The iOS App Store: Needles in Haystacks | Hacker News Reader

The iOS App Store: Needles in Haystacks

semilshah.wordpress.com

19 pointssemilshah19 comments

At Zwapp (I am the founder) we've actually attempted to address this issue, and yes, we use users and their social networks to see if we can make more apps discoverable than just the top popular lists. So far it seems to work out really well, people are interested in sharing their apps and providing each other recommendations. You see this in real life all the time. We meet up, put our phones on the table, and often the conversation is lead to "what apps do you use". We try to stimulate and support these types of conversations. There are more reasons why this approach is valid. Gaming reviews is less important because you wil trust a review of a person you know. It may be more interesting to see the most popular apps of your friends instead of the most popular in the app store. And finally, we have spend a lot of effort trying to provide excellent app detection. The reason for this is two-fold. it helps you get started quickly as a user, but more importantly it helps us to understand what apps people have and use, allowing us to provide qualitative recommendations. It is better to get a few users to download your app and then really use it, then get a whole lot of users downloading it and running it once because of a mismatch.

Cool. Are there examples of folks using Zwapp to reach the same number of downloads as being featured by Apple, ro something close to it?

There is Zwapp, the community, and there is Zwapp Connect, our service that helps developers reach the users that are actually interested in their app. We use our recommendation engine to match between user needs and app to drive downloads. We've tried several app download services and found the quality of the downloads very poor. By using a lot of social/app and meta data that we have build up we can target much better and help devs to drive downloads to people that are more likely to use your app. (sorry about the pitch). It is actually a tough problem to crack that involves reach, matching tons of data, providing the right call to actions and then measure the success and improve the process again.

Cool, there are also some iOS apps explicitly for "app discovery," but I still think it's impossible to break out. I read somewhere that 4% of app downloads account for about 3/4 of all app revenues.

Zwapp is one of those app discovery apps. And it is a platform for developers wanting to promote their apps to passionate app users. See : http://itunes.apple.com/app/id426360184?mt=8&ls=1

I can totally relate to this article: as a frequent launcher of iOS apps, i'm always open to suggestions for how to promote them. At the moment my (admittedly very vanilla) strategy is:

* Set up a promo-page at www.blahapp.com * Use adwords ads to send people from google to my website * At the website, provide links to the app store.

However, any suggestions will be well noted.

It's a two step click thru, and effective cost of acquisition can be high! Think $5+. And volume will be low...not enough to "chart" or grow sustainably.

How has your strategy worked so far?

So far, i've just been putting my apps on the app store with no promotion. It's going alright, making ~$100/day. For my next app, since i'm putting a bit more effort into it, so i'm going to match that with more effort into promoting it too so i'm trying to figure out where would be most effective. So... long story short: i'll find out soon.

Good luck, would love to know what you end up doing.

We once tried buying google ads directly on highly targeted keywords. We spent a small amount of money, but it resulted in no sales at all. Other attempts at advertising, via tap joy, etc, also produced almost no positive results.

Using pay-per-install, you can have thousands of people download your app (for thousands of dollars)... but nearly none of them will ever launch it again.

I think they're also the same people who download dozens and dozens of apps, more than they can keep track of.

Ever heard of PR?

Hire a PR company, or send copies of apps for review, etc.

Apple also reviews new Apps, and if it's outstanding, Apple typically promotes the app.

So, if you are not enjoying success, perhaps improve the app and improve visibility as mentioned.

Hello, I'm afraid PR isn't the answer. Some folks can afford to hire big guns and/or get lucky, but it's not so easy to just plunk down cash for copy.

Would that I had the money to do so...

I'm working on technology related to this problem. I'm interested in hearing anyone's thoughts (ideas are cheap, right?) about the best way to curate the app store at scale.

The biggest challenge seems to be that there is a very limited amount of information available. Marketing text, category, and maybe rating (Though I think you have to violate Apple's ToS and scrape to get that.) Apple already offers free-text search, but I think few use it.

Most approaches so far have gone for trying to create a social network around app discovery, which seems like a lost cause to me (how many people are going to join such a network?) I could be wrong though...

> The biggest challenge seems to be that there is a very limited amount of information available.

Not only that, but there are trivial ways of gaming it. I've seen a number of apps in the bestselling categories with four or five star reviews, but when you look at the actual reviews they're all one star because the app promises abilities that aren't possible. They just release a point version and use Mechanical Turk to pay a few people to review.

I don't understand why Apple doesn't make reviews a rolling average instead of resetting it entirely with a new release.

My two cents - it would take a strong/credible brand to come in, editorially decide on categories and then rank the apps based on a number of metrics or pure editorial voice. Assume the content can be gleaned in one way -- then how is it organized and presented to the user?

I've thought about doing an App Store wrapper around the App Store, more than once.

Cool how would you do it, or design it?

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