It’s been a busy couple of months since Apple released iOS 8, the new iPhone 6 and 6+, Yosemite and … hold on, this post is supposed to be short. If I list everything that Apple announced, I’ll be here all day!
On with it. Since Apple’s big event, I, like most other active app developers, have been very, very busy. I’ve been working away at a new app for special needs education, and a complete rework of my first special needs app, Dollar Up. I’ve also had to update all of my apps to be sure that they work on iOS 8.
As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve also written another new app called 9 Letters which is due to launch this Thursday, the 20th of November. 9 Letters is all about letting the inner word searcher go mad. If you like Scrabble™ or Boggle™, or just about any other word game, I think you’ll like 9 Letters.
One of the really neat features of iOS 8 and Yosemite is Continuity. I love it; it brings to the Apple devices a wonderful synergy where they work together to become a single powerful tool that anyone can use. No more do we have to close a document, save it somewhere special and then reopen it on another device in order to continue our work. We can now just Handoff the document, in it’s current state, from one device to another.
When I was nearing completion of 9 Letters I realised that the game would benefit from this neat feature in iOS 8, so with a remarkably small effort (Apple really made the process very easy) I added Handoff to 9 Letters, and I love it.
Now, when I am on the train home from my day job I can play a game of 9 Letters on my iPhone, and then handoff the game to my iPad when I get home. It really is great.
Below is a short video I recorded tonight that tries to demonstrate just how great this is. I hope you enjoy it. I also hope that other developers get behind Apple with Continuity and all it offers; working with computers and mobile just got even easier.
With the advent of iOS 8, Apple has added what it calls “App Previews” to the App Store so that developers can showcase their apps with an up to 30 second video of their app.
These videos are supposed to be simple screen captures, with perhaps a little post editing done in an application like iMovie. They are not supposed to be anything more than that. With that in mind, Apple have made it pretty easy to record your App Preview and upload it to iTunes Connect.
Even so, it seems that some people are still struggling with what tools to use, and how to get a file that they can upload that meets Apple’s rules.
The main things you need to take into consideration are:
The video must be less than 30 seconds in duration.
The video must be less than 500mb in size
The video must be the correct resolution. For this, the resolution depends on the device class you are submitting the video for. When I submitted my videos, the iPhone 6 had not been released so I had only to create videos for the iPad and iPhone 5. Apple don’t allow us to create App Previews for the iPhone 4.For the iPad, videos must be 1200 x 900 pixels
For the iPhone 5, videos must be 1136 x 640 pixels
Before you start – ingredients
For any act of creativity, be it cooking, or recording an App Preview, you need the right ingredients. For me, I use:
Mac Mini running the latest OS X Yosemite.
iPhone 5 or iPad Air.
Lightning to USB cable.
Quicktime Player application (part of Yosemite) for video capture.
iMovie 10.0.5 for video editing.
Handbrake v0.9.9 x86_64 for final video encoding and cropping.
Capturing the raw video
Apple clearly states that if you install OS X Yosemite, and connect your device via USB cable, you can use the Quicktime Player application to capture the video in it’s rawest format.
This is actually, really easy. Once you have your device (for me either an iPad Air or an iPhone 5s) connected, run Quicktime Player.
If you’re lucky, Quicktime Player will automatically find your device and you’ll see the devices screen pop up in a window on your Mac. If not, from the File menu, select “New Movie Recording”:
This will, if it still doesn’t find your device, open a window that looks like:
Within this, click on the down arrow next to the record button, and ensure that your device is selected. Be sure also to make sure that your device is also selected as the “microphone”. This is important so that any sound your app produces is also recorded along with the video.
Once you’ve done this, you should see your devices screen within a window on your Mac:
So now all you need to do is click on the record button, and then use your app while the Mac records everything you do. Be sure to have a script to follow so that you cover everything you want to show off about your app within your App Preview. Apple has a great podcast within the WWDC 2014 collection that covers this sort of thing.
TIP:
If your app has background music, turn it off before you record your video. It will be much easier to add the music to the edited video later on. In all likelihood you will end up chopping your video up into pieces and rearranging things to make best use of the 30 seconds. When you do this, any sound that is running along in the background also gets chopped up and ruins the continuity of the video. I’ve learnt this the hard way.
