In this episode of Top Ranked I talk about Trial mode. Trial mode is one of the most important features available to you as a developer if you’re building a paid app. By implementing Trial mode in your app you give consumers the opportunity to take your app for a spin while ensuring that you’ll get paid for your hard work if a consumer sees value in it. We know from what we see on the back end that apps which include trial mode get 70x more downloads on average. Of those 70x more downloads about 10% will get converted into purchases so doing the math you can expect on average about 7x more sales just by doing the small amount of work required to include a trial capability into your app. We make it very easy for your app to know whether it is running in trial mode or if the consumer has purchased a license. What we cannot do is decide what trial mode means for your app. In fact, I would say probably the most important part of including trial mode is deciding how trial mode should work in your app. There are various scenarios that you could use. You might make the trial time-based (e.g. full functionality for 10 days), launch based (e.g. full functionality the first 10 times the app is launched on a device) or partial functionality (e.g. only the first 2 levels of a 30 level game are available in trial mode). You should be careful when allowing full functionality in a trial as a consumer could easily uninstall and re-install the app to completely reset the trial. When you provide full functionality you may want to consider storing the info about a user or a device in the cloud so that it persists across reinstalls. There is a performance cost related to checking for trial mode so you should be careful about how often you actually do the check. It’s a synchronous (blocking) operation that can take 60ms or more to complete. Note that you will not see this when in development as that 60ms penalty is not there then but you will see it when the app is published.