I just finished my first iPhone app. It's a little game and I want to launch it for 99 cents.
So my concerns is, how long usually does an app stay on the new released list. ALso, is there any launching tips on timing etc?
Thank you
These days apps stay on the new app list for hours rather than days. It used to be that updates gave you better visibility but but my last update caused barely a blip in sales so I don't think it is true anymore. This will probably depend on the categories you are in though.
The goldrush is sadly over. It used to be that merely being in the app store generated hundreds or thousands of sales. That is definitely not true any more. Now you need either luck or marketing.
Things you can do:
Provide review copies to as many
sites as you can find. Most will
have limited visibility but if you
can get onto a bigger site you may
get some sales out of it.
Provide a free limited version.
Build a mailing list on your website
Pimp it everywhere. In your sig, on your website
Start writing the second game
ASAP - why wait, right? In reality, your true launch date is going to be determined by Apple anyways depending on how long it takes them to review and approve your app.
One tip I've heard is to update reasonably often.
When you update, your app may reappear on some of the category lists as being recently added/updated. This can give you some extra visibility which might just be what gets you ahead.
Related
I have a cool flutter app which is used to track staff attendance. A user can check-in and check out when they start/stop working and the app record that event, calculate the number of hours worked and send a weekly summary to the manager of the staff expected wages. The current problem is that some staff members forget to check out (everyone is ok with check-in) so we don’t have good numbers and we need to manually change the attendance. I would like to add something to remember them to check out, and I am looking for creative ideas to do so. My objective is to make something very affordable.
So far I thought about two options:
to use geolocation and track when staff get in/out of a certain location and log it as check-in and check out
to set a timer when they start the shift and send a local notification if after xx hours they have not done the checkout
Geolocation seems to be the best because I can even automate the checkin/check out and do it in the backend but it will consme lots of resources in the client because I would need to check their location every while even when their at at home or on holiday...
The timer has some limits and still, I would need to manage background tasks that are complex as well as imprecise checkout depengin on when the notification goes out.
Do you have any suggestions on anything simple to implement?
I would suggest the second option.
A simple scheduler which would look for all the employees who are checked in for more than x number of hours and then throw a clickable notification to checkout. It would be an easy and clean solution. However, it has several limitations as an employee might leave early but checkout later.
In my opinion, Your most clean solution would be to have an RFID/NFC check which automatically registers as a user checks out from the building.
Another thing that can be done if your employees are working mostly on their computers. There can be a browser extension or a web app which will clock in the time they are working on their laptops. Once they close it they will be automatically checked out.
I don't know where to ask this, so I'm going to just ask it here and handle the backlash when ever it comes.
First let me state that I'm familiar with the recent issues relating to Pepsi and YouTube how ever what I am currently unsure of is, does this effect website publishers also, or has my traffic just all around stopped converting?
I'm currently getting around 300,000 impressions per day and my revenue has dropped to as low as 0.19cpc when before it was sitting almost around a dollar for every registered click.
Question basically comes down to, are you guys getting effected by this also? What can I do in the mean time if this is in correlation with the advertisers opting out, because it's getting really hard to manage servers with no revenue.
Yes it seems to have had a drastic impact on my earnings as well, although I'm not doing anywhere close to the impressions you're doing.
My cpc and rpm have hit an all time low and its disastrous. I'm seeing the same cpc as you btw, we're not alone other publishers are complaining about the same issue.
I'm considering dropping a few adsense units till i see some better figures.
What is better for window form applications or what do you all perfer?
An application with a Trial Period by a Date (like free to use for 30 days) or do you like to limit functionality of the application for the Free Version?
I think that it depends on the application type.
I think time limited is best if:
No data saved in the application which will not be available if I don't by it.
It is an every-day kind of application, not something that is just used once or twice.
I think function limited is best if:
The application is used just once or in a short period of time.
The application can be limited in such a way that it can prove its power, but not provide useful results.
I've marked this as community wiki, feel free to add things to the lists.
I like # of uses better than a date limit. I often try something once, forget about it for a while, then want to try it again only to be locked out. Having a set number of uses unlimited by time is much better. Limited functionality can be OK depending on the app, but full functionality limited by usage is better IMO.
"The customer is always right"; provide both and let him/her chose.
We do both.
Fully functional 14-day trial period
Reverts to restricted DEMO functionality after 14-days
Maybe some users forget to use or test your app after installation. After a couple of weeks user starts your app and trial is expired -> User is angry. So think about possibility of trial extension :-)
How do I send a push notification to a device at regular intervals, e.g. every x minutes?