Once you’ve finished playing with the app, click on the record button to stop recording.
You then need to save the recording to somewhere suitable from the File menu in Quicktime player.
Editing your video
Now that you have your raw video (I like to name them with the word “raw” in the filename for clarity), you need to edit it, and turn it into a 30 second masterpiece complete with any flashy effects, music or voiceovers. For this, I use iMovie. It’s actually a pretty decent movie editor and I find that I can do most things I need within it. There are other far more capable video editors available, but for me, iMovie works well.
I won’t go into too much detail on how to use iMovie to do the editing, but I’ll address those issues that are important to getting your video ready for iTunes Connect. Here are the basic steps I follow:
Start off, by starting iMovie, and creating a new event for your App Previews.
With the new event selected, click on “Create” button and select “Movie”, and then select “No Theme”.
Click on “Create” and enter an appropriate name for the project. I tend to follow a convention where if my raw file is “Appname Phone raw.mp4”, my iMovie project is called “Appname Phone IM”.
At this point you have a blank time line. Drag your raw video file into this timeline and get creative!
When you’re happy with your 30 seconds of blockbuster video masterpiece (be absolutely certain it’s less than 30 seconds!) it’s time to export the project to a file. Click on “Share”
Next you are prompted to name your video file and select the resolution. For an iPhone 5, it is vital that you select “HD 720P 1280 x 720”. For an iPad, select “HD 1080P (1920 x 1080)”
That is the end of the iMovie phase of the project. You can now close iMovie if you are feeling confident.
Final Step – Encoding and Cropping
As I mentioned earlier on, Apple have very specific requirements about the resolution of the video you upload for an App Preview. To reiterate:
For the iPad, videos must be 1200 x 900 pixels
For the iPhone 5, videos must be 1136 x 640 pixels
So what gives, Apples own tools don’t give us a video that matches these at all! Using Quicktime Player and iMovie we end up with:
1920 x 1200 instead of 1200 x 900, and
1280 x 720 instead of 1136 x 640
Well, as it turns out, the resolution of the iPhone 5 video is almost the exact same aspect ratio as what Apple requires, and we can scale the iPad video such that we get the full height, and then crop the sides to get the exact video resolution we want.
Don’t understand that? Don’t worry, I didn’t at first either; it took me a while to realise that I needed to scale the videos from iMovie to fit what Apple wanted. For the iPhone this is trivial, but for the iPad scaling wasn’t enough because it left ugly black bands down each side. Here is a screenshot of an iPad video I produced in iMovie a week or two ago:
How do we fix this? I use a wonderful tool called HandBrake (http://handbrake.fr). This great application which runs on OS X, Windows and Linux is a free video transcoder. It has a wealth of features and does what we need beautifully.
One great feature of HandBrake is that you can create a “preset” which describes how you want your output to be encoded and sized, and then save that preset for later use. I’ve done this for both the iPhone 5 and iPad App Previews, and this has worked perfectly for me every time.
One huge benefit is that the quality of the final video is great, and it’s also very well compressed. You can probably tune things but for me these presets work.
So, start up HandBrake, and from the “Presets” menu, select import to import the presets I’ve provided below:
Now, drag the video you saved from iMove onto the Handbrake main window (or select it from the “Open” dialog) and you should see all sorts of details about your video:
Note on the side in the Presets “drawer”, I’ve selected iPhone5? This is one of the presets I’ve made available above.
Note also at the bottom where you can see the resolution of the source video (the one from iMovie) and the resolution of the output (what you have to upload to iTunes Connect). The output is exactly what you want.
All you need to do now is click on the “Start” button and wait for HandBrake to tell you it’s finished.
You’re done! You now have a video in the correct format, duration and size for a direct upload to iTunes Connect. Remember that you need to do this with Safari on a Yosemite Mac (as far as I know).
This is a short post today. The purpose of this post is to share a link to an Xcode project I’ve put together containing the accessibility code I wrote for Dollar Up. This code allows a developer writing an app with the popular Cocos2D project to interface their app with Apple’s UIAccessibility API. It’s fairly painless to use and I’ve found it very easy to integrate into Dollar Up.
The aim of sharing this code is to help make it easier for other developers to make their apps Accessible.
