A few months ago, an independent study conducted by economists at Analysis Group found that small developers (those earning up to $1 million a year and with fewer than one million annual downloads) on Apple’s App Store grew their businesses and reached more customers around the world, even outpacing larger developers. They have at their disposal a variety of App Store tools and they managed to grow revenue 71 per cent between 2020 and 2022. In the US, those developers saw an above-average increase of 87 per cent in earnings during the same period.

It’s exciting to have a successful app but there are some rules one needs to play by. This is where the latest round of Apple’s Meet with App Store Experts series comes in. It’s an opportunity for developers to learn about new features in the App Store and ask questions directly to Apple experts.

The free online series will help gather information around “the newest pricing capabilities available on the App Store”, “new tools to manage pricing by storefront, additional price points, and global equalisation”. Taking place till August 24, it’s the perfect forum for developers to get their questions answered in real-time.

Over the years, we have spoken to several app developers and all of them have something similar to say — the App Store team is highly accessible and always has excellent suggestions to make apps engaging.

Real-time answers

The latest sessions will offer a deep dive into several App Store features that help developers — learn how to measure user acquisition with App Analytics, grow subscription businesses, explore product page optimisation, configure apps and games for in-app events and boost discovery and engagement with Game Centre, and more. It sounds like a lot of information because it really is. There are total 53 live online sessions and these are available in 14 locations, including India, the US, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, the UK, France, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

What can a new app developer learn here, you may ask? For example, the app discovery and marketing course can be helpful when it comes to understanding how people search for apps on the App Store and how developers can make their apps easily discoverable.

The App Store helps connect businesses of all sizes with over 650 million people across 175 regions / storefronts each week, and Apple offers a wide variety of tools and end-to-end support for developers to build, test, market, and distribute their apps to more than two billion Apple devices.

Among additional tools and resources Apple offers is an extensive suite of free technologies and frameworks — including software development kits (SDKs) and developer services with more than 250,000 APIs — support developers building apps for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

Developers can also get access to more than 40 Apple software development kits to get the most out of machine learning, augmented reality, and other top-end technologies, as well as over 170K free technical documents and sample code to help them build, test and distribute apps.

An opportunity for everyone

If you are thinking that success stories are meant only for big developers, think again. The recent independent survey found the App Store has helped developers grow beyond small teams to scale their businesses to establish a worldwide reach. Many developers who sold digital goods and services on the App Store and earned more than $1 million in 2022 were previously small developers. Of these global developers, 40 per cent were either not on the App Store or had less than $10,000 in earnings just five years ago.

Further, the Analysis Group economists found that thousands of new developers and entrepreneurs joined the App Store in 2022 from all over the world. Among them, around 25 per cent came from Europe, 23 per cent from China, 14 per cent from the US, four per cent from Japan, and 35 per cent from other regions including South Korea, India, and Brazil. So, how can you access the programme? Simply visit developer.apple.com/events/app-store/. This is the seventh round of ‘Meet with App Store Experts’ that Apple has launched since 2020, and there have been 283 live global sessions so far.