Ask HN: Do I need a better icon for my application? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do I need a better icon for my application?

4 pointsveeti10 comments

For a while now I've been developing a small freeware Android application, and recently I've launched a commercial version of it in the Android Market. And while the users seem to be generally very happy with the application, I can't help but to constantly think about the launcher icon, which is not very beautiful:

http://imgur.com/7cEx4.png

Could my poor icon actually be hurting the sales? It surely doesn't create a very good first impression when a user finds the app in the Market, does it?

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As a user... I download apps with beautiful icons over apps with ugly icons all the time... in my personal opinion, I associate a bad icon with a generally poor application. To me, if you don't invest the time to make your icon great, then how can I expect that your made your entire app great?

Same here.

I don't know that anyone can answer you with any substance unless you tell us what the app does and is titled. Icon looks like a good enough icon on it's own merit but does it fit your app? I don't have any info on what your app is so I can't answer that.

Although I agree that it'd be better to know more about the app, I think the icon needs some polishing either way. A good logo/icon isn't created overnight and can always be benefited by conversation.

Sorry about that - a description is in my profile. The app is called Clipper, and it's a clipboard/snippet manager.

That might be a rough name to seo considering Clipper is the name of the public transit card in the Bay Area!

... and a kind of sailing boat, and a programming language for MS-DOS business applications which was actually quite popular back in the day. But generic terms like "android clipboard" are more important anyway.

I get it now, but before I knew that I figured it was a text editor. The text is more prominent that the actual clipboard, to me at least. If it's displayed in context of the name, though, you're probably okay.

I can see that - that's what it looks like to me as well

Well, I think there's certainly a case to at least consider testing it. This is about A/B testing app names and icons in the Apple App Store:

http://www.markj.net/ab-testing-iphone-app-names-360idev/

While they're optimizing for the dynamics of that market to achieve downloads and, therefore, favorable placement, you can probably gets some insight and tailor to the Android Market.

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