How SwiftKey plans to make money by giving away its popular app

SwiftKey announced that its Android app will now be available for free. It previously sold for $3.99 and was the second best-selling app in the Google Play store. What explains the switch?

|
Reuters
The Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S4 smart phone.

SwiftKey, the popular Android smart phone keyboard app, will now be available for free. 

On the surface, this may seem an odd move seeing as the keyboard is the "second-best-selling-app in the Google Play Store" where it has been sold for $3.99. The app is also adding more than 800 emojis to let users communicate emotions more easily and fluidly as they type, though only for Android version 4.1 or above. Other updates include more than 30 new themes, stronger predictive typing capabilities, and five new languages — Belarusian, Mongolian, Tatar, Uzbek, and Welsh. 

As a way of thanking those who already use the app, SwiftKey announced in a blog post that current users will receive a "Premier Pack" consisting of 10 new themes that will otherwise be sold for $4.99. 

The app also announced the opening of a SwiftKey Store that will be stocked with add-ons, which is where the app will likely generate revenue. 

Known for its intuitive nature that lets users swipe a finger from one letter to the next as opposed to typing, the app's influence is evident in a prominent new feature being rolled out by Apple for its new iOS 8 mobile platform. The feature is called QuickType and, like SwiftKey, will suggest words as you type. iOS 8 will also allow for third-party keyboards to be downloaded from its app store, meaning users will soon be able to use apps like Swype and SwiftKey on iPhone, something previously not possible. 

That's a lot of competition for the company founded in London in 2008 by Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock. And as the company pushes to expand its reach, it seems to have realized the philosophy guiding much of the mobile app market: Go free or go home. 

"As we go global, there's an unwillingness of consumers to pay for an app that they aren't sure they need," Joe Braidwood, chief marketing officer for SwiftKey, told Bloomberg. "We want to be the de facto keyboard, the cornerstone of creativity on people's devices. If you are the stickiest app, there's a world of ways to grow."

Perhaps this move can be attributed to the "Something for Nothing economy," as media columnist David Carr points out in The New York Times, noting the difficulty of monetizing products in an age when consumers are accustomed to receiving everything from music to messaging apps for a price tag of zero. 

But SwiftKey seems confident that the "freemium" model, meaning a free app buttressed by paid add-ons, is the way to go. Freemium is widely considered the smartest avenue for monetizing apps, according to a March report from App Annie Intelligence and IDC, analyzing mobile business models. 

The report adds that in-app advertising and the freemium model outperformed paid app models by a wide margin from 2012 to 2013, noting that mobile app revenue will likely increase through 2017. The report also notes, however, that increasing emphasis will be placed on in-app advertising, which means we can likely expect more mobile-app ads in the future. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to How SwiftKey plans to make money by giving away its popular app
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2014/0611/How-SwiftKey-plans-to-make-money-by-giving-away-its-popular-app
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe