Apple's App Store Secrecy Hurts Indie Developers | Hacker News Reader

Apple's App Store Secrecy Hurts Indie Developers

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41 pointsjonmwords24 comments

Barnard invested $7,000 to build this app. It’s the best timer iOS could ask for.

I don't think so. Based on the screenshot from the article, I would rather use the built in timer rather than search through a bunch of pre-defined buttons for an arbitrary time.

Why aren’t iPhone users downloading it by the thousands? Because they can’t find it.

Maybe. But I think the author should seriously consider the possibility that users simply aren't interested in paying $0.99 for a timer app when the phone ships with a perfectly functional timer already.

Here's the thing about the App Store, especially as it stands in 2012. Certain app categories are massively oversaturated with too many apps offering essentially the same thing. Think flashlight apps, lock screen apps, converter apps. Even if you have an amazing app in one of these categories, you're going to have a lot of trouble making any money. I would definitely put timer apps in the same boat, especially since the phone already ships with one. If you're looking for success in the App Store you should probably turn towards a niche that has been under-filled and find a way to offer significant utility to those potential users.

That said, I do agree with the general premise of the article that App Store discovery needs to be improved.

Fair points, but the fact is that the app was selling more when it was visible in search. When it dropped out of search, it stopped selling.

From the chart it seems like the sales were much more drastically affected by external promotion (being featured by Apple, mentioned on TUAW, and cross promoted from the other app) than any search algorithm changes.

In my opinion, considering how many timer apps there are in the App Store already, making $5k in a little over a month is a pretty good result. That's a nice little passive income stream of $127/day for an app he probably doesn't have to put that much more work into (although I don't think those numbers will be sustainable).

Maybe I'm reading too much into the specifics, but how did he invest $7,000 to build a timer app? Is that just the development time x his old job's hourly rate? Is that including marketing? I can't fathom how an indie dev could spend almost 10k on a very simple application.

According to his blog post he didn't build it - he hired people to do it for him. I agree the figure seems rather high, although it does include a designer and developer.

(...before someone chimes in: I do commercial iOS dev for a living. I know that $7k isn't really high at all in the scale of development - but I also know I personally wouldn't invest $7k of my money into an app that was basically a timer)

Ahh, makes so much more sense. I've gotten too used to the realm of hackers on here to have even considered someone not building an app like that for themselves.

Yes, it's very strange.

Specially considering that this app is extremely simple. Look at the screenshots: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id507518845

And, I don't understand why is Apple's search broken. He has made a paid app that has sold 5000 copies so far. there are free apps with the same name that have been downloaded tens of thousands of time, and a competitors that costs twice and has sole (probably) 60000 copies (it has 8500 votes).

They all have great reviews and rankings, just like his app. But they've sold a whole lot more.

So, tell me, why should his app be on the top spot?!

BTW, if you have Siri, odds are you won't ever need a third-party timer app.

I had a similar experience with my app, Tea, which I commented about when all of us were learning of the algorithm change [1]. I noted that sorting results by popularity alone yields a poor experience and causes customer confusion. I hoped that Apple knew this and would recalibrate the results over time. It looks like they did.

Prior to the change, my app was the top result for the search term "Tea." Immediately after the change my app was the sixtieth result. Today it's at the third spot, behind Starbucks and Teavana, both free apps [2]. What happened? I'm guessing that the algorithm learned that some people who searched Tea were in fact looking for my app, went down in the search results and chose it. Only by noticing this behavior was the algorithm able to determine that the app was not a name squatter. It's very possible that the same thing will happen to Barnard's app over time.

1) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4153918 2) http://cl.ly/1J1F1e352b1E1y3h1S1K

The major problem with this is that the article assumes that this app being "the best" timer available is an infallible fact. Perhaps the reason that this app isn't being downloaded by every user imaginable is that they are either content with the stock Clock app or the other timer apps better suit the needs of consumers.

I don't want to turn this into a finger-pointing exercise, but I downloaded a free version of one of the apps mentioned in this article, and to put it bluntly, it's not very good. (I wanted to buy the for-pay version, but decided not to after I tried using the free one.) The controls are awkward, the workflow is confusing, some of the settings make no sense to me, and it does localization wrong so there are parts I can't quite use. I'll give anyone a bit of a pass if they're actively working to improve it, of course, but it also hasn't been updated since last year.

In "Dune", the Duke says "Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms and the freedom to use them". As an 'indie' Apple developer, Apple's policies frustrate me as much as anybody, but it's hard for me to find a lot of sympathy for someone who has a free trial with a 3-star rating, that hasn't been updated in the better part of a year.

