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.
There are many application in app store that they force users to vote 5 stars to unlock the content. That's forbidden by Apple but they don't care about it. I have at least 4-5 competitors which build very poor app but have more than thousand forced reviews.
Suprising thing is that even people complain about they are being forced in their reviews, Apple is not doing anything about that and those apps are in top 10 in their categories for more than a year. That's dissapointing and not fair!
Should we wear the black hat and do similar tricks to compete?
I don't suggest you using the same bad practice than your competitors, obviously it cause you to be down the research when user look for your product. To avoid that kind of situation, Apple offer this website
I've never use it before so I can't tell how effective it is.
After some more research, this website seems to be what you are looking for
It's an absolutely unfair competition you're facing but as long as user won't complain or report to Apple those kind of situation, they won't do anything I guess.
Or maybe now users are OK with this kind of situation so it would mean that the rating system of the AppStore might be re-think in a better way.
Anyway you have only few options in your situation but reporting those app.
Since I've never seen similar situation in an app, may I ask what kind of app it is ?
I'm going to deploy new paid app to appstore. This app will connect to our server and download some data (pretty big sometimes).
I'd like to know, is there any way I can check (on server side), that request is going from app, which was really paid (not stolen).
I know that anybody can buy app once and then distribute it (and guys with jailbreaked phones/pads can install it easily). It may cause extra traffic from our servers, and we want to protect us from it.
Or may be I can somehow figure out, that request comes from one sold copy of app? In this case, I can restrict numbers of downloads from one copy, so if it will be widely distributed, it just stops works one day.
Any ideas?
I am copying this verbatim from an email I sent to the cocoa-dev mailing list a while back to someone who had your concerns. The numbers have probably changed, but my rationale still applies as to why I think it's a waste of time to even think about this sort of stuff.
Setting aside all the technical issues, do you have evidence that
jailbreak piracy is a large enough problem to justify you doing all this?
For one, while I don't have a percentage I'm quite certain that it is a
minority of phones that are jailbroken. I run with a pretty tech savvy
crowd and I know only one person who has jailbroken their phone, and I
am fairly confident that techies are more likely to go through the
trouble. (How many average users have the faintest idea of what it
means to "jailbreak" a device?)
Jailbreaking is probably more prevalent in countries and cultures with
less of a tradition of paying for software. But this leads to the
second point...
From your standpoint you (presumably) really care about converting
would-be software pirates into paying customers. If they can't use
your app on a jailbroken device yet don't buy it legitimately, you
haven't accomplished anything economically worthwhile. In fact, you may
be worse off because you lose the (admittedly small) possibility that
the would-be pirate will show off your app to others who might in turn
become paying customers.
So, your calculus ought to be something like:
(# users with compatible devices) * (% with jailbroken devices) * (%
interested in your app) * (% unable or unwilling to circumvent your
protection) * (% who will purchase your app when confronted with copy
protection) * ($ price per sale) > (increase in legitimate sales that
could be obtained by devoting development resources to product
enhancement, marketing, support, etc.)
Let's suppose that 250M compatible devices have been sold, with 150M
distinct users (assuming that there are many people who have replaced
devices or own iPad with an iPhone, etc.) Suppose 10% are jailbroken,
which is what some cursory Googling turns up. That gives us 15M
candidate users.
Now, unless you are writing Angry Birds, it seems unlikely that you will
appeal to any more than 1% of the user base. That leaves 150K users.
Maybe 80% are unwilling to circumvent your copy protection, leaving 120K
users. Now the kicker: how many are then going to want to actually buy
the app? Maybe 5%? That puts you at 6000 users.
So with these admittedly crude guesstimates, if you could gain even 6000
users (out of the 135M non-jailbroken user base postulated above) by
devoting your time and energy to anything else, you'd come out ahead.
Well there are many tries to detect, if a device is jailbroken. But most of them can be tricked out again. So there is no SAFE method of detecting a jailbroken device. But just search for "detect jailbreak".
Than you could send your result to your server (together with the data request) and decide, what to do. But think about the effort, as said by Conrad Shultz.
Anyway you can track, how many apps are sold and how many server requests there are. So you will have youre private statistic, how many copies of your app are stolen. You can upload an update for your app anytime, if it really will be a big problem in your case.
