A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery | Hacker News Reader

A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

techcrunch.com

93 pointsjndsn40246 comments

I wish Apple/Google/MS would realise that they could stop operating an App Store and start running an App Mall instead.

Inside their Mall, different third party stores could focus on different niches and demographics with totally different criteria for including and rating apps with different UX to browse and discover products. Some could use expert reviews, some user reviews, others taste based recommedations. Its crazy to think there could ever be a "one size fits all" store for all types of people and all types of activity that digital devices are used for. Maybe an IGN store, a LifeHacker store, a ThinkGeek store, a Fortune store etc.

Apple/Google/MS could spend their time on the simpler effort of curating and promoting good stores instead of good apps and offer them a typical referral fee on each purchase. I think everyone would benefit - better shopping experience for users, better niche surfacing for developers, new revenue source for tech reviewers, simpler curation job for the platforms.

I never thought of it that way, but I really like this idea. In fact I enjoy keeping up with a few good curators - small labels in music for example. Beats most recommendation engines in my opinion.

I don't know about Google, but I can't believe how Apple, the “design is how it works” shop can leave such a gaping hole in a place where it conspicuously matters. Every casual AppStore visitor immediately realises that they have no chance in hell of finding anything. First Apple boasts how many million apps they have on the store, then they make 99%+ of it unreachable. Bummer.

I also find it extremely misleading when the stores quote statistics such as "over 93 percent of all ios apps have been downloaded every month" as proof that people are finding the apps they want. What they don't disclose is that the majority of these downloads are probably just 1 time downloads by the app creator on their own device.

http://www.padgadget.com/2013/06/10/50-billion-apps-download...

There is a saying that springs to mind, “Never trust a statistic you didn't fake yourself”.

It's amazing idea but I'm afraid that (at least in case of Google) it won't happen. I guess their logic is "if the Play store doesn't work as a promotional channel, developers will buy ads".

> I wish Apple/Google/MS would realise that they could stop operating an App Store and start running an App Mall instead.

You mean, like the "internet"?

We thought Internet 2 would be amazing and fast and open and free.

Turns out Internet 2 will be curated, closed, monitored, metered, and pay-to-play.

No, this even better because it means devs would yet another group middle man to pay off just get their content to users.

On android there are plenty of app discovery apps. But considering the fact that most users only download a fixed set of 10-20 apps , i wonder if most users care about app discovery or is it just a developer problem, at least in the short term.

Maybe there's no need. Or maybe the real problem isn't app discovery - but a problem of managing more than 20 apps on a phone and remembering to use them in the right context.

That is exactly the feeling I have. I rarely install new apps and of those few survive my semiregular uninstall marathons whenever the phone feels cluttered. The actual number of persistent apps is surprisingly little and less than 15 I use on a daily basis.

It might be a personal preference but "browsing" apps in the store isn't something I do at all. Most installs come from directed searches after reading reviews online, buying new Hardware (e.g. pulsemeter) or subscribing to a new service (e.g. spotify and friends).

EDIT: Simply being available in a store is definitely not enough to be found. Get a good webpage show the benefit (most apps are struggeling here ;) ) and give me a chance to try it out without much hassle

There's nothing stopping anybody from doing this. Apple offers a DB dump of the store's content (including music). You could build a curation platform on top of that. They do, indeed, offer a referral fee for iTunes purchases.

I'm actually currently working on such a setup.

How much is that referal fee ?

http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/

Is it difficult to become an "Enterprise Partner"?

https://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentat...

Nope. Or at least it wasn't when I applied: fill out the form, get an email with username/pwd.

We already have that. Lifehacker regularly posts lists of apps, complete with links to the app in the store for you to download. They're not alone with this.

I'm not sure I agree entirely on the press thing - although my experiences are from owning a mobile game company, not a mobile app company. For games, online press is great to start to be recognized within the community of peer groups/companies, but has never moved the needle for us, user-wise.

We haven't been featured either, but that's made things harder on us. Getting featured is still huge for visibility. We're pressing for it pretty hard when we release our next game. It's 90% likely we won't get one, but its a huge win if you can pull it off. (It does increase the already silly graph of first-week downloads vs. the-rest-of-time-ever downloads, but it definitely makes sure that second part averages a bit higher.)

What has moved the needle for you?

We had a dev relations contact and got featured worldwide with Hexiled, then a smaller feature later when we added more language support. I argue with my dev partner about press - I think the best tactic is more decent apps in the store trying to get a home-run feature by honing the app style, rather than begging little app reviewers for coverage.

I think if your feature gives your virality a launch pad, that's the best bet. We had the feature, but at the time our app was flawed and we had not yet introduced a couple of sharing functions.

Totally agree with that. The key with the App Store is to get a perfect storm of PR and feature to rise above the noise at least for a few hours/days. Then it's up to the product. Without this storm, even a good product (unless it has an immediately high viral coefficient) risk oblivion.

