I can’t believe someone published a brilliant study of AppStore marketing. Some nice key points:
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AppStore, Marketing | Tagged: AppStore, market | 
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
I am excited about our recent release of the MobileNoter. Technically, it is an update for our iPhone app. However, it is a really major update, AND we offer a paid subscription now. Previous version was free, and “free” doesn’t count when we talk about product’s viability. Apple approved our update a few hours ago and we are already have paying customers – this is a good sign!
So it’s time to become serious about marketing. I don’t think our app will make into the Top 10 in its category any time soon, because it’s kinda niche app. On the other hand it’s not a throw-away app either, that is when an app is downloaded, run once, and happily forgotten or removed altogether. We’ll see how it goes and I will post about interesting discoveries we are sure to make.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: AppStore, iPhone, OneNote | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
I want to recommend a good blog by the AppsFire team I found recently. The guys have good insight on the AppStore and its life. They provide an app discovery service, which is what can make iPhone users’ life easier and it also provides additional marketing tool for iPhone app developers. Both things are badly needed by the iPhone community. We just started marketing for our own application: MobileNoter and found out that it’s a tough task. More on this later.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore | Tagged: AppsFire, AppStore, blog | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Our app – MobileNoter just got approved into the AppStore. The approval process took one week. The current version is free, because we want to see how popular it is going to be, plus we’ll be adding some much needed features very soon. We’ll introduce paid version once the users start saying they love our app.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: apps, AppStore, MobileNoter | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Here is the solution: hire this great PR firm – Reverb Communications, and they will create a storm of fake positive reviews, their interns and possibly employees will be posing as fake users and give your app 5-star ratings everywhere!
While this is not something new – shareware developers still do it sometimes on download.com and used to do it on tucows.com, but a glorious PR firm? Can’t they earn their buck in an honest way? Maybe they can, but we should not count on that.
Can Apple stop that? Yes, they can, because others have been doing that successfully. Stephen Kaufer, who is Founder & CEO of TripAdvisor (great site) describes in Founders At Work (great book) how those hotel owners and managers are submitting fake reviews all the time to push their hotels’ ratings higher. While Stephen doesn’t give all the details how they distinguish fakes, they obviously do a good job at it, at least from my standpoint.
Now, will Apple stop that? Well, they won’t. This is an entirely different story, let’s just say they’ve got other things to do. But we – developers can help here. It is relatively easy to write an AppStore crawler that will datamine the information about reviewers - the ratings they give, the apps they review, the texts they write, the dates of reviews, and so on. This program would easily identify most offenders in the same way the TechCrunch guys did manually. It is not a commercial project, of course – but it could be good for a student course work, or maybe even for graduate work. Anyone?
Leave a Comment » | AppStore | Tagged: Apple, apps, AppStore, spamming | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
All of a sudden, Apple just pulled the plug on one of the worst spamming offender – Perfect Acumen. I didn’t review statistics on this one, but it is said to be (or, used to be) #3 developer in the number of apps in the AppStore. While Apple says the reason for the ban was that Perfect Acumen’s apps violated someone else’s copyrights, it’s a no-brainer that the infamous app developer got Apple’s attention precisely because of its spamming strategy.
Hooray to Apple. They should really go after Brighthouse Labs next.
1 Comment | AppStore | Tagged: Apple, apps, AppStore, spamming | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
It took Apple exactly a month to approve our application. I am not particularly amused – people have been telling stories about 2 or 3 months it took them to complete the registration. Sometimes the only thing that moved the process on would be calling Apple. They beat me though – I received a voicemail from Apple Developer Connection asking to call them back. I did just that and 20 minutes later we are admitted! We didn’t have to submit any documents except for the Articles of Incorporation. You’d think it’s small, but we are also a Microsoft Partner and we have never been asked to submit anything like that. You just sign the Partner Agreement with Microsoft and you are in.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore | Tagged: Apple, AppStore, iPhone, legal | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
I decided to check myself how bad AppStore spamming is these days. The biggest and known offender is Brighthouse Labs. A quick search confirmed that: they have – get this - 2058 applications in the AppStore. Well, they have only a dozen of real apps. There are 333 results for their different iLocate apps, while it should count as a single real app. Because they are all the same, just showing different kind of places. The search prominently returned me iLocate apps to find Hair Removal places (thanks, I don’t need that), Pet Sitting (don’t want to know what it is), as well as Afghan Restaurants (thanks, I hope I won’t need this) and other similar nice places.
Brighthouse Labs also got 447 SupaFan apps. I checked the one for Jerry Seinfeld, whose happy fan I am. I wish I didn’t touch that crappy app. It contains a very basic bio page, something called “chat” – not sure if it’s working, and something what’s supposed to be news. They charge $0.99 for this app, even though it provides zero value. Facebook, twitter, anything - you name it – will provide more interesting information for the fans than this useless app.
The iPhone development community has been loudly complaining about this practice. This is spamming at its purest: polluting the shelves of the AppStore with all those titles. But it gets even more interesting. Another known offender is Iceberg Reader. They got 1389 apps. Some of them are expensive. What do they sell? iiWeather for 1389 cities around the world? No! They sell ebooks wrapped into a reader, just like a flick is wrapped into a Flash player on the web. I check a couple of books. Bag of Bones by Stephen King is sold for $7.99. Amazon offers this in a paperback for the same amount. But the Kindle version is $6.39. OK, here we have The Gypsy Morph by Terry Brooks. I used to adore those Shannara books. Iceberg Reader “app” for The Gypsy Morph is $26.99. Hmm. Amazon paperback is $7.99. They are not just spammers, they are greedy spammers!
So we have thousands of clone apps, we have thousands of books sold as apps, what we have left? I made a quick review, and came with the estimation of about 10,000-12,000 AppStore applications that are not real apps. These are clones that can be (and should be) very easily packaged into just a few apps. This is how much we should trust the mindboggling 60K+ of iPhone apps number. It is totally overhyped and meaningless number. Hopefully, with the introduction of the in-app purchases in the 3.0 upgrade, Apple will eventually force these clones into oblivion.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore | Tagged: apps, AppStore, iPhone, spamming | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
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