A phone cleaning app makes $2M/mo on the App Store – The reviews show how | Hacker News Reader

A phone cleaning app makes $2M/mo on the App Store – The reviews show how

undefinedapps.com

37 pointsalexkrkn27 comments

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The title, the preamble, and the content of this article feel so click baity and unnecessarily elaborated.

This user also posted the same article on the same website but with a different title, not 24h before this one.

Perhaps he / she forgot to add, "But wait! There's more..."? :)

I thought it's allowed to try to post the same article more than once no?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying different titles on a story.

I'm new to blogging about marketing so just doing my best, I usually write about technical topics.

Happy to hear what I can improve for my next post, if you have advice.

It's ' -- the reviews show how' in the title instead of summarising how or even just not saying that that does it for me, I won't click something like that.

I see what you mean, I was trying to come up with a title that gets readers interested in reading the post, but I guess it came out too click-baity.

You could drop the “shows how” bit and go for something more direct: Analyzing the marketing tactics of an iOS app estimated to make $2m/mo

Understood that you are not native english speaker and use AI to enhance the content. I would advise to ask AI to share some ways to make the content more concise and incorporate learnings from those suggestions rather than copying them directly. That would keep the human element still around.

These days, I personally find articles with minor grammatical errors more interesting than AI assisted/enhanced/corrected content, because AI generated content often comes off bland and loses the rawness of author's intentions. Just personal opinion of course. :)

It feels like it was written by AI. Everything makes sense grammatically, but somehow it says very little in many words.

Or maybe I've just become too paranoid.

I wrote the entire thing with no use of AI, but I did use chatgpt to proofread and improve my English (not my first language).

I'll try to make my next post more concise.

The post reads fine, I don't understand why others think it's AI generated.

About the post content: I found the analysis itself a bit shallow, but I really appreciate this new perspective on doing review-first analysis without even trying the app first, since it's something I've never considered

Thanks for sharing!

Thank you!

I'm new to writing about marketing, so I hope to improve as I go and offer better insight with more practice.

If you don't see this as AI generated... I dunno what to tell you. It was pasted right out ChatGPT.. the short paragraphs, passive phrasing, and tone - lots of wiggle phrases like "But not many know about this solution." "Nevertheless, I was surprised to see how many reviewers mentioned in the comments how much storage and time they saved! Some reviews even mention the actual numbers the app gave them." "

Lots of words to say nothing of substance.

If it reads like a bad high school essay - it's ChatGPT!

>If it reads like a bad high school essay - it's ChatGPT!

The useful part about the "If it's vapid then it's probably an LLM" test is that even if it ISN'T an LLM, it's still vapid and bad in the same way, and basically needs the same solution:

Folks, if you want to write, take writing classes somewhere.

ChatGPT didn't learn how to write in that way due to its own efforts. It had to be trained on a mountain of blogspam, which is written in the exact same way.

All ChatGPT does better is produce blogspam with more consistent grammar, and over a wider range of topics than any single person could quickly understand.

This content feels like it was AI generated then edited by a human.

Haha it was actually written by a human (me) but I did use AI to proofread (English is not my first language).

So the other way around...

Thanks for commenting, I have no reason to not believe you so please take my comment as constructive =)

For context, phrases like "We'll take a look at" are what typically lead me to lean towards AI being part of the mix. There are other things about the article that did that too but they may be related to you working in a non-native language.

That's a good point, thanks.

It comes across as a bit “wordy” hence maybe triggering some people’s AI “spidey senses” - including mine originally!

So perhaps more editing was needed, to distill the message.

If English is not your first language then it’s pretty damn good in that context :)

Thanks for the feedback! That's a great point.

I'll try to work on making my writing more concise, based on the comments here.

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One aspect of analysis ignored is review stuffing as a possible explanation for the repetition of keywords. At $2M/mo there's almost certainly a portion of the marketing budget going to inflating reviews.

As an aside, I found an app that deletes all photos except your favorites. This way I can go through my photos and mark the ones I want to keep and delete the rest. Then I copy those photos to storage.

I see this as more of a way to profit off a monopolies dark patterns.

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