That’s Not Funny on the Windows Phone 7

After the unexpected success of the ‘That’s Not Funny’ application on the Android platform and its spectacular failure on the iPhone, I thought I’d port it over to Windows Phone 7, and see how it does there.

The application is stupid simple and basically plays various sounds that could be used as a comeback for a bad joke.  As always, the app is free and is ad supported.

Ad Revenues

I released the app on 11/8/2010.  Initially the uptake was slow and the impressions increased over time from about 300 a day at the beginning to an average of a 1000 a day around DecemAber.  The ad revenues were about a dollar a day until about 12/18/2010.  Then, inexplicably, the revenue tripled even though the impressions remained the same.  Since then the impressions picked up a bit and so have the revenues.

So far, the application has made $99 in ad revenues, which basically covers my App Store fee. 

Charts

In addition, the application did pretty ok in the charts.  It reached #21 in the Entertainment category and #227 overall towards the end of year.   Currently, as of writing, it is #54 in Entertainment and #367 overall. 

Development Experience

Despite the app being pretty simple, there were a couple of things to learn.  I had to figure out how to use the List control, which is more complicated than it needs to be and really requires the Silverlight Toolkitgesture APIs to be useful.  In addition, there were the Media, Resources and Advertising APIs to pick up.  The emulator is significantly different from the devices, in particular, users reported that sounds loop, which never ever showed up in the emulator.  However, these are all small, easily fixable issues.

I’ve developed apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry before jumping on WP7 platform.  I have to say that Microsoft created a really fun development environment.  It is far easier to develop on it than any of the competitors.  It’s going to be successful.