Here is a link to the repository. It’s a bit bare bones at this stage, so if you have suggestions or find problems feel free to fork or branch.
There seem to have been a number of blog posts of late talking about how difficult it is for indie developers to make a sustainable income from their apps. The app store has evolved over the past few years, and not all of us developers have managed to find that pot of gold.
For example, I consider myself an indie developer, though I don’t try, and never have tried to make a living from my apps. Yes, it would be nice to be able to, but I’ve not managed to create any of those app store hits, and I didn’t enter this game early enough to establish my ‘brand’ before the app store became crowded.
With a few exceptions, I’ve focused my attentions on kids educational apps. It’s what I enjoy writing. I know that, even though my apps might not be runaway successes that are loved by all, they are loved by some, and that’s good enough for me. I know that my apps are used regularly by some people; maybe not a lot of people, but by some. I want my kids educational apps to be fun, and helpful; it’s what got me started when I wrote Tap Times Tables.
Early on in this adventure I discovered the Moms With Apps forums where I found other developers. I was looking for help because whilst I knew how to write an app and make it work, I had no idea on how to market it or sell it. I know a lot more now, and that is largely because I found Moms With Apps. The people there, especially the team, headed at the time by Lorraine were so helpful, and through them I discovered “AppFriday”.
“AppFriday” has been, for several years now, an opportunity for developers of kids and family friendly apps to promote their apps at a discount, or for free in attempt to gain more visibility, connect with customers, and hopefully increase sales.
What many of us have found is that AppFriday has been very successful overall, however there has always been an undercurrent of wishing we, as developers didn’t have to mark our apps down so much so that we could not make enough income from them to keep developing. For some time now I’ve tried to avoid setting my apps to free, only doing so when combining it with other promotions, or when I was basically desperate enough for a sale that going free wasn’t going to lose me anything.
Most of the times I set my apps to free, I would see a little kick, but that would only last a day or so. So whilst AppFriday was helpful, it didn’t produce any big sales numbers.
Something that a number of developers have been noticing for a while now is that the number of people turning up for AppFriday has dropped off, and that when an app is set to free, there have been some unusually large educational volume purchases. I can speak for everyone here, but in my case, I set Tap Times Tables to free on the 25th of April. Leading up to that date I was making roughly 1 or 2 educational sales each week. Since that date, I’ve had one single educational sale of Tap Times Tables in the US.
As the images show, educational sales in the US prior to setting the app to free on the 25th of April were a significant proportion of my sales. Since then however that has changed dramatically.
This observation (and I am not the only developer to make it) plus the oft mentioned race to the bottom for prices has led the AppFriday team to try something new. When AppFriday went on hiatus for the Northern Hemisphere summer break, the team sought some feedback from developers on what we wanted to do when the hiatus was over. Did we want to continue with AppFriday in it’s present format (i.e. discount or free promotion only) or did we want to try to try something new?
Well, as I just mentioned, the decision was to try something new. As of the 1st of August 2014, AppFriday has changed to a new format where the only apps that are promoted are apps that meet the guidelines shown at: http://www.appfriday.com/About
Now, instead of promoting discounted apps, we are promoting quality apps that have been Handcrafted for use by kids, that are family friendly, and safe to use. This new emphasis is an attempt to shift the focus of customers so that they will hopefully place some value on the apps that they purchase. We want people to buy our apps because they meet a need; that they are fun, friendly and helpful. Getting people to download something just because it is free or discounted heavily doesn’t encourage buyers to value the apps or what they can do for their kids.
It is also an attempt to return to the days in the app store when you had a new app and actually had a way to let people know it. When many of the developers in the Moms With Apps group began this journey, Apple provided a space in the “New and noteworthy” area of the app store. This gave customers a way to see the new apps, regardless of who published them.
The “Best New …” area in the app store these days is not actually a list of “new” at all; it’s a curated list of what is selling well. Sometimes there are new apps in there; but most of the time the apps there are not actually new. People like to see new, shiny things on the shelf; even if it’s just to take a look and consider whether they want it. This new AppFriday is our effort to give you a new way to find the new apps, and the freshly updated apps for your family and your kids.