Out of curiosity, if you're willing to share, how did you get in touch with a dev relations person at Apple for (what looks like) your first game? I'm going to release my first big app soon (music creation) and having someone at Apple know about my product would be so helpful!

I agree with your thoughts on tactics, BTW, which is why I'm working hard on polishing the UX.

Co-developer has built apps in the past and met a dev relations guy at a conference or WWDC or something. We give them heads up on product releases or major updates and they forward it to editorial teams (local or worldwide) for consideration.

Thanks!

IMHO most of the success was due to being featured. Being featured was mainly due to having contacts at Apple and Google. Having contacts is out of reach for most developers. There are only so many developers Apple and Google can have a relationship with and there are only so many apps that can be featured.

Jesus. The road to success, judging from the article, boils down to this. "Know somebody who works for Apple App's Store who can help get your app featured on launch day."

Everything is back room deals. Didn't Instagram have a months-long deal to be a "featured app" as long as they didn't make an Android version?

Those animated gifs throughout the article were awful. But as for the substance, does it really take knowing people on the inside to have a successful app these days? That seems surprising.

> you need a relationship with someone in the Cupertino saloon.

That is no advice at all, just a confirmation of how biased the app stores are. All the big guys can do that. How is supposed a small indie dev, across the world can success at this, now?

Look - it's really what business comes down to. Most of what seems to happen organically was actually facilitated by creating and maintaining relationships. But that's not the main point I was trying to make, rather that as developers, we need to understand the mindset of the team behind it. They think of themselves as store managers and they want to bring the apps that will do well with their users above revenue. Another point to seriously consider which I didn't incorporate in this post is that both Apple and Google will push forward apps that make use of their latest APIs in a way that they approve of, to serve as examples to other developers and increase traction of the new OS features (example: material design, Wear SDK, Apple Watch, etc.)

There is a lot of good experience presented in that article. But there is one place where they screwed up: It's easy to make apps for Android that scale up to tablet-sized screens. Failing to do that isn't Google's fault, and whinging about Google's preference to feature apps that run on tablets is unhelpful. Especially so since they previous, correctly, decided to build an Android design from scratch. If you do that right, it will run on tablets. Based on the tablet issue, their idea of building specifically for Android is still infected by a lot of iOS-itis.

You have a point here. A lot has been done in the Android framework to enable developers to build app that will scale up and down elegantly. However, keep in mind that there is more than supporting the physical form factor to it. To build for tablets vs phone is a different product mindset, with different goals and user experience. I don't expect people to open BillGuard every day on their tablet, rather to take their time on weekends to go deeper into the more advanced tools for example. Since the app is used differently, the UX has to be thought through specifically to take advantage of the specific platform you're building for.

That's a very complex issue. In some ways, Google's recent design trends and libraries, e.g. as in Inbox, do not take good advantage of large screens on the desktop or in tablets. I suspect Google aimed for a cross-platform UX first, before really tackling the screen real estate issue.

On the other hand, a tablet layout that "flattens" a UI hierarchy by displaying a list Fragment to the side of a display/edit Fragment is pretty simple to do. Material Design works just fine for this, too.

We had good success at my last job at a big brand travel company, because our Apple rep really liked us. But me as an individual has no chance. I don't think Apple really cares about you as a developer as long as there are enough to make iPhone sales happen. It's sad though, I wish I could build an app discovery app which would be a lot of fun to do, but it's stupidly verboten.

How did you get your Apple rep? I have never quite found out how to "apply" to get one, or if it's all self-selected from within Apple...

From what I understand, once your app crosses the 1 million download mark, Apple's Developer relations will reach out to you.

Our mobile travel app (before my time) was one of the first to ship on iOS, right around the launch of the app store. So they naturally appreciated it. If everyone knows your brand name, it's surprisingly easy to get people to do stuff for you.

If it was up to me Apple would shut down the Mac app store and give the audience back to the indie developers.

They kind of already completely gave up on it because of the iOS appstore is much more popular and it's not really adding anything good to the consumer.

Apps are now discovered outside of the stores.

...which is the same way they were discovered long before they started being called "apps".

If you know where, please let the rest of us know (i.e. if the source has better discoverability than the AppStore).

for android you could best-app-market is pretty good. Also xyo and appolearning look interesting.

Facebook in stream app ads.

OK, I didn't say the source should be searchable with multiple criteria...

Apple cares about your app if it displays unique features of their platform. So build a new Apple Watch app, use extremely nice design, integrate with HomeKit. Otherwise, they don't care

I'm wondering if there is any marketing/sales strategy crossover from other domains which also have limited product placement opportunities - like supermarkets?

In supermarkets, I understand it's common to pay initially to get the shelf space so you can demonstrate your product will have traction.

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