Faceplanting: an app launch horror story with a twist

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71 points·joshuacc··9 comments

Great article. Fun to see an app "launch" get salvaged, though of course the main takeaway (as usual) seems to be "get featured by Apple" (but you have absolutely no control over that, sorry). Not to fully discount the obvious effect that redoing the icon and screenshots had on sales in the midst of being featured, of course.

> "get featured by Apple" (but you have absolutely no control over that, sorry)

Actually Angry Birds got featured after they got a publisher who had connections to Apple and called them.

#928F8D text on a #EFEFEF textured background? I'm not being mean or pernickety, I am actually struggling to read this.

I used the Readability bookmarklet: http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

Here's how the page looks like after activating it: http://i53.tinypic.com/2whfjhj.png

It seems like Windows does unspeakable things to the font we use, so I changed it to Georgia.

Windows font rendering makes me sad :(

It's a great read, but I'm honestly struggling to read the text unless I highlight it first. Please change the colours to make it a bit easier to read :)

Thanks for sharing your experience. While it's great that your app got featured by Apple, it would have been more informative if you could have gauged the effect of your updates to the app before the Featured App effect kicked in.

Not only that but they were able to do their update on day three of being featured.

He mentioned iTunes SEO. Any one knows of any great posts on the subject.

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