So this Friday, when you see developers and other people on Twitter using the #appfriday hashtag, take a real look at the apps. See if there is something you need. Are your kids struggling with their Times Tables? Do they need help with spelling? Do they need a fun distraction like colouring in, or playing with concepts such as recycling, body parts, reading, etc?
And, if you do purchase an app, and you like it, don’t be afraid to pop into the App Store and post a review to let the developer know. Reviews make a big difference. Even if you don’t like something about an app, the developers would love to hear from you via email (most of us provide links to support sites).
Dollar Up is now just over 2 months old. As a developer I’m especially proud of this app, not so much for what I’ve done within it technically, but for what the app can do for people.
The main reason I wrote Dollar Up was to help out. A teachers aid/assistant wrote to me and asked if I was in a position to write some apps for Special Needs students. Whilst I wasn’t able to do everything she asked, I was quite excited at the prospect of writing an app that had the potential to really make a difference.
So I came to an agreement with the teachers aid who provided a lot of input into the initial design and layout of the app that I would build it at no cost to her or her school, and provide her with as many copies as she needed. I got to own the app itself, and consequently any proceeds from sales.
Over the next 3 months I spent most of my development time (which means spare time as this is not my main job) putting Dollar Up together. My understanding was that there was a genuine need for an app that helps to teach basic money skills to people with learning difficulties such as Down Syndrome or Autism.
This was to be my first foray into Special Needs education. Over that first month I learnt a lot about what makes an app easier to use for people with special needs. Make buttons bigger, allow students an option to retry a question, etc.
One huge lesson was that my perception of what people can grasp and understand was centred around my own experiences. That is to say, I had no comprehension of just how much I take for granted in this world. The simple fact that some students couldn’t be expected to grasp or learn concepts like numbers over 10 rocked my world. More than one night I’d get an email explaining this sort of thing to me, and I’d turn to my wife, shaken and unable to get on with the programming. It takes time to absorb this sort of thing for me. Whilst I’m by no means the smartest guy out here developing apps, I’m so used to being able to do these simple things, that comprehending just how ignorant I am of those around me left me more than a little upset.
This learning experience did one thing; it galvanised my desire to do this app, and do it well. I wanted to make a difference, to help fill a gap in the app store, and provide Special Needs teachers around the world with a tool they could use.
In the past, with one notable exception, I’ve done all of the work on my apps; the code, the artwork, the sounds, everything. I work to a shoestring budget. Some say that my apps suffer from this; that if I spent the thousands they do on artwork I’d do better. They may be right. With Dollar Up, I decided to use my little income from the other apps in my portfolio to pay for voice work, and some artwork.
Initially Dollar Up was just for Australia, but it became clear that there was a demand for it in other countries as well, so I started researching where to get permission to use images of coins and banknotes from other countries. In some cases, like the UK and Canada, this proved to be a long process involving a number of emails and in one case phone calls to sort things out. Eventually I had the permission I needed. I never set out to make much money from Dollar Up so it was important that the various institutions understood that.
At release, on the 7th of February, Dollar Up supported 7 lessons with 5 currencies (Australian, US and Canadian Dollar, UK Pound, and Euro). A week later, I added a 6th currency (New Zealand Dollar) because I’d heard via @TheAppyLadies that there is a strong Special Needs community there. Since then, there have been 2 more updates, adding at least 9 new features the most recent of which is the ability to extend the app using the iPad’s built-in camera.
During the last few weeks prior to the first release, I distributed Dollar Up to over 30 beta testers around the world. This was invaluable, not just for fixing things and improving the app; it showed me that people really were looking for an app to help them teach their students or children money skills. It heartened me and confirmed to me that I had done the right thing taking the time to write Dollar Up.
On the day the app was released I remember having a coffee with my wife. During that coffee my phone was buzzing away with messages and tweets showing support for the app. It was an affirming moment for me.
In all of this my expectation was that by supporting all of these currencies I would see some interest from the key markets of Australia, US and UK. Whilst I included the Euro as a currency, I didn’t expect a lot of interest from Europe because the verbal/audio feature of the app is English only.
One thing to note; if you work with currencies other than “Dollars”, don’t let the name of the app put you off . If you select Pounds or Euros as your currency, then the app will intelligently use the correct terms through all of the lessons, both on screen and via the audio prompts.