It's convenient to think that Instagram is beating us because of name recognition or advertising or iTunes search favoritism or whatever, but maybe it's because they've got a 5-star rating (the average of 700,000 reviews!) and their last update was only 2 weeks ago.

He spent $7000 to build this app, made $5000 in the first month and think it is bad?

The search algorithm is shitty, but this example isn't good to illustrate problems with the App Store.

I had the same initial reaction ("why complain at $5000/month?") but it is obvious that search doesn't help his app at all. In fact, it is probably the weakest link in acquiring those 5000 sales. So I think the point still stands. But yeah, I would call this a successful project otherwise.

Our Craigslist app, Invantory (http://invantory.com), received a slight boost with the algorithm change a few weeks back. But the big shift came when we followed the advice in this slideshow:

http://www.appcod.es/tutorials

... and used this search engine to get a rough idea of placement and keywords used by competing apps:

http://www.appcod.es/appsearch/

Tweaking the name of our app and using a different set of keywords on the next update worked wonders.

I could be off-base, would guess that part of the issue is that his choice of names is also a keyword for every one of his competitors: "Timer." It's like trying to Google yourself if your name is "John Smith" -- good luck with that. On the other hand, "Apple Paltrow" will have no problem finding herself in the future. I could be wrong, but if I were him, I'd rename it to something like "SuperMegaTurboTimerDelux++"

Anyone else find it interesting he is so against black box tactics, yet his app name is "Timer :". I guess that is better than "Timer+++".

Good point. Maybe that's the reason why it's not found by search, too. I think claiming the app's name was "Timer" when in fact it is called "Timer :"[1] is dubious. Ok, maybe the app stores search should prioritize highly rated apps but it seems there are simply a large number of apps having "Timer" in their names.

(Besides, relying on the app store as such for marketing is a gamble, that should be established by now ...)

[1] how did the author come up with "Timer :", it's just weird, I think.

The developer knows how App Store SEO works, but this seems like an attempt to get some free press using the hotbutton complaint about App Store SEO as a ploy.

Here's the list of apps they've published: "Timer :" "Mirror ◎" "Launch Center Pro" "Gas Cubby - Fuel Economy (MPG, Mileage) Calculator and Car Maintenance & Service Log" "Trip Cubby • Mileage Log for Tax Deduction or Reimbursement" "Tweet Speaker - Listen to Twitter"

Guess which ones have more sales? Their better SEO optimized apps sell better. SEO could have scaled his $5k/month (not bad!) results by a factor of 3x, 5x? Maybe more?

This app doesn't even rank for it's own name (searching for "Timer :". Don't complain about it, fix it!

Perhaps it's the best timer application ever, and it might very well be... but this seems like poor form.

Definitely agree that he knows how to work the SEO. It just strikes me as funny to complain about a competitors app using his app name in their keywords, yet using "Timer :" is basically just using someone else's app name with a seemingly arbitrary character at the end. "Angry Birds :" sounds like a cool game.

While I agree with the premise of the article 100%, the example used is pretty silly. I use the built in timer all the time and have no problems with it. When I saw this featured by apple a few weeks ago I was really annoyed. There are far more useful and just as well done apps that could have been featured instead. It's absurd to me that he could complain about making 5k in a month on a freaking timer app. Also, 7k seems like overpaying for an app this simple. I would happily do it for half of that and be thrilled at getting 5k back in a month.

I wonder why the sales dropped so low on June 16th. Didn't the "Chomp" update not roll out on the 22nd?

I don't like the Timer example because it's such a new app. Let's see how it places in 3 months. It's also competing on a crowded search term. I can't imagine hoping to make top 3 for such a crowded niche. Maybe it will eventually get there though.

a) $5k in first month w/ bad search results is pretty good, imo, for a paid timer app

b) how did this cost $7k to develop? did he write it himself, or was it all outsourced?

c) this is a nice press hit for him :)

This is just one guy complaining about how The App Store search didn't help HIS timer app. They didn't interview the guys who built the other timer apps that show up first in the search results

> More than a month into its tenure on the App Store's shelf, though, the app has only made about $5,000

So the app made more than 80% of apps will ever make. Also after just one month the app almost break even. That's not too bad if you consider that the product is something ultra trivial.

I don't mean to be rude but most people wouldn't pay even a dollar for an app that effectively does the same thing as an in-built app does. Just because you relieve the user from the "pain" of dialing to a desired time doesn't mean it automatically becomes worth a dollar or more in the eyes of most users.

With that being said, I am not questioning whether the lack of discoverability affected sales. The price argument above just reflects how my mental utility functions work as I think it does for most people - so the initial sales might have come from appcubby enthusiasts and/or the "early-app-adopters".

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