This is a very general question. I'm asking because I want to know in advance if it's worth the time and money to jump into this market?
Apple's iOS developer program costs $99/year. MonoTouch looks good but costs $399/year (I feel comfortable with .NET). That's $500/year. So for an app priced at $1 needs to sell 500+ copies per year? How likely is it to achieve this number? How about free app with ads? Is there any extra cost?
Personally, I feel that the iPhone ship has sailed, for the most part. While we did get some decent sales from our "iAmbigram" app for the first 3 months or so back in early 2009, the sheer onslaught of apps in the app store make it all but impossible to get located (even if you have a pretty darn good app).
We spent about $3.5k to develop the app, and have basically broken even over the course of 2 years. It wasn't the windfall we were hoping for, but I understand that few apps are. We have a second app in the store which was pretty much a total loss (at $.99, even).
The problem, as I see it, is discoverability. Unless you have a killer app, people will not know about it, and you will suffer in obscurity forever. At least on the web, you can do some basic SEO and rank high on Google and make some $$ that way, but on the iPhone... there is no similar mechanism.
Anyway, I wanted to share our case study. Believe it or not, it's not easy to make back even a small $500 on iPhone apps these days (which was certainly NOT the case in 07 and 08).
I've worked with folks who are chatting online with their peers, constantly batting around ideas. I've also worked with folks who adamantly refuse and think it's a waste of time.
Are online live chatting forums of particular use to you? Why or why not?
Internal to your company, or external and world-wide?
Does your employer encourage or discourage their use?
Update: I see some people are voting this question down, yet so far all the answers have been positive, if with some reservations. If someone has a strong negative opinion (I hate online chatting and think it should be banned etc.) I'd really like to hear why.
If you have telecommuters, not chatting online will be the death of you.
Without chat, there is no interaction.
Without interaction, there is no problem solving.
Without problem solving, the code will suck.
The chatting part does waste a lot of time and I often wish I could just pull them out and just WriteSomeCode, but yeah, trade off scenario.
There's an additional benefit to using online converstations, in that it doesn't /have/ to be an interruption. If your working on something you can ignore them till you're done and they just have to deal with it. In real life you have a talking face to try get rid of. ( And the cool thing here is you can ignore them and they still get heard, have your cake and eat it too! )
I've used IM at the last three places I have worked. Currently the building that I am in is so large that it takes a couple of minutes just to walk to my managers office. Then there are the days that we work from home (1-2 days a week). Email for some purposes just doesn't cut it and the phone can be too disruptive and all encompassing for some tasks.
When I was doing consulting work I would give my IM contact information to my clients. About 25% of them would use it to contact me and I am still in contact with them to this day which opens up the possibility for future work! The clients that used IM felt that they had a better connection with me because they could see when I was online and available to talk.
I'm still in contact with old work colleagues through IM and this allows me quick access to their knowledge base as well.
My suggestions for using IM in the workplace are:
Use a client that supports multiple
protocols (MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Jaber,
etc)
Setup and use personal accounts for
each of the networks you are on
(i.e. don't use accounts tied
directly to your work)
Make sure your IM client records a
history of all of your conversations
Always be available but minimize
personal conversations
Provide your IM information freely
to friends, clients, and colleagues
Add appropriate groups (i.e.
friends, family, work) and filters
to reduce undesired interruptions
while still being available if
needed
Don't feel that you have to
respond to every chat request. Let
it set until you are ready to deal
with it
One other trick I use is to use text to speech software so that when a chat message comes in it is read allowed. When I am at home (or preoccupied away from the computer in the office) the message is automatically read allowed (I liken it to a ringing phone call) in order to get my attention. But, I don't have to stop what I am doing in order to know what the message is.
I used to. I found it a great resource to chat with people I used to work with. In our business I find that we tend to network alot and using that collective knowledge is awesome. Of course my company turned that off so they lose.
I know that a certain large Bank hasd an internal AIM setup so that they can IM each other. That was refreshing and dang useful. They also allowed some external access. Talk about getting the value of IM!
Yes, absolutly, I work with most of my employees, and employers via MSN/Yahoo/Skype/.../ it makes the work easier, because I can hire the better people without having to pay them to move to me.