What has surprised me the most is that the UK has proven to be the quietest. As the graph to the left shows, the US is by far the strongest market, but the UK falls into the bucket at the bottom.
Sales haven’t been huge, but I never expected them to be, and it’s not why I wrote the app in the first place.
I had however thought that the spread of sales would be more uniform. My hope with this post is that by telling the story of the apps development, I can try to give it a human side. I’d very much like to reach more people and schools with Dollar Up; I want it to help. If people don’t know it’s there, they can’t use it and it can’t help.
If you represent an English speaking school that uses, or wants to try the “Next Dollar Up” method to teach money skills then perhaps “Dollar Up” can help. If you’d like a promotional copy of Dollar Up to try, please write to me at support@pkclsoft.com. Explain which school you represent, what your needs are and if I can I’ll help out with a free copy or two. Of course, I only have limited numbers of these so I’d really prefer to provide them to schools where the potential to reach more students is higher.
I’m pleased to say that I’ve just submitted to Apple for review, my latest app. This app has been written at the direct request of an Australian teacher to help her teach her students the “Next Dollar Up” technique.
Below, I’ve included a youtube video trailer for the app, just to whet your appetite. If you’d like to know more about the app, please contact me for some information via the support page.
Game Centre integration is on the way out for two of the PKCLsoft apps.
Today, updates for both Tap Times Tables and Math Plus Minus were rejected by Apple.
The reasons given were that both apps have links that can take the user out of the app. With the new “Kids” category that is coming out with iOS 7, any apps that want to be included in that area have to meet new, tighter rules.
One of those rules is that your app can’t have links that take the user (the kid) out of the app, unless there is a “gate” that can typically only be opened by a parent or adult.
As the kind people at momswithapps.com have pointed out here, there are different ways to implement a “gate”.
Now I can understand where Apple is coming from, so I’m acting accordingly. I’m removing Game Centre from both apps completely.
I don’t want to leave it in and put a “gate” there because it just doesn’t make sense from the kids point of view. If all s/he wants to do is look at his score, then asking for a parent to open the gate doesn’t make sense; it’s unwieldy.
So, the question I asked myself (and this was also asked in a way by Lorraine at momswithapps.com): “Does Game Centre really add any value to the apps?“
When I look at the apps in Game Centre, the number of players is only a small proportion of the total number of people that have downloaded the apps so perhaps it’s not such an important thing.
Encouraged by this, and also driven by the need to correct the issues for Apple, I’ve acted to remove Game Centre.
If you use either of these apps, and are upset by this, please let me know. If there is enough demand, I can look into adding it back in, in the future, and add a gate.
Today I came across the following info graphic. As I continue to work on new educational apps (the current one is coming along nicely), I’m very aware of the need to try and make the apps useful for all kids. Through my apps, I’ve come in contact with a number of people over time that work with or have kids with special needs.
This info graphic seems quite timely, as my next two apps (after the current one) will be developed especially for kids with special needs, in cooperation with a group of teachers that work in this area. I’m really quite keen to start on those projects as they represent a real need.
Here is the info graphic. I’m not associated with it’s author at all, but if you want to contact her, the website is:
A month ago I was riding high. I’d been through a wonderful weekend where I promoted my math apps via the wonderful App Friday and appadvice.com sites as a part of trying to launch my new game Claustrophobic.
I wrote about that experience in The Power of Promotion. I even spoke about it (rather clumsily, I might add) at a local Cocoheads meeting (video).
I’ve been really amazed at the longer term results of that promotion.
Whilst Claustrophobic has failed to capture the interest of the gaming public, both of my math apps (though primarily Tap Times Tables) have improved their sales on a day-to-day basis. Whilst I’ve not made any money at all from Claustrophobic, the act of promoting the math apps via App Friday and appadvice.com has paid off to the extent that my costs of development (apart from time) and marketing for Claustrophobic have now been covered.
To give you an idea of the before/after for my sales:
So you can see, that whilst I’m not getting rich, the difference is quite obvious.
After a couple of weeks with Claustrophobic in the store, it became quite obvious that I had to do something to try and get the game moving. I had got about 2000 downloads in that first week where it was free, but by looking at game center, I could see that people were uninstalling the game at a rate of about 10 per day. Not good. I wanted people to play it and have fun.
