I’m making an application for iOS, I plan to release it in the App Store soon. The question arose - how to promote it correctly? Catch up with the audience? How to form the content initially, given that the application is something like a message board, respectively, if people download it, but it is empty, it does not fit. And is it better to launch it first in one city or in several? If anyone has such experience, I will be very grateful for the advice and answers.
The App Store
Apple’s App Store is a vast and complex ecosystem containing millions of apps across dozens of categories. But this vast selection is only valuable if users are able to find the apps they’re looking for. To that end, Apple has designed the App Store to promote discoverability.
How do people discover apps?
There are two main ways users discover apps in the App Store: by searching for keywords and by browsing featured and top charts. Surveys have shown that between 20 and 50% of users find apps by search, while another 14 to 20% discover them by browsing categories or looking at Apple’s featured selections.
App name and keywords
According to Apple, nearly ⅔ of app downloads result from searching. Therefore, it’s worth spending some time thinking about how to optimize your app for search. Your app’s search relevance is determined mostly by your app name and keywords, so let’s take a look at each of those in turn.
Apple once permitted app names to be more than 200 characters, leading to “names” that were chock full of SEO-gaming keywords, metadata, and the names of rival apps. Today, App Store guidelines limit developers to 50 characters and prohibit terms and descriptions that are not the name of the app.
When it comes to keywords, developers are limited to just 100 characters per app. With so few characters to work with, developers need a deliberate strategy. Ask yourself: What keywords are most important to you, and what are the keywords that will set you apart from your competitors? The best keywords are both relevant to your app and frequently searched, but the former outweighs the latter.
Remember: Users are much more likely to go with the top search results. Therefore, it’s generally better to be ranked #2 or #4 for a keyword that’s searched fifty-thousand times a month than to only be ranked #345 for a keyword that’s searched a million times a month.
Lastly, some brass tacks:
Separate keywords with commas.
Break down phrases into individual words (i.e., “photo, editor” not “photo editor”)
Save characters by not pluralizing your keywords (i.e., “calendar” not “calendars”)
Getting featured
Getting an app featured in the App Store is the dream of many developers. Not only does it confer special recognition on your app, it also gets you more prominent placement in the App Store. To add icing to the cake, getting featured also permits app developers to customize both their app and developer pages, further enabling them to stand out from the crowd.
A survey by Applause found that 40% of awareness of apps comes from browsing the App Store. In raw terms, that means getting featured on one of the dozens of lists, which are themselves created by a combination of popularity and editorial curation by Apple. Since users in general are more likely to trust (and therefore download) an app that they’re already aware of, having a recognized presence in the App Store is a major asset.
So how do you get your app into this elite group?
Obviously, there’s no substitute for quality. The best way to get an app featured is simply to build a great app. Apple’s curators are always looking for new apps that their users will be excited about. To that point, having a world class user experience goes a long way.
Beyond that, it helps to understand how the App Store works. A former App Store manager has revealed that the App Store isn’t a monolithic app supermarket, like Walmart or Target, it’s actually more like a bustling mall with dozens of small stores specializing in different areas. Each of these editorial teams is dedicated to a specific category or region, and each makes its decisions about what apps to feature internally. That said, developers can pitch their apps to Apple’s marketing team, who may then choose to advocate for an app within Apple. Going to events like WWDC and chatting up Apple representatives can also be a good way to raise awareness inside Apple about your work, especially if you’re a small or first-time developer.
Another thing that Apple’s editorial teams consider when choosing what apps to feature is whether an app takes advantage of Apple’s newest and most exciting tech. Remember, promoting an app in the App Store is also about promoting features that set iOS apart. Taking advantage of the newest APIs and functionalities can make your app more timely and relevant when Apple is choosing what apps to feature.
App Store search ads
A relatively new product from Apple allows developers to promote their app at the top of search results. Given that nearly ⅔ of app downloads come from searching, Search Ads can be an effective way to give an app the bump it needs to get found.
Search Ads are built around an automated auction process similar to Google AdWords. Developers set a maximum price they’re willing to spend per tap, which is then compared against the bid of the next most relevant competitor. Developers only pay when a user engages with one of their ads.
As with organic search results, relevance is the main determinant for whether an app is likely to appear on a given page of results, not how much a developer is willing to pay for placement. Relevance is determined by a combination of App Store metadata and user response.
That’s just a broad overview. Search Ads also includes some advanced features, like the ability to target specific groups based on demographic and location data. It also includes services to help you target your ad spend by recommending keywords based on your app’s metadata.
