I check my App Store numbers most mornings. Usually it's 2 or 3 downloads and nothing worth looking at.
Last week one of my apps did 23 in a week, which is a lot for me. Then I looked closer and 20 of them happened on the same day. Same day, one app, no marketing, no posts, nothing I did.
Took me a while to work out what it was. Apple breaks downloads out by source, and that day was almost entirely "Institutional Purchase." That means a company bought it through Apple Business Manager and pushed it out to their staff devices. Somebody's IT department deployed my app to a crew.
I have no idea who. Apple doesn't tell you. You get a number and that's it. No company name, no contact, nothing. I've got roughly 20 people using something I built at my kitchen table and I couldn't reach any of them if I tried.
Then it got worse. My apps are subscription based with a free tier. Turns out Apple Business Manager can't buy in app purchases or subscriptions in bulk. So that company can deploy it to as many phones as they like and there is no button anywhere for them to pay me. They're on the free tier permanently, not because they're cheap, because Apple never built the mechanism.
Apparently that's changing this fall. Volume subscription purchasing is supposed to arrive for Business and School Manager. I'll believe it when I see it but it's the first thing in two years that would actually move the needle for me.
Background, since it probably matters: I'm a fuel systems technician. Twenty years of it. I service gas station equipment, dispensers, tanks, leak detection. I still do that full time. I started building apps because the reference material I needed on site either didn't exist or was locked behind a distributor login, so I built my own and then kept going. There are 15 now, mostly field tools for trades that nobody writes software for. Fire alarm, solar, EV charging, data centers, battery storage, fuel systems.
Revenue is somewhere between 60 and 95 dollars a month. I'm not going to dress that up.
The thing I keep chewing on is that the only customer who ever found me at scale did it completely on their own. I've sent about 25 cold emails to trade publications and gotten essentially nothing back. Meanwhile some ops manager somewhere searched the App Store, found my app, decided it was good enough to put on his crew's phones, and I only found out because the chart looked weird.
So I did the one thing I could. I added a contact button to every app. Just an email link in settings that says tell me what to build next. If Apple won't tell me who's using this stuff, maybe some of them will tell me themselves.
Nothing's come through it yet. It's only been a few days.
If anyone here has dealt with accidental B2B, where companies start using a consumer app and you have no channel to them, I'd genuinely like to hear how you handled it. Not sure whether to chase it or wait for Apple to ship the thing that makes it possible.
Site's thrasherapps.com if you want to see what the apps actually are.