One user was happy enough to write a review in iTunes and provide me with some very useful feedback about the game. After some very detailed discussions online, I got to work and made a raft of improvements to the game play. This user was an experienced game developer and player, and the help was invaluable.
Here is an image showing the rather dismal rankings after launch. Certainly not the sort of graph an app developer wants after a launch:
So with a new version done, I readied it for release, and got it into the store. I then scheduled the app to go free on the 22nd of February, and let the kind people at appadvice.com know about it.
Whilst I wasn’t going to promote via App Friday this time, I thought I could get a good boost from appadvice.com and get the game in front of a lot of people. My hope was that they would enjoy it and get the word out.
Here is where it got a little frustrating for me. When we schedule an app price change, the price change starts in the first country to tick over that midnight boundary into the date we’ve scheduled. This makes sense, but it only has an effect if the people in that country notice.
All app developers know how important it is to get ratings, reviews and rankings in the US app store. Another thing that is important about that US app store is that it also has a huge infrastructure of support websites such as appadvice.com, 148apps.com, gamezebo.com, etc. These sites are all US focused, so when they say something, they say it in US time.
What does this mean? Well, even though Claustrophobic was free in Australia from midnight on the 22nd, no-one seemed to know. OK, so it’s my job to let people know, but hang on, isn’t that what appadvice.com was going to do? Well yes, but not in Australian time.
So for a whole 24 hours in Australia, nothing basically happened.
And then the US woke up…and so did the rest of the world…
Notice how clearly that jump is at midnight on the 23rd (Australian time)?
Now I can’t be sure exactly what time appadvice.com post their links and update their appsgonefree app with the new data, but it’s pretty amazing to watch an apps ranking go from nowhere to everywhere so suddenly.
Looking at this, we can see that in the US, Claustrophobic quickly jumped to around #55 in the Games/Action (iPad) and around #100 in Games/Action (iPhone). It then stayed there until the app went back to paid.
As I mentioned above, it was really quite frustrating to see what whilst the app was free for some time leading up to the US hitting the 22nd, there were plenty of other countries that simply didn’t know that they could get the app for free.
I guess that to a large extent this shows my lack of marketing skills, as it should have occurred to me to look for sites like appadvice.com in other parts of the world and coordinated things a lot better. Sometime on Saturday this hit me and I reached out to Kristin Heitmann of www.apppmedia.com, one of my friends in the ParentsWithApps community who had previously posted about experiences in Germany.
Kristin kindly sent me some links to app promotion sites in Germany, and I started working. Of the three sites I contacted only one actually responded, and that was APP gefahren
They were very quick to respond and offered to promote my app via a push to their customers. Initially the offer was as a paid-for service but after some discussion, they very kindly offered to do the push for free to help me out. My hope was that I would get a nice bump in Germany and I’d be able to give something back.
Prior to the push by APP gefahren, Claustrophobic had peaked in Germany at a rank of about #110 as shown below:
Once the push went out, there was a definite jump in rankings:
So whilst appadvice.com is great for high rankings in the US and other countries like Canada, it was clear that to get that extra boost in countries like Germany it’s just as important to have other sites like APP gefahren in on the action as well.
So what actually happened to the downloads? Did Claustrophobic got nuts like the math apps?
Sadly no, but I think that the main reason for this was nothing to do with how I promoted the game; I think it was more that it was a game. The whole “game” category in the App Store has soooo many more apps, and competing in such a large market is not easy at the best of times.
Education, as I’ve said before, is a much better market to be in just at the moment. The selection of apps in the Education category is far smaller, and it’s much easier to get noticed if you frequent the right sites, and make yourself known.
Getting visibility in the games universe is hard. Gamers are a tough crowd. They love their games; they expect a lot from them. There are some very impressive game houses out there producing awesome visuals that build up the expectations of the gamers. It’s not easy to get noticed in that environment without something new.
To be honest, I still think that Claustrophobic, whilst not in the league of a lot of other games out there, has something new; something I haven’t seen anywhere else. I still think it has potential (as does Jennifer Allen at 148apps.com). Version 1.1 saw a lot of changes, and the next version, 1.2 which I’m working hard on will bring a number of new features to the game as well.
So, how many downloads?
