Lessons to be learned » AppStore

iTunes to use your Facebook connections

Oleg Kokorin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:35:55 +0000

Only a few days ago I discussed the idea of companies using people’s social graph for mass-scale marketing, and here comes the news: Apple is going to do just that in iTunes. This is huge. It will add more power to Facebook in their quest to become the world largest ad platform.

What are the best days for AppStore sales?

Oleg Kokorin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:28:09 +0000

It is probably not news for anyone who’s been in the AppStore business long enough… My friends, who develop iPhone games say that Saturday is a huge spike in downloads. Sunday is good too. If your app gets into the “new apps” list on Saturday, it’s likely to make some buck, even if it is going to be buried in the 500th spot in the “top downloaded apps” list eventually. MobileNoter is Business/Productivity software. Weekends and holidays are not good for us. Wednesday is one of the best days for sales for Business and Productivity. Luckily, our business model does not rely on bored people who would download and try anything for a few minutes of entertainment. Even though it’s not in any of the Top 10 list, people do find, download and buy our app.

iPad is out

Oleg Kokorin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:40:39 +0000

So, the iPad is out. MobileNoter has been updated for iPad, so we got into the grand opening. We see a significant spike in downloads of our app, even though it’s definitely not mind-boggling. This is understandable, since there are not too many devices sold yet.

I started to think more favorably about the iPad. It seems that it will provide everything most people really need from a computer. What people need? A daily fix of Facebook, some games, YouTube, and maybe some news. iPad is great for that.

The best study of AppStore marketing to the date is here

Oleg Kokorin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:56:42 +0000

I can’t believe someone published a brilliant study of AppStore marketing. Some nice key points:

Price reduction by 2 times resulted in 3 times more units sold.
Free ad supported version of an app can easily bring more revenue than the premium paid version.
Good free version of an app is a must, especially if the premium version is expensive.
Web advertising for AppStore is utterly useless.
Cross-application advertising for AppStore is almost useless.
AppStore Ranking algorithm revealed!

New release of MobileNoter is out there!

Oleg Kokorin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:34:12 +0000

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.

Good blog found

Oleg Kokorin — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:39:12 +0000

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.

We are in the AppStore, finally!

Oleg Kokorin — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:18:37 +0000

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.

Your app got a bad rating in the AppStore?

Oleg Kokorin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:26:57 +0000

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?

Apple fights AppStore spamming?

Oleg Kokorin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 07:05:07 +0000

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.

Just registered in the iPhone Developer Program

Oleg Kokorin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:45:37 +0000

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.