Our first app: One month on the iOS App Store
log.burningrobot.com
log.burningrobot.com
- Use appfigures.com and appannie.com to track your sales and rankings. They provide much nicer reports than those provided by Apple. Also, they'll tell you if reviews come in, and even translate them for you. I'm personally addicted to the hourly ranking updates from AppFigures.
- Never stop promoting. Do something (even if it's something small) every day to raise awareness. Getting on the front page of Hacker News is an excellent start! But don't stop there.
- Get a 'press kit' of screenshots and descriptions to send to popular app review sites and tech writers etc. Many will ignore you, but the hits are worth it. A great review in AppAdvice completely turned around my app's fortunes.
- Don't bother with AdWords - at least at the start. Generally the price per click and the conversion rates won't support the revenue you would get from an app sale. Some people spend big on AdWords to push their rankings, but that's not a reliable way to make money.
- Expriment with pricing. Price changes are quick and easy to make. Don't be afraid to raise your price. You might be pleasantly surprised by the result. And if it doesn't work out, you can lower it again. I found I got fewer cranky reviews when my price was higher. but YMMV.
- Continue writing honest reports about your app's progress. We see so many news items about huge successes and huge failures, it's a good corrective to see how a 'normal' app fares.
- Work on your next app. I just launched my second app in the store and while I'm still not making enough to live on, it's great to get twice as much money coming in.
- Have fun. Building something of your own and selling it is great. You might start resenting your day jobs, though.
I would prefer a dev be confident in the value and price of their app than to constantly be changing it. In my personal experience, most devs that are constantly meddling with the price have an app that's barely worth 99c on their hands.
The other thing it possibly indicates is that they change the price frequently to show up in apps like AppShopper as having a reduced price, which I find to be shady practice as well typically only done by mediocre devs.
It's just one of those respectability things, like reasonable in-app purchases. I won't use or respect your app if you don't respect me as a user, and charging $12 for an app one day, 99c the next and $5 the day after that isn't respecting me.
Obviously this is all my own personal opinion and experience, but I don't think I'm the only one out there who feels this way.
(b) With (a) in mind, there really needs to be a way to plot to/from somewhere other than (what the iPhone thinks is) your current location.
(c) It would be great to be able to see bike lanes, but I understand how much extra effort that would require; so don't sweat it, but if this does rise to the level of a business...
(d) Get rid of the icon-sheen in the App store. It's not enabled on the actual phone icon, and it looks so much better that way. It looks cheap with the sheen in the App-store: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4087500/does-itunes-store...
Thanks for the honest feedback!
You've probably only set it under Icon files -> primary icon
You can tell if you did it right if it shows up without the shine in itunes connect when you upload.
Also, what would you say is your total estimated cost for making the app from start to finish?
It took 3 months to get to version 1.0. We worked on it part time, nights and weekends. There were some big gaps as life and work got in the way. It was my first iOS development experience, and I had only dabbled in Objective-C previously, so most of that time was getting up to speed with the language and framework. I primarily work in Ruby.
There are no real ongoing costs. The website is completely static, so hosting is negligible. We use Google's local search and directions APIs. Both of them are free at our usage levels.
It cost $99 for the Apple developer license. That's all the capital all we invested. The rest of it was just time.
Finally, did you use a mac pro or imac? and if it's relevant, does the glossy screen cause eye strain when programming for extended periods?
Apple's documentation and sample code is excellent, and really nicely integrated into XCode. Once iOS 5 came out, I learned almost exclusively from there. Of course, Stack Overflow is great for very specific gotchas and questions.
I did all the work on a MacBook Pro, with glossy screen, usually plugged in to a 27" Apple display (also glossy). The gloss doesn't cause me any problems unless I sit in very bright sunlight, but all things equal, I would prefer matte. Xcode is a bit of a pig, so it definitely does best on a big display.
In the last release of one of my apps I implemented one of the libraries and I saw the amount of ratings soar. Especially the positive ratings.
The advantage of these libraries is that you can ask at a specific time, say the tenth launch.
The potential problem with the reviews page is that it makes it seem to the user like they have to write a review in order to give a star rating. On the main app page, however, they can just provide a star rating.
Sometime soon I'll post a sales breakdown for my latest app. For me getting reviews written on sites like MacLife and AppAdvice made all the difference for sales.
How so? The initial traffic from those sites? Other sites picking up the story? Ongoing SEO benefits?
Unfortunately I can't tell how many came from App Advice, only the total number of sales that day (600).
Question: When you submit an app for approval, can you tell them the exact date you want the app to be officially released in the App Store?
I’m not sure what type of analytics they provide back to you for any purchases or activity but hopeful it’s something to overcome the data disconnect once inside the App Store.
You can check out the app in the app store: http://bit.ly/Bike-Maps-App
The bike directions prioritize streets with bike lanes and low traffic bike boulevards. With walking, really any street with a side walk will do.
Are you doing any marketing for it?
Our experience is that people rarely redeem the download codes, but will often reciprocate kindness. Our biggest sales came when we gave some promo codes to a bike courier company, and they tweeted about the app to their 3,000 followers.
Aside from that we comment on some of our favorite cycling blogs with our url. That's it. Suggestions?
They do have a nice dashboard and the site is easy to use.
Hopefully word of mouth among your existing user base continues to pick-up along with your daily sales, but you are already off to a great start.Apple screws the developers and we all bend over. What a joke!