These took my ailing 1900 game centre players to just over 5000. As I write this, that is down to 4600 players, with about 110 players each day. It’s great to see people getting better scores; it shows that they are actually playing the game and playing it over and over. Apart from wanting to earn something from the game, I’m really hoping that people genuinely enjoy it.
So where to from here? Version 1.2 is moving along nicely. It’s going to incorporate a whole bunch of things that have been asked for by users via reviews (there are some truly wonderful reviews in iTunes, and by wonderful I don’t just mean positive). It will also become the starting point for an educational game.
I also have a huge new feature, but I’m not sure if I can pull it off technically. If I can, I think it will be a game-changer. Watch this space.
If you’ve found this information helpful, the please feel free to share, or to let me know via a comment. Here are a few links to people that have helped me out. If you’ve helped me and I’ve missed you, let me know and I’ll add you in.
This blog is about promotion, or to be more precise, my experience of it over the last 48 hours.
I have a number of apps in the Apple App Store. Most have done very poorly since they were released; a couple have done OK. None have been runaway successes. I know that my attempts to market the apps have suffered from my own lack of knowledge in the area, and I accept that.
My two most successful apps are kids educational apps (Tap Times Tables and Math Plus Minus), aimed at helping kids out with their basic arithmetic. Over the past 12 months, I’ve tried a bunch of “tricks” from the various websites and people that appear to know a lot more than I do about marketing.
Amongst other things I can’t remember now, I’ve tried:
Changing the icon
Changing the keywords
Changing the app name
Improving the screenshots
Improving the iTunes app description
Adding (and removing) disclosure artwork
Paid advertising
App Review sites
Setting the app free for a day
Adding functionality targeted for schools
Being a part of targeted promotion at the beginning of the US school year
I’ve had some success, but for the most part, I think that the success of these two apps has to a large extent been related directly to being featured in the “New and Noteworthy” list at the beginning.
Apart from that, the single most effective thing I’ve done marketing-wise was to join the Moms with Apps / Parents with Apps community. Most of the other things listed above have had very little effect on day-to-day sales.
Being a part of the community of people at Parents with Apps is a must for anyone wanting to produce apps for the kids or educational markets.
Over the past 3 or 4 months I’ve been working away at a new game app called Claustrophobic. With it’s submission and approval going through without a hitch early in January it was time to start marketing….
This time around I was really hoping to take advantage of what I’ve learnt over the past 18 months with my other apps, plus all the reading I’ve done.
One of the greatest things that the PWA community has set up (thanks to the immense efforts of Lorraine Akemann) is the “App Friday” concept. This is a weekly phenomenon where a selection of apps by members of the developer community are discounted and made available for a day (or two). This is managed via a 1 hour party at 10AM San Francisco time each Friday, and is hosted at the facebook page facebook.com/AppFriday.
Every week there are around 20 apps available either for free or at a decent discount, and it is amazing just how many people wait for this promotion to get an app.
I regularly see developers expressing their gratitude towards the App Friday team for helping them get a (often significant) boost to their sales, if even only for a day.
I have taken part in this App Friday phenomenon several times now, but to be honest, most of those times I’ve been trying to jump in on the promotion without having my apps on the magic “grid” being promoted by the team.
What I’ve noticed on these occasions is that even though my apps might be discounted just as much as the other apps on the “grid”, they just don’t get any attention. Others seem to have the same experience. The one time I have had an app on the “grid”, it did very well, but that very well was only 100 odd sales.
So, back to Claustrophobic. I had previously organised for both Tap Times Tables and Math Plus Minus to be on the “grid” for January 18th 2013. Originally I was discounting them to $0.99. I had never set Tap Times Tables to free, and the only time Math Plus Minus had been set to free was less than impressive.
When Apple approved Claustrophobic for sale, I decided to try and be smart. I set it’s release date to the 18th of January as well. I figured that I could get some cross-promotion happening. Around this time, George, the current App Friday team leader, told the community that a relationship between App Friday and the immensely popular appadvice.com website had been setup. Each week, AppAdvice would, at it’s discretion, and based on a set of rules choose one or more apps from the “grid” to promote as a part of their “Todays Apps Gone Free” page.