When I need to collaborate with someone in another office, it's great ... when I'm deep in thought, I have to turn it off (just like e-mail).
It depends on the group dynamics and personal preferences. Personally, I have enjoyed my work groups that use chat to feed on each other's ideas and troubleshoot without as much walking around. If you are geography dispersed, its almost a necessity.
I find online chatting invaluable in many cases, but not normally instant messaging. Since I use many open source technologies at work, I tend to join the respective IRC channels, both to ask questions there, and sometimes to help others if I know the answer offhand.
It may depend on the work environment. As a self employed consultant, I'm always in chat - it's my primary communication to the world, along with emails for more official type communications.
Being able to converse with others creates synergy, but it also can cause distractions. A good manager can tell the difference.
At my last workplace, we used IM extensively for collaboration. Not so much at my present workplace. Infact, i have not once had to do that here in 6 months. But i do look around on the net for answers and sometimes i have posted queries on forums too. IM is a nice tool to have, but its also a time sink. Also, dont underestimate the lost focus. Its particularly hard to concentrate on getting that algo implemented right if someones constantly pinging you about how to establish a connection to an oracle database.
I work at home 2 to 3 days a week. I mainly use MSN to stay in touch with my coworkers. It's pretty useful to ask short questions quickly. If we find ourselves typing whole conversations we often agree to continue the conversation by phone.
I use IM to communicate with colleagues in other offices when it replaces a face-to-face chat. I turn off notifications in all my comms apps at work though, because they distract me otherwise.
I telecommute from California to Colorado and never have used chat. We do have daily SCRUM meetings and constant email threads. When I first started working remotely, we did try it but it seemed intrusive to several co-workers so we stopped using it, that was 4 years ago, I probably should give it another try.
It seems I have nothing to really add to what hasn't already been written.
I use it extensively, especially when remote people are involved in development. Without it your real time communication dies. It is the only viable method of communication that isn't as interruptive as phone calls or something of that nature. As we all know we can't just sit on the phone the whole time when developing, so chat is the next best thing for real time communication.
I personally don't like it. I think email allows you to take a little time to compose your thoughts.
IM seems to work for other people though. Whatever works!
Our entire business unit telecommutes. Only us first years are required to be in the office, so our enterprise IM solution is vital to staying in touch and on task. Its how my manager lets me know what project I'm working on, if I need to bill my time to another customer, or if I need to bounce ideas around. So yes, I do. Is it open for anyone to get on? No, not at all. You have to be on the intranet to access the system, and it is closed to any and all outsiders.
Out of the four professional jobs I've had over the past 8 years or so, I've only worked at one place that did not allow any type of instant messaging. All the other companies had at least some type of setup for intranet instant messaging.
I think that IM is almost necessary in today's business environment. I don't IM very much, but it's nice to have it available. Especially when I just need a quick answer to a question - like "Where is this file located?" and then boom I have a link to the file pop up right in front of my face.
I use IRC at work - it's almost a requirement for all of us who interact remotely (workign from home, different offices, and client sites) to be able to get help on problems fast.
Yup. It's actually required here. But only MSN though. We use it for development/task related communications with the team... which also help minimize noise since this company I'm currently working in is a big one where 90% are developers so utter silence is a MUST...
But if I've got questions to other members of the team, I prefer asking it personally though because I find it hard to explain some things when just chatting...
I've had to use it in my last job as my co-workers lived in the UK and my boss worked in California whereas I'm in Atlanta. It was used for quick questions and when it was "whenever you get the chance to respond" type thing. I could be on the phone and an IM pop-up and they would get an automatic message telling them that. Longer discussions were done with web cam and telephone and the ability to share a desktop to view code, data, etc.
My company won't allow it. Even if we run a IM server in house (so we aren't wasting time chatting with friends). I've tried to convince them, I find it really useful for knowing if someone is at their desk or not. The phones don't do that so well since if you don't pick up it redirects to a secretary that will get pissed if you are checking if someone's back every 5 min...
So I run a IM client on my phone so I can at least chat with a few people through out the day. (Less interrupting to others if my wife IMs me vs calls me and also easier to ignore if I need to).