation with someone from Apple about this figure and he confirmed that this was a very typical percentage breakdown.

Camera+ did very well in the US early on, reaching as high as #7 in the Top Paid chart and #5 in Top Grossing. But it actually fell off the Top 100 Paid chart faster than our past apps. Whereas Convert and Voices both stayed up for around two whole months each, Camera+ got knocked out in just three weeks.

So, back to the 60-70% US figure… for Camera+, the breakdown was actually 37% for US sales. This is obviously a huge difference. We’ve had days where international sales completely obliterated US ones… as in around under 2.5% US.

It’s a pretty unusual chart to say the least, beginning predominantly blue (US) then switching over to predominantly green (worldwide) about ⅓ of the way in..

One of the things that could account for higher potential international sales for non-game apps is that many countries don’t have games dominate the charts as much as they do in the US. Take Finland, for example, where Camera+ has done very well recently and you see that only 11 out of the top 25 are games or entertainment.

Now bear in mind that I’m not talking about our international success here from some know-it-all-ish point of view. The way things worked out for Camera+ came as somewhat of a surprise to us and we definitely ended up on the good side of a 225,000 sided-die for part of it with Apple making us App of the Week in many countries recently. We need to figure out ways to be more predictably effective in international markets. The obvious thing would be to translate the app to various languages, but it’s not at all a trivial effort.

Listen to feedback and keep improving

For some of our smaller apps, we’ve admittedly been taking a bit of time to get them updated. It’s harder to make a big impact unless an update for them is fairly substantial. But with a more complex app like Camera+, the updates are coming along faster. We have some very cool features planned and we expect that the app will rise in popularity as we implement them.

A very good sign for the future of Camera+ is that well over 60% of 1.0 purchasers have already updated to version 1.1 and several thousand more are still updating every day. This means that people are undoubtedly using the app and appreciate the new things added to it.

Risk: There are no guarantees in the App Store

You can spend a year on an app and hardly make a dime on it. It’s not just the nature of the App Store… it’s the nature of practically any business. I’ve seen some big-budget apps from big-name publishers basically fizzle out in the App Store. It’s a harsh reality so be prepared for it if you decided to try your hand at creating apps for the iPhone and iPad.

First and foremost, though, create something you’re proud of and you’ll have a better chance of success following. When you find yourself getting excited over the most trivial of details… things that most people won’t even notice, let alone care about… then you know that you’re on the right track.

Since it’s summertime, I thought I’d do a video tutorial this week on how to take great beach photos with your iPhone using Camera+.

This week’s contest theme: Beach Photos

The second contest’s theme is beach photos. Any images taken on or near a beach will be considered for the contest. Photos must be taken with the iPhone using the Camera+ app.

Here are the contest details:

1. Follow me, @mostlylisa on Twitter.
2. Share your photos on Twitter using the Camera+ Share button and include the hashtag #MLPhotoContest in your tweet so we can find you.
3. The contest ends July 15th, 2010 at midnight EDT.

There is no restriction to the number of entries, so feel free to enter as many times as you like! I will announce the winner on Friday, July 16th, 2010.

This week’s winner will receive a $100 iTunes Gift Certificate.

Congratulations to last week’s winner Kalle Oksa for his awesome Kullaberg landscape shot.