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App Store Roundtable: Analytics

Wed, 20 May 2009 15:00:45 +0000

For this installment of the App Store Roundtable, we talked to developers about analytics. On the web we’re spoiled when it comes to analytics. Simple plug-ins allow us to track where visitors come from, and what they look at. We can also use this information to track purchases and referrals over many months. It’s a different story in the App Store, and many developers feel that the lack of quality analytics is hindering their marketing efforts.

Why don’t I know ANYTHING about the people that are looking at my store front. The biggest one is how many people that click on my app, actually buy it. I would love to compare the performance of different screenshots, especially the first one, and see what kind of conversion rate I’m getting. What about how many people are clicking through to my site, and how many of those go back and buy? Or what percent of my customers are reading more reviews than those on the front page?

– Evan McMahon of Veiled Games, developer of Up There

Absolutely! Not knowing where sales are coming from hurts us in two different ways:

1. Hard to tune our marketing strategies. What’s working and what’s not working? How much is it coming from a lite version vs. ads vs. reviews? Impossible to tell.

2. Impossible to set up sales-based partnerships. I actually talked to some flower companies about doing something together for Flower Garden. The idea being they can advertise Flower Garden in their web site or emails and they get a percentage of those sales. But we have no way of tracking how many sales came from there!

– Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch, developer of Flower Garden

We’ve had some success using the LinkShare affiliate program to track an app cross-promotion experiment that I ran with my friend – it was a little “ad” in Scramboni for another app that helps you learn SAT-grade words. We were able to get something like a 12% click-to-purchase ratio. LinkShare allows you to track marketing efforts from clickthroughs to purchasing, and gives you a commission on every copy sold.

– Peter Bakhyryev of Byteclub, developer of Scramboni

I go to great lengths to try to track the efficacy of my marketing efforts. I can track data right up to the point where a user enters the app store, but at that point it’s a black box. How many users who visit my app page buy the app? How many users search for a lite version after visiting the full version page? How many users who downloaded the Lite version bought the paid version? How many users found my app’s page because of a search? All of this data would make me feel more confident in spending more money on advertising and marketing. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate how much information we get right now, but I’d love to have a lot more.

– Owen Goss of Streaming Colour Studios, developer of Dapple

Apple does a great job of taking care of things once an app arrives in the store itself, but they expect the developer to take care of the marketing aspect after that. It sounds like a reasonable proposition, but the reality is that there isn’t enough information available to developers to effectively do that for reasonable costs (particularly for the price tier 4 and lower apps). It’s essentially impossible to tell what marketing efforts have an effect on sales and which do not.

– Adam Byram, developer of Budgee

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App Store Roundtable: After Sales Support

Tue, 12 May 2009 21:00:26 +0000

In this installment of the App Store Roundtable, I talked to a few developers about issues with supporting their apps after a sale has been made. Many developers are concerned at the difficulty of providing any form of after sales support to customers. Minor problems with an app often lead to a bad review and a dissatisfied customer, when a better support system could have quickly resolved the issue.

The App Store is a wonderful platform, but I would love to have better customer service tools. The App Store asks the shopper to place their trust in the developer with Apple serving as an intermediary. Apple’s reputation goes a long way in building trust, but by providing better customer service tools Apple would turn their developers into a dedicated customer service team. By adding features like an app FAQ section, the ability to send a refund, and a standard “contact” button, Apple could strengthen customer relationships.

– Carrie Segal, developer of Colorific

I see real difficulty in supporting end-users. Apple’s sole concession is a “support” link in the App Store, which most people seem to ignore, preferring to add a review. Of course, we can’t respond to those reviews. We see a number of problems: Users typically see iPhone OS updates at the same time as developers, and there’s that delay in pushing out fixes; the difficulty of remotely diagnosing problems; the obstacles in getting access to logs and databases…The list goes on. Apple is certainly moving in the right direction with the recent availability of crash reports and version numbers on reviews, but things are possibly improving too slowly to help developers building more complex applications. As it stands, the App Store is still geared towards “disposable,” low-cost apps. People aren’t going to pay more for complex apps until developers can adequately support them.

– Stephen Darlington, developer of