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Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store

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Re: Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store

#31

Post by physcab »

I'm wondering why you've chosen such a competitive category. You're in the same league as Runkeeper, Nike, Fitbit, and all the other fitness trackers and they make their income through the sale of devices so they can afford to put their app up for free.

How about picking a niche that doesn't have their need satisfied yet and charging money directly for that? Maybe designing a grader for teachers, or a tool for gov workers to submit reports, or a business expense tracker. There are lots of categories looking for a design overhaul and with just a little bit of research and effort you can make your app stand out from the pack of existing shitty solutions.

Re: Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store

#32

Post by clarky07 »

physcab wrote: post #31

I'm wondering why you've chosen such a competitive category. You're in the same league as Runkeeper, Nike, Fitbit, and all the other fitness trackers and they make their income through the sale of devices so they can afford to put their app up for free. How about picking a niche that doesn't have their need satisfied yet and charging money directly for that? Maybe designing a grader for teachers, or a tool for gov wo…

Perhaps it's a poor choice, we'll find out I suppose. The reason is mainly that I know it well, and already have an app that is featured by Apple with great ratings already. To be fair I "picked" the category 4 years ago, and I've made a lot of money in it so far. As for the current choice I suppose I could start something new from scratch, but I felt like it made more sense to pick a current app that I think has the most potential.

Runkeeper, and most of the other competitors (outside nike) make their money on IAP's for advanced features. I don't actually consider fitbit a competitor per se, it's a slightly different beast.

Re: Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store

#33

Post by nsxwolf »

MBCook wrote: post #23
clarky07 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of hate for the app store by developers, and i've dished out some of it, but frankly with over a million apps it's not an easy problem to solve. I actually think the store is in a pretty decent state right now overall. You can't possibly make everything very visible. It's a pretty good deal to be on the shelves, now you just have to work harder on your own promotion.

> ...but frankly with over a million apps it's not an easy problem to solve. Maybe a perfect solution isn't easier, but it should be very easy to improve the mess that is the app store. Let's start with a very simple suggestion: Searching for an app by name should return that app. Yeah. It's much better than it used to be (today when I search for Tweetbot it pull up Tweetbot) but that hasn't always been the case. You…

This was very disheartening to me when I was in the app store. Without a direct App Store link it was difficult to get someone to download. You had to swipe a random number of cards, sometimes quite a lot, to find the apps after entering the exact name. The results were usually quite relevant - in that they were competitors with similar but more popular apps.

It seems like an unjust reward for already successful apps - they're given the right to steal search results for a competitor's app name.

Re: Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store

#34

Post by clarky07 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #33
MBCook wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...but frankly with over a million apps it's not an easy problem to solve. Maybe a perfect solution isn't easier, but it should be very easy to improve the mess that is the app store. Let's start with a very simple suggestion: Searching for an app by name should return that app. Yeah. It's much better than it used to be (today when I search for Tweetbot it pull up Tweetbot) but that hasn't always been the case. You…

This was very disheartening to me when I was in the app store. Without a direct App Store link it was difficult to get someone to download. You had to swipe a random number of cards, sometimes quite a lot, to find the apps after entering the exact name. The results were usually quite relevant - in that they were competitors with similar but more popular apps. It seems like an unjust reward for already successful apps…

It's a balancing act. If you want to be found by searches for your title, you have to have a branded title (that if needed you could trademark). If you want to just use your top keyword as your name, it's going to be much harder to rank for it. I think the best path is to use a small subtitle - "Branded Name - Keyword Phrase"

That's a good way to be sure you can be found. If you type "Vima"[1] in the app store, I guarantee you find my apps :-)

[1] Vima is greek for "pace", which is how we came up with it. Full title is "Vima - GPS Run Tracker"

Re: Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store

#35

Post by supercoder »

physcab wrote: post #31

I'm wondering why you've chosen such a competitive category. You're in the same league as Runkeeper, Nike, Fitbit, and all the other fitness trackers and they make their income through the sale of devices so they can afford to put their app up for free. How about picking a niche that doesn't have their need satisfied yet and charging money directly for that? Maybe designing a grader for teachers, or a tool for gov wo…

On the flip side its competitive because there's a large market. It also means people will be searching out such apps.

The problem with a niche, especially on the app store, is that if you can't get people searching your app out then it's hard to break through.

Re: Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store

#36

Post by wdr1 »

icefox wrote: post #30
limeyy wrote: post #17

There is alot of similarity between this story, making iOS apps and making AdSense websites 7-8 years ago. One could slap a website together in a week, and one would see the revenue slowly but surely coming in and going up. The strategy of "making a website every week", and the total will make up for it worked too, for a while. Nowadays, every niche is crowded, and often more professionalised with several persons wor…

The only people I know that make money on AdSense are those that have sites that provide not very good information, but just enough to get you there and click on the ad which might have what they are looking for. Can anyone tell me of a site that doesn't use this technique that makes money with adsense?

You can find lots via Google Display Planner:

https://adwords.google.com/da/DisplayPlanner/Home

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