Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poetreat. Aiming for May 7. Week of polish then submission. http://poetreatapp.com/
Nice landing page.
Thank you :)
My First Year in the App Store
81–90 of 104 posts
Re: My First Year in the App Store
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, and yes and no. When I realized I'd found a decent sized niche I had to make a decision: do I let it sit and coast/build something else, or do I invest more here? I've decided with the latter, which will play out for at least the next year. Jury still out whether it was the right decision.
If you completely abandoned the project as it currently exists, do you think your income would drop off sharply? In other words, how much of an ongoing effort is it to ensure your income stays high? Does search favor apps that are being updated constantly? Or is there any reason not to eventually just stop working on the app?
It wouldn't drop off. In fact there's many apps in the App Store that haven't been touched in years that continue to bring in money.
My thoughts are that I have so much to improve upon, and there's a lot of low hanging fruit left for me, so it's likely worth the additional investment.
I compared investing more time/money in this niche, vs in other unvalidated ideas I have and it made sense to stick with this for now.
Re: My First Year in the App Store
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of the above. I bought quite a few of them. It doesn't take too long to get a feel for how good an app is.
But how did you know they were making money?
Gross rank for apps reveals a lot. Any top 25 app by gross rank is doing well by "niche" standards.
Re: My First Year in the App Store
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how did you know they were making money?
Doesn't Apple only let those who have purchased write a review? If so, the gross number of reviews may give some idea of how many have purchased the app (ignoring price fluctuations, etc)
Some developers have told me this is a good rule of thumb, but for others it's way off. Mine # of reviews is not really indicative of how many downloads.
Re: My First Year in the App Store
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree it's hard to do really detailed research similar to, say, the Google Keyword Tool. It's mostly a gut check. "Does this have a lot of competition? Does this keyword appear to get a lot of searches?" What's your app name?
Poetreat. Aiming for May 7. Week of polish then submission. http://poetreatapp.com/
Nice landing page for sure. Maybe this is obvious, but they key is finding out a solid upgrade that makes IAP's worth it to customers.
Re: My First Year in the App Store
#86Very surprised by that type of revenue. What kind of marketing did you put into it? Without marketing, my first app on the store went as follows: > The next morning (and literally every day since) I woke up and first thing checked my email for that magical message from AppFigures. My total day one net sales? $0.70. Admittedly not very much.
As far as I know, all downloads are based on search.
Re: My First Year in the App Store
#87I thought the App Store had a rule that you couldn't submit an app that was essentially a 'book or a film' how did you get around that?
Great point. I've actually run into that problem. On some updates they would reject me and I'd have to add a few features to be approved.
That's part of the reason I'm redoing the entire app from scratch with tons of extra functionality, etc.
Re: My First Year in the App Store
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great questions. Revenue is where it's at! Initially it was just a paid download for the text of the Bible. With more research in the App Store though I realized audio Bibles were selling much more than I was. So I outsourced the audio (mentioned in the post I think) and now the model is that users download the original app (with the text) for free, and then can buy the audio as an IAP. This works great on multiple f…
Wow, you are incredibly ingenious! Thank you for responding!
:) You bet
Re: My First Year in the App Store
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did the initial mockups by hand and some of the debugging. Other than that all outsourced.
Would you care to throw the offshore team some love by posting who they are? I have a web service and would love to use them if it cost $500.
The original guy I hired doesn't do development any more, but his Elance profile is here: https://www.elance.com/s/iprogs/
Since then for upgrades and other apps I've hired others that have cost more than $500 :)
Re: My First Year in the App Store
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patio11 has argued forcefully that developers systematically neglect women and underserve that large market; I wonder if we can add to that 'and developers also ignore religious markets too'?
Really, developers ignore every demographic that they aren't a part of. There's a reason "suits" are often at the head of large creative focused corporations and compromise artistic integrity to make things more palatable to their target markets. Market research and knowledge is a very real thing that product focused developers often completely ignore or rely on instincts of unknown quality.
I think this is a condition of most humans, not just developers.
When you pitch a product idea to someone many will come back with "but who would buy that?" when it turns out, there's TONS of stuff me, you, and my mom would never buy... that literally thousands of other people would.