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….
How exciting! Claustrophobic has hit the app store and people are starting to play it. A press release was sent out this morning via prlog.org, which can be found at:
I short while ago, the kind people at GoPayment.com asked me if I’d like to be interviewed about hiring an app developer. The end result of that has been posted today, and can be read here.
Yesterday, both of my Math apps received a minor update in the App Store. The changes were really very minor, but a part of my desire to maintain and support those people that have bought the apps. If you are one of those people and have some feedback, please let me know if there’s something you’d like to see added or improved.
Another piece of news is that my new app, Claustrophobic has been submitted to Apple and is awaiting review. I’l really quite excited about this app; it’s a real step up for PKCLsoft, and I’m hoping that people are going to love it.
A lot of thought has been put into the game concept, the sounds, the visuals. There’s still a lot more I want to do with the game, and I have a plan of added features, new game twists, etc.
Whilst it’s not available yet in the store, you can see some video of the game by visiting my YouTube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/pkclsoft
Ove the next week or so, I’ll be posting more game play videos to give people a feel for the game. Once it’s available, players will have the ability to share their games via the built-in Kamcord feature. I’m really looking forward to seeing how people play, what strategies they use, etc.
Claustrophobic, a new game for the Apple family of iDevices running iOS 5 or later, is almost ready to release.
In this game, the aim is to keep your ball rolling as long as you can. When it’s moving above a minimum speed, your score increases. If you stop or slow down, so does the score.
As time moves forwards, the space you have on the screen in which to move reduces, as the boundaries move inwards.
As you roll around the screen, controlling the direction of the ball by tilting your device, various obstacles, tokens and power-up’s appear on screen. It’s up to you to dodge or hit them to keep the game going. Some will give you points, some will end the game, some will affect how your ball moves.
This game has been built from the ground up to work on all of the new Apple devices, especially the iPad Retina, iPad Mini and iPhone 5.
A teaser/trailer video has been posted on Youtube to give you a feel for the game ahead of it’s release.
If you want to know more about the game, write a comment here, or email me via the support email address on this site.
With less than 2 days to go till Christmas day here in Australia, I thought it was time to wish everyone out there a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous new year.
I’m also moved to say that whilst I’m based in Australia, I want to express my best wishes to those families affected directly or indirectly by the shootings in Newtown just a week ago.
It’s very easy for us in Australia to feel glad that we have effective control over guns, but it doesn’t diminish how shocking it is for us to see these events unfold overseas.
So as a final message from me, please have a safe Christmas break where you can remember how important family is. Acknowledge those you see this year and show them you’re glad they are a part of your life. Don’t let people feel alone.
With the recent update to iOS 6.0 and the beautiful iPhone 5, it became necessary to update several of my apps to work with the new screen size. Whilst Apple
did us developers a huge favour by ensuring existing apps worked on the new phone, the “letterbox” effect detracted from the experience of owning an iPhone 5 in the first place.
When I updated uAlertMe, I took the opportunity to not only increase the screen size, but to revamp the look altogether. It now sports nice new retina artwork for both the iPhone 4/4s and the iPhone 5. In addition to this, I also thought it would be great to add some new features that have been long coming.
The most important new feature was social integration. I’ve always wanted users to have the ability to post or tweet the images received from the Mac running iAlertU, and iOS 6.0, with it’s deeply embedded support for both Twitter and Facebook, made this a natural addition.
So now, wherever you can see an image or screenshot, you will also have a handy tweet & post buttons allowing you to do just that. Just remember to tell your iOS 6.0 iPhone that you have a twitter or facebook account.
Wow, it’s been 9 months since my last post, and so much has happened since then. It’s been so busy, and I find myself so caught up in keeping track of other sites like my facebook page, the Parents with Apps forum (a ‘child’ of Moms with apps), various review sites, and promotions such as the AppyBack2School even being run throughout August by the Technology in (Spl) Education website.
This all started out as a hobby for me. I wanted to keep my hand in some contemporary development, and I’ve always loved working with Apple products (and that goes back more years than I care to admit).
After my last post, back in October 2011, I came to the realisation that kids are getting through primary school without learning some basic skills. I went to a parent information evening at the school which turned out to be all about parents needing to help their kids with their math skills. Kids entering this school at Year 7 come from all over, and the range of abilities/knowledge was apparently quite diverse.
So I set out to write what was going to be a simple Times Tables app to do my bit. My kids were not having any trouble, but it highlighted to me that there was a need. Looking at the app store, I could see that there was plenty of competition, but it seemed that there was still room to move as people seemed to want something more.
Thus, Tap Times Tables was created over the next month or so. Both of my kids got involved with it’s design and interaction, and whilst it hasn’t broken any records, it’s done OK, certainly better than I had expected given the flooded market.
Soon after it’s release, I was asked to write a similar app for addition and subtraction, and Math Plus Minus is the result.
So, for the next little bit, leading up to the end of the Australian school year, both apps were out there, and were quite a celebration of having done something positive. I could see that the apps were being used on a daily basis, and from some of the feedback emails I was receiving, I could also see that they were being used within school environments.
Then the school holidays hit, and sales took a bit of a dive. Even today, although I have never specifically targeted Australia, my sales here have far outweighed those overseas. Not having any sort of marketing ability, I just accepted it and waited for school to go back.
Now, recently, the northern hemisphere has gone on holidays, and it seems that the entire education app developer community is spending a great deal of time trying to keep the sales happening during the break.
I’ve been so busy with new app development on the side that I’ve not had time to join in the marketing in the way I probably should have.
In an attempt to rectify this, I’ve shelved my other app work and am currently adding some really great features to both math apps that will make them far more useful in a classroom environment. My hope was to have these released by the 1st of August to coincide with the AppyBack2School promotion during August, but I’m running behind.
What have I been doing? Well, to start with I’ve added the ability for a teacher to, via a Google Docs spreadsheet, enter a roster of student names for an entire year level and import this into the apps. This means that for a school which has a bank of iPads or iPod Touches with my apps installed, they can hand them out to students and allow the students to use the apps, recording their results against their name, and reporting it back to a teacher via email.
A sample spreadsheet for this would look like the following:
In this example, we have a roster for Grade 4, comprising 4 classes of students where the name of each class includes the name of the teacher.
In addition to this, I’ve added the ability to create a lesson. Each lesson consists of one or more questions that can be played in the main game of the app. The beauty of this is that the teacher can now take control of what questions the students are answering. They can even specify what incorrect answers will be shown so that all students are presented with the same options on screen (thus levelling the play field).
Combining this with the roster, it becomes easy for the teacher to distribute a “test” to students within the app that they can sit, and then submit results for.
An example lesson for Tap Times Tables is:
In this example, we have 12 questions for a lesson called “Mixed tables”.
I’m really pleased with these changes to the apps, as they really represent a move from being what started out as “simple” learning aids, to becoming real classroom aware tools.
It is my sincere hope that with the beginning of the school year in the northern hemisphere, my efforts within the apps, and the efforts of people like Siva at Technology in (Spl) Education that I’ll see the apps being used more and more.
I never went into this to get rich (although my family wouldn’t mind), but if I can bask in the inner glow of knowing I’ve helped some kids out, and made a little on the side as I do then that would be great.