[Tapping this out on my phone - hopefully the formatting is all right - I'll fix it later if necessary. Apologies in advance if it's messy...]
As others have pointed out, you'll want to look at Apple's docs for how to do this (it's not the most straightforward process in the world)..
What I wanted to contribute is the suggestion that you check this out: http://urbanairship.com/push/
Urban Airship takes care of a ton of the hassle you'd otherwise have to deal with yourself. You still need to be registered with Apple for sending push-notifications, but if you use Urban Airship's bits, they'll provide you hosting for your notification service, reporting, a management console, and a REST API for interacting with the system. They even have a scheduling component, and I'd bet that it would solve your problem here with just a few simple calls.
These guys are local to me (I live in Portland, Oregon), and I've seen a few of their demos - it's slick.
There are other features, but I think the ones listed are compelling enough to at least give it a look :)
It's obviously not required - you could do all this on your own, but the service they're offering is insanely good and affordable.
At the time of this writing, they have an "indie" account that will let you send 100,000 notifications through them a month for free. After that it's $.001 per notification (again, this appears to be per month - so, if I understand the terms right, you get 100,000 notifications for free each month, which is just awesome).
You can see the different pricing options here: http://urbanairship.com/plans-and-pricing/
I'm not affiliated with these guys in any way beyond having chatted with them at local geek events and having been offered, along with other attendees, free alcoholic beverages. But, as I don't drink, I'd like to think my judgment hasn't been affected by the psychology of gifting (fascinating subject).
So... it's worth it to at least take a look at what they're offering. And if anybody else has links to similar services, post 'em in the comments. Apple has given devs an amazing platform to play with, but they haven't made it very easy in places - it's cool to see shops like this making it more accessible.
In my opinion, of course :)
There is no "built in" way to do this just using APNS. You would have to have your push provider code do this for you.
In my case my push provider pulls rows from a DB table and sends them at the time specified. I would just insert another row back into the DB after I sent a message.
As for limit, everyone I have talked to says that there is in effect no limit.
chris.
My users use the site pretty equally 24/7. Is there a meme for build timing?
International audience, single cluster of servers on eastern time, but gets hit well into the morning, by international clients.
1 db, several web servers, so if no db, simple, whenever.
But when the site has to come down, when would you, as a programmer be least mad to see SO be down for say 15 minutes.
If there's truly no good time from the users' perspective, then I'd suggest doing it when your team has the most time to recover from any build-related disaster.
Here's what I have done and its worked well for me:
Get a site traffic analysis tool
which will graph hourly user load
Select low-point in graph for doing
updates
If you're small, then yeah, find when your lowest usage period is, and do it then (for us personally, usually around 1AM-3AM PST is the lowest dip...but it never drops to 0 of course). Once you start growing to having a larger userbase, if you want people to take you seriously you'll need to design your application such that you can upgrade without downtime. This is not simple, and it often involves having multiple servers.
I've spent ages trying to get our application to this point, the best I've come up with so far is for a couple hours run both the old version and new version at the same time. Users logged in at the time of the switchover stay on the old version, until they log out. Next time they come in they go to the new version. Any users coming on after the switchover get sent straight to the new version. It's still not foolproof, but it's pretty good.
What kind of an application is it? Most sites that I use tend to update around 2AM or 3AM.
Use a second site, and hotswap as needed.
The issue with hot-swapping, is database would still be shared, and breaking changes would bring stand in down as well.
I guess you have to ask your clients.
In any case, there's the wee hours of the morning. If you're talking about a locally available website, I do not think users will mind if they get an "under maintenance" notice at 2 am in their time zone.
Depends on your location: 4AM East Coast/1AM West Coast is typlically the lightest time.
Pick a few times that you'd like to do it and offer them as choices to the decider-types. Whatever you do, put up a "down for routine maintenance" page while you deploy.
Check the time of least usage
Clone/copy/update latest production code to another directory
If there exists any database migrations to be done, perform any that are required, and non conflicting with the old code base
At time of least usage, move symlink to point to latest code
First use an analysis tool to try and determine your typically "light" traffic times. Depending on the site and your location in the world in comparison to most of your users, it could be 4am, it could be 1pm, who knows. Then, once you have a good timeframe nailed down, make sure to have your deployment process as automated as possible, so that it happens quickly to minimize the downtime of your site.