Ask HN: Why my highly rated apps have no downloads?
One thing in common with all of them is that niche bloggers (my apps are for little children) never rated me below 4/5, and I get high average scores on the stores.
Here are the scores when I counted last time to write a traction document for investors (this was around late december):
Christmas Snow Globe - 30 ratings - 4.96/5
Magical Music Box Lite - 58 ratings - 4.60/5
Magical Music Box - 38 ratings - 4.86/5
Matryoshka! - 92 ratings - 4.76/5
Nono in Amazonia Beta - 21 ratings - 4.80/5 (android only)
When I search similar apps on the stores, usually my apps are the highest rated ones of the list.
But I am not getting really interesting download amounts, except on launch on iOS (when they show on the "new" list, that is ordered by launch date), so I am wondering:
The apps have no downloads because my marketing is bad?
or
The apps have no downloads because they are TOO niche and strange?
Note that except for the paid version of "music box", all apps are free, and have no ads and no iap on them (actually, not even cross-promotion of my own apps, I am now considering this a mistake).
INFO: I don't do astroturfing in the ratings for most part (sometimes there are like 5 ratings at most that are from family and co-workers), because I am very scared that I might get banned from the store (both apple and google, but specially apple, are getting increasingly agressive in nuking astroturfing, in case of apple banning your entire company from the store).