Archive for 'Marketing'

This is an interesting — and handy! use of UI Automation:

jonathanpenn / ui-screen-shooter

This is a set of scripts to demonstrate how to take screen shots for your iOS app for the App Store automatically using UI Automation. It shows how to take screen shots, extract them from the automation results and change the language in the simulator with shell scripts. This saves quite a bit of time since we need to generate screens for the 3.5″ display, the 4″ display, and both iPhone and iPad if your app is universal–not to mention that you have to do this for every localization you support in the store.

You can see the script run against one of my apps in this video…

Some more handy UI Automation tips here.

h/t: iOSDevWeekly!

UPDATES:

Automating iOS App Store screenshots

This looks like a nifty tool for your App Store SEO efforts:

App Store Rankings is the keyword based App Ranking Tracker

Are you still manually checking your app’s rankings? Are you searching every day to see how well your app ranks for your keywords? It’s time to upgrade to App Store Rankings and let us track all your keyword performance for you. Get accurate keyword results, historical data, alerts and more.

Keyword Based App Ranking Tracking

The majority of all app downloads happen when users search for apps. That’s why tracking your ranking and performance for all the keywords that matter to your app is very important. App Store Rankings automates this task, turning the pain of searching and tracking your rankings across dozens and hundreds of keywords into an easy task…

Yep, that’s a pretty darn convenient presentation, isn’t it now? Pricing seems reasonable, and there’s a single app free plan for a taster too.

Be sure to check out the App Store Rankings Blog as well, there’s some pretty interesting posts there. Particularly the one from October 28th. Modesty prevents us from explicitly (heh) describing why, but check it out for some fascinating quirks of app search that you weren’t aware of … at least, we very sincerely hope you weren’t aware of!

Here’s a nicely done app for tracking App Store rankings while you’re out and about: AppStatics!

WHAT DOES APPSTATICS DO?

Here’s a quick rundown of the feature set:

• In a tap, swipe and a glance, view the rankings of an app across various geograpic, device, and genre rankings
• Bookmark apps for quick and easy access
• Search the App Store to discover popular apps
• Browse the apps that are newly popular, or rising to the top of the App Store rankings

Nothing overly novel, but in a nice package; and it’s free this week, so might as well check it out!

So you may have read our post a couple days back on how most apps don’t turn out strikingly profitable. If you didn’t, TL/DR: They don’t. What can we do about that, then? Well, the biggest stumbling block is discovery, we’d venture that pretty much everyone would agree. So here’s some thoughts on that:

How To Get A Massive Increase In Downloads With Some Simple App Store SEO

… The question with “app store SEO” is what keywords should you choose, and how do you get your app listed at the top of those keyword searches?

Invantory, developers of a new Craigslist app have written a pretty insightful post as to the tools and process they used chose keywords that made a dramatic increase in the number of downloads their new app has received…

Not bad, not bad. The secret sauce here?

AppCode.es – The Swiss Army Knife for App Store Optimization

Perform App Store SEO, track your competitors, dispense your apps’ promo codes effectively.

Check out their slideshare.net presentations:

AppCod.es – app store marketing toolbox

App Store SEO tutorial

App Store SEO #2 choosing keywords

New rules in App Store Search

And check out their U.S. store search engine:

Aside from guessing your competitor’s keywords, we can predict your app store search position and help you track it.

Good stuff, good stuff. At $14.95 a month, certainly seems like it’d be worth a spin to see if you can get results like the Invantory folk!

Another option in this field is MobileDevHQ:

Don’t let your app get lost in the sea of apps. Over 65% of consumers find apps via search in the app store. Use MobileDevHQ to analyze and optimize your app store presence and beat your competition…

Check out the video here: Optimize for App Store Discovery and sign up for a free 30 day trial — hey, why not — and see what they can do for you!

Finally, for a case study in how to plan to make an initial splash, some good thoughts for you in

The Art Of Launching An App: A Case Study  

UPDATES:

How To Contact Press (And Increase Chances To Get Press Coverage)

Five Big Changes In The iOS 6 App Store (And What Developers Should Do)

81 Different Ways to promote your mobile app / game

Top 10 App Marketing Tips from “Tap Your App”

There’s been a couple posts over at the W3i blog recently worth checking out to guide your project planning:

Just How Much Money Can Top Mobile App Developers Make, and How?

… the average per-app revenue is roughly in the range of $1,200 to $3,900 depending on the platform. Additionally, Vision Mobile noted that an app has roughly a 35% chance of generating about $1 to $500. This obviously means that most developers simply cannot rely on app development as their main source of income…

Yowza. Check out this revenue model chart:

There’s some more fascinating stats in

Tips for Designing for App Monetization

The problem most app developers have is that they overly focus their initial design efforts on engagement and retention rather than monetization. Most developers believe that once they launch a highly engaging mobile app, they’ll get around to optimizing for monetization. The problem is that most apps achieve their peak traffic levels within the first three to six months of launch. By the time they get around to optimizing monetization, they already blew past their peak traffic levels and are declining quickly…

… the range of paying users on any given day was from approximately 0.02% (two one hundredths of one percent) to 0.1% (one tenth of one percent)…

Kinda sobering, indeed. To really put things into perspective though, check out (h/t @rwenderlich) this post on game availability for various platforms:

Those Are Mighty Big Numbers

How many games were published for the original Nintendo Entertainment System? MobyGames lists 1116. And the Super NES? 1043. The Nintendo 64 had only 324, the Game Cube 557, and the Wii an astonishing 1201. So all together for the Nintendo consoles, that’s just under 4,250 games…

… iPhone / iPad? Hellatons. From what I can tell, over 100,000 game titles. Not all are unique, mind you, but… that is not a small number. That is a very big number. When you say, “one in a million,” you are only off by a factor of ten when you are talking iPhone games…

… I really don’t know how the brave, new world of gaming is going to work. I hope I can figure it out, as a developer.

Yeah, we’re all with you there.

UPDATES:

The fall of Angry Birds

How Free Apps Can Make More Money Than Paid Apps

Making money in a crowded App Store: it’s dog eat dog and Spy vs Spy

The Sparrow Opportunity

Now this is a solid sign that the app economy is maturing: now there’s marketplaces set up specifically to sell your apps’ complete rights. Most notably, Apptopia:

Hey, you want an exit strategy, for 15% of the sale price their marketing and valuation services are probably worth it; and on the other hand, if you see something kinda-sorta-like what you want, pretty good chance it’ll save you a whack of time and/or money to get something functional to start with, yep.

They give you download and revenue stats for last quarter, last month, best month, and worst month too, so it’s kinda neat just to browse around and see, for the most part, just how little money most apps make!

There’s another marketplace of this type at sellmyapplication.com too, but they don’t seem built out anywhere near as nicely as Apptopia.

Any of you Dear Readers have experience with these app marketplaces, on either side of the transaction? How did that work out for you?