A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
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A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
#2I'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.)
Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
#3Apps are now discovered outside of the stores.
Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
#4Those 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.
Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
#5If 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.
Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
#6Apps are now discovered outside of the stores.
...which is the same way they were discovered long before they started being called "apps".
Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
#7I 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.
Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
#8Those 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?
Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
#9I 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 c…
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.
Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery
#10We 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.