When I read this I quickly realised that I needed to change my listings for the “grid” by setting both Tap Times Tables and Math Plus Minus to free. This was a bold step for me. I don’t like setting my apps to free; I think they are cheap enough as it is at less than the price of a cup of coffee. Nevertheless, I knew I needed to do this.
By getting AppAdvice to list one or both of my apps on their page my hope was to get some cross promotion for Claustrophobic; to help it’s launch day.
Next I created two videos and put them up on YouTube. The first was a teaser/trailer aimed at just eliciting some interest. The second was a brief demo of the game in action.
These were then incorporated into a press release that I put together using prlog.org. The press release went out at 9AM on the 18th (Australian time).
The next thing I did was start sending out promotional codes to 17 different Gaming or App Review sites. These sites were not the usual educational app review sites, but the big ones like AppAdvice.
Unfortunately, I have a lot of competition in the games genre, and getting noticed by these sites is next to impossible. Of the 17 promo codes I sent, only 4 elicited any responses, and these were all along the lines of
“Hey we’re busy right now, and we’ll take a look if your app looks interesting enough. In the meantime, why not pop over to our advertising page and spend some money to promote your app“.
There were three exceptions to this.
When researching sites, I happened across the appspy.com article titled “Phobia as a Game Concept“. This was a nice find. It was completely unsolicited and had some nice things to say given they only had the trailer video to go by.
At this point there were perhaps 3 days before launch day, and I had no real confidence that any sites that would be truly helpful were going to take an interest. It wasn’t looking good.
So, I decided to pay the dailyappshow.com for a video. Now this wasn’t truly a review, more a game play demo. My thought was that it seemed to be the most cost effective way to get the game in front of a lot of people. I was wrong by the way. The video turned out to be very basic, and the results have been far from impressive.
So launch day arrived, and my math apps went to free. I was advised that AppAdvice had indeed chosen to include both math apps on their “Todays Apps Gone Free” page which was awesome. Beyond this, I received a lot of help from a number of developers in the PWA community in the form of some behind the scenes promotion. Several blogs also ran posts such as:
Claustrophobic was being downloaded, I could tell, but not at the rate I had hoped for. A number of people in Australia reviewed it, but other than that, the reviews have been fairly scarce.
I don’t have tracking data for most of Friday because AppFigures couldn’t see the app till it hit the US store which was very frustrating. What I did notice though was that downloads really didn’t start in earnest until it did hit the store. The only tool I had available was to watch Game Center and see how many were playing. This wouldn’t be accurate, but it would give me an indication. (Side note, as it turns out, the Game Center figure was about 78% of the total).
And then I started to see something amazing happen with the two Math Apps. As soon as the AppAdvice page was public, the rankings for both apps went from non-existent almost everywhere to ranking very very well.
Here’s a picture of the rankings a little before it peaked (unfortunately I didn’t take screenshots at the peak):
After this it just got better and better. Both Math Plus Minus and Tap Times Tables enjoyed rankings like this for a solid 24 hours. For most of that time, both apps sat at #4 and #6 in the US Education category. Unbelievable.
And now, as I write this, the clock has ticked over in the US and both apps are now paid again (I extended the free time to 2 days in the end). Guess what has happened:
Rather than focus on this bleak image, lets look at the ranking charts for both apps for that period:
For Tap Times Tables:
For Math Plus Minus:
So what do these rankings actually mean for downloads?
For Tap Times Tables:
For Math Plus Minus:
Pretty amazing numbers aren’t they. For apps that normally get sales averaging 3 to 10 a day, to suddenly get in excess of 15000 downloads in a single day is amazing.
I attribute this primarily to the post on appadvice.com. I thank them very sincerely. I don’t yet know if this will help the apps in their rankings and sales in the future, but I hope so.
So what happened to Claustrophobic amongst all of this? Well it’s early days, but as they say, it’s these early days that matter the most for an apps chances of survival. Here is the rankings picture for Claustrophobic:
And the graph:
So, comparatively speaking, not much in the way of downloads and absolutely no in-app purchases so far. The fact that it’s free helps, but it’s that added boost of a single little icon and link on a site like AppAdvice that goes a long long way….
What has surprised me the most is that the UK has proven to be the quietest. As the graph to the left shows, the US is by far the strongest market, but the UK falls into the bucket at the bottom.