However you promote your app, it’s important to make sure you’re doing it in a cost-effective way. Marketing analysts and SEO experts may be able to help you optimize your marketing spend to ensure that your app gets in front of the right users based on your business objectives.
Currently I have a live iPhone app. I need to convert it to a paid one with territory limitations. That means I need to make my app paid for some territories and free for the rest.
Will apple allow this?
Can I upload 2 separate apps with same features, one is free and other is paid but their no feature changes. Only territory limitations.
First thing is you can not change price of the same Application for different territory. Apple will not allow to do so. In fact there is no such option to set different price for different territory.
So for the second you mentioned i say YES. To do so you to keep few things in mind.
Let say you have created 2 different applications with same features for 2 different countries with different price tags
Make sure the version which you uploaded for Country-A should be only visible to Country-A. And same for Country-B.
Keep Description & keywords localized language.
Make sure there is something different in both app versions. Otherwise Apple team will feel its a similar concept & they might reject the application.
Hope it will guide you.
We already have E commerce app Targeting 3 different countries with 3 different domains. It also uses 3 different DB.
Now we are going for IOS app. So my questions here are:
Can we upload a bundle for specific country only? (Available in that country only, if multiple bundles allowed for single app)
Should we handle JSON based DB request in a single bundle by checking user's location? (so single bundle handled by programming)
Our goal is here our app will allow only specific country's user to place order.
Also prices are different for different countries, prices are from server.
We don't have in app purchase prices.
Please let me know what option is best. Even if new please suggest.
Its a broad question with lots of good answers and unfortunately all of them are opinion based but I will give my two cents.
You can absolutely create multiple apps and target a specific country. You control this by changing the availability preference. (see pic) This will allow the app to be shown only in a certain country.
The advantage of this method is that you can have complete control & customizability specific to a country.
The disadvantage is that you are now maintaining multiple code bases. If you have a code bug in one app then you need to update 3 apps to fix the "same" bug. What if you want to support more countries. Now you have to create that many clones of the app. Think about if you had to add a new feature. Its snowballs pretty quickly doesn't it?
If you make one app then there is only one code base, one place to make all code changes or add features. Its somewhat easy to maintain code wise.
The bad side, well now you have to take care of every possible country specific scenario either within the app e.g. Localizations, currencies etc. or you have to get that information from your servers.
There are ways to find out through apis from which country a user is connecting from without asking the user itself.
In my opinion, creating one app is the way to go. It will save you lots of headaches down the road. But having said that I don't know how UBER or others big international players handle their country specific apps. Do they have one app or many. That I don't know.
We are about to ship an app with localization to many languages.
The point is that the localization is not only for the UI but for many assets of the app (offline videos and images, about 200MB for each language).
The app has 50 levels and we wish to ship the app free with 3 lessons inside, so the users won't need to download assets before they decide to buy the rest of the levels.
Obviously we don't want to ship the app more the 20MB and shipping it with 3 lessons for all the languishes can get to 500MB.
The specific language is an important issue as this is a language learning app so we don't want it to be something that the user will have to deal with, he will need 1 language and that's all.
Can we upload language specific versions for the every languish or it will be considered as spamming the app store?
Thanks
Shani
Yes, you can do that and plenty of companies do it. Search the App Store for "Gengo Wordpower" for example and you will find lots of apps by one company just with a different vocabulary file.
Testing in-App Purchases seems fairly straightforward but I want to release my app globally. If I read the dev guide correctly, it says that I can only have 1 test account per territory. So am I stuck making over 150 test accounts? There has to be a better way!
I would agree with Kheldar. Is there a specific reason that you need to test for all your territories? Personally I would test my app for one territory and assume it works the same for all.
They just "suggest" that because it's a good idea to make sure all the currency values are tested for everywhere you want to release it at plus any sort of localization.
Really big companies are the only ones who can truly test that way - it costs a lot of resources to validate every country...
By not doing it you will be fine, plenty of indie apps get released with only enough testing to make sure the app runs with the normal framerate and you can do each of the features without crashing and these apps have done very well in downloads and sells (even with the inevitable 'issue' that pops up here and there). Leave a support e-mail/contact and makes sure to check your reviews for anything major you need to address and you will be good to go.
Just test with your major area or major areas (ie: Your a German living in America and want to make sure your German and America versions are top notch so test the '2' versions and release everywhere!) and handle anything else as/if it comes by.