Is it possible to link from an iPhone application to the iStore so a user can (a) play a sample of music and then navigate to that track in order to buy it?
In a bit more detail: the application lists a number of tracks for a particular artist (a recommendation by the app based on user criteria). The user scrolls down the list and finds a track that they are interested in. They play the 30 second sample (as you would in the iStore) and then, if they like it, they press on a link that takes them to the iStore where they can purchase the track. If they buy the track, then the application gets 5% of the money paid for the track.
I have looked through the web and found a number of suggestions but nothing seems to fit the specification above.
I would be very grateful if anyone is able to tell me whether this is possible and some clues as to how it would be done.
Thanks,
Simon...
You would need to become an iTune Affiliate
http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/
-t
Related
I am developing a game for iOS. I would like to implement a feature that allow the user rate my app and, if he does it, he will get points for my game.
I know how to display an screen, menu, whatever to ask the user rate my app, but I don't know how to know when the user does it, I mean, the user completes all the process and I get my valuation.
You will unfortunately not know this since apple won't give you the feedback on it. The best you can do is give them the "rate my app link" and attribute them with the points if they click on it. I've seen games that provided points to the user for rating and they give the points when the user clicks on the link.
The only thing you can do is to use something like Appirater
You could recommend to your clients to review and rate your app. But I think that you don't be able of know if they finally rate or not.
As a few people have mentioned not really possible to know if people who go to the store actually rate the App. But AskingPoint has an interesting solution that allows you to use your App Analytics (full disclosure Im a founder) to present your best users with a rating widget. We think this will increase the odds they actually DO rate it. And you will have the count of the number of people that were taken to rate on a given day, and could correlate that with number of ratings you got. It helps, but is not exactly what you want.
There is no way to know if a user actually rates the app. You can provide them with a callout to take them to the app store (with the intention of getting them to rate it). However you can't actually see if they rated it, only if they tapped the link in the first place.
So in my new music app game I'm creating, I'm allowing the user to pick a song from his own music, then play it in response to a prompt. Assuming the prompts are all 4+ rating, what would the appropriate rating be for the app once I submit it? Do I call it 4+ since that's what the prompts are? Or 17+ because the user's music might be that extreme? Some of my prompts aren't so PG anyway, so it might be a bit of a moot point, but I'm just wondering the most extreme rating an app would take based on the contents of a music library, a sort of precedent. Thanks!
You cannot predict the contents of a user's music library, so I would go for 4+. If you are really concerned, consider ringing Apple's Developer Support and running it past them before submission.
Good luck!
As you may have seen in some apps an alert pops up asking the user to rate the app in itunes and usually the alternatives you get to choose from is something like: Sure which opens the rate page for the app. The second option is No Thanks which closes the alert and the third option usually is maybe later which displays the alert later.
I was wondering how to do this.
I want the alert to be displayed after say the app has launched 20 times if that would be possible.
And how can I create an maybe later alternative which displays the alert maybe 15 launches of the app later?
And a final question is there a special link for the apps rate page? So when you click the sure button or whatever it will take your directly to the rate page.
I've used this: https://github.com/arashpayan/appirater. You can look at my fork as well for a specific mod I needed.
[EDIT: comment re NSUserDefaults]
I suggested this link because it is a full, working implementation of what you describe that is easily integrated into existing apps. I've used (and modified) it myself. NSUserDefaults is a general purpose mechanism for persisting app state. I agree with the others that it's a very useful thing to learn and use, it's just not a full answer to your question. If you choose to roll your own implementation of a rating system (nothing wrong with that) you will most likely use NSUserDefaults to store the relevant info.
Check out my answer for this similar question. I provide two different links you can use for taking the user to the "rate this app" screen in the App Store.
Direct "rate in iTunes" link in my app?
You can use NSUserDefaults to save the launch count (increment it in application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:), then save the user's choice another preference key. If the user says later, you could reset the counter back to zero.
I don't think there is a special rating link, but you can link to your app's specific App Store page. This was incorrect, as TomSwift points out; see Direct "rate in iTunes" link in my app?
I wrote a library for doing this with minimal effort on your part:
https://github.com/nicklockwood/iRate
I'd recommend using a library rather than rolling your own solution. It may seem like a simple problem but the library takes care of a whole bunch of extra stuff, like ensuring that the user is prompted for each new installed version, that they are reminded after a certain time if they decline, that they aren't prompted to go to the app store unless they have a network connection, etc.
I am new to iphone stuff. After deploying an application in iTunes is there a way to find out the number of iphone/ipod touch which has installed / uninstalled this application ?
During uninstall the user is asked to rate the application, how to get that information with a developer license credentials ?
Apple tells you the number of sales (and the number of upgrades) in iTunes Connect. What they don't tell you is how many people have uninstalled your application or, more importantly, how many people are still using it n days after installing it.
You may be able to get this information (and more) using one of the third party analytic tools such as Flurry, although Apple has recently started to object to service like them. Another option would be to gather the same kind of information on your own server.
It would be really nice if Apple provided better information but, unfortunately, they don't at the moment.
All this data is provided through Apples iTunes connect site
https://itunesconnect.apple.com
Additionally you could subscribe to one of the support sites like
http://www.appfigures.com
which will give you nice graphs on sales etc
You should also take a look at Flurry Analytic's. Not only will it tell you how many unique devices it has been installed on, but you can add events as well. So lets say your app has a "Featured Listings" area or something like that. Flurry will log how many times people enter into the "Featured" area. It will help track conversion rates...
Also shows you the navigation path the user took. So they click on , "search", then they click on "homes", then they clicked on "featured"... yada yada yada... it provides excellent information.
If your app uses Core Location you can even see a dot on a map as to where the user was when they did all of this.
http://www.flurry.com/
-LT
The information provided by iTunes Connect is the number of downloads of your app. The ratings and reviews are actually not provided via iTunes Connect, but you can find it indirectly on the app store.
There are some services that aggregate all this information for you. A new one is www.appannie.com which shows you both downloads and ratings.
For number of installed Apple just updated https://itunesconnect.apple.com site you can adjust the date range in the middle of screen (using the slider) or by adjusting the dates on top left corner after navigating to sale and trends screen to see how many downloads you have had.
i'm looking to query the itunes appstore charts to determine what position a given app holds.
this would need to go as deep as possible with a view to tracking an apps movement from launch to appearing in the top 100 and further.
any ideas?
You can get the top 200 apps, podcasts, etc. from the iTunes RSS feeds:
http://itunes.apple.com/rss
edit: The iTunes RSS feeds now limit you to the top 200. Up until a week ago it would return the top 400
There are plenty of sites out there that do this, but they all operate via some flavor of screen scraping. Apple has no API for this, and I doubt they ever will.
The app store data is in XML format. You can use any number of parsers — click on the search field in the top-right corner of the Stack Overflow page and type "iphone xml parse", for example, for questions about how to parse XML on an iPhone.
Apple will likely reject your application if you use it to scrape the Apple sites directly as it violates their Terms and User Agreement. If you want to do an app like this, I suggest setting up your own service that scrapes Apple, then use the iPhone app to connect to your own servers.
As mentioned below there are plenty of good ways to grab the data. See here and here
If you're interested in checking whether an app is being featured on the App Store homepage a category homepage, in What's new, What's hot or Staff picks, you might wanna have a look at a script I wrote:
http://www.futuretap.com/blog/scraping-app-store-featured-entries/
This will give you the top fifty songs:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topsongs/limit=50/json