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SoCoder -> Blogs Home -> Blogs

 
Cower
Created : 08 August 2010
 
System : Mac

Two Weeks Later

Sorry, no zombies
I'm simply re-posting this from my Ascension thread on bb.com, but it's some rambling about Ascension sales and the Android market and so on.

It's been about two weeks, so I figured I might as well comment on this after a while since it's been interesting for me. Honestly, I should have kept some sort of journal about this, but I didn't, so this is all based on recollection. Also, this is mainly about the market, not really about the application itself (there's not a lot to say about its development), and it's 100% subjective, since I cannot offer you anything objective that isn't to do with the coding/design side of things.

First, an observation about people who buy stuff on the market: there are lots who will refund your app within 10-15 minutes. This seems to be the accepted way of demoing an app, and since there's no good alternative, I think it's probably fine. I haven't done it myself (I have only actually purchased one app on the market, and that was a student organizer sort of thing), so I thought it was pretty peculiar, so that's a bit of a heads up for anyone else wondering about it if they sell something for Android. I thought it was interesting, at least.

I imagine some folks here probably heard about the (incredibly bad) reporting of a wallpaper app that sends off all your personal info and your dog to China - well, not really, it doesn't actually send off anything except information to identify your settings and such between devices. It does this badly, by the way, but that's not really anything I care about. The reason I'm bringing this up is because following those reports, nobody bought my wallpaper at all for a couple days. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or not, but everyone knew it was a wallpaper app that did all these awful things, and I can imagine there was a lot of caution exercised following the incorrect reports.

So, if Android security becomes questionable and you happen to share some keywords with what's caused the security issue, you might lose sales. I'm more inclined to believe, personally, that there was more to it than just some shoddy reporting that killed sales on my app, but it's something I noticed.

I mentioned in my blog on SoCoder that the market is full of spam - this is still true. You still can't beat these guys in search results, but there are people who are sifting through the search results for wallpapers they like, so that's interesting. However, there was something I didn't really account for in being spotted in the market, and that was the Just In section of each category. I personally don't visit this part of the Market often because of spam, but apparently a lot of other people do. The farther down your app goes in the Just In list, the fewer (additional?) downloads you'll get.

A few days ago, I released an update to v1.5.0 of Ascension, and this resulted in a lot of sales compared to all previous days. I wasn't sure why I was seeing a sudden increase, but it turns out an update will shoot your app back up to the top of the Just In section. I think a combination of previous comments/ratings may have also helped users visiting that section in deciding whether or not to buy the app - and I get very good ratings/comments so far (I have all five-star ratings aside from a single four-star rating and a one-star rating that I can't really explain - fellow left a comment, and it still baffles me).

Basically, get good initial ratings, release an update that actually does something (1.5.0 added two new settings and some new bar images along with some bug fixes), and hopefully previous ratings and comments will help reassure new buyers that your app is worth buying. That's how I'm looking at it, at least.

The burst in sales from the recent update also put me on the Top Paid section, but Ascension is really far down the list. I'm not sure yet what impact this has had on sales and it's really too early to say, so I'm going to keep an eye on it and see how that goes. I like to imagine that continued sales will push me further up through the Top Paid section, which will in turn increase sales and continue pushing me up. However, whether this is how it'll work or not is unknown to me, so it's just wishful and really idealistic thinking.

On marketing: I suck at it. Frankly, this has turned into something of an experiment for me. I've only announced my app on a single website if you don't count Twitter and Facebook (which I imagine didn't get me anything), which was androidforums.com. Mostly because they tend to treat developers pretty nicely, and I like helping some of the people who want to be developers there. It's basically free publicity. Some other sites I've looked at, and I won't say which of them they are, seem pretty off-putting if you're developing a paid application. I think some communities have sprung up with enough people who think because parts of Android are open-source, everything for it ought to be free. I'm pretty wary of going around to those folks. I simply have nothing useful to offer here because I'm no good at marketing.

That's about all I can think to write. If there's anything in specific you were looking for comment on, just ask and I'll either give you my opinion or at least tell you that it's something I don't know about. Also, if something doesn't make sense, I blame the time I wrote this at and if you mention it, I'll probably try to elaborate more clearly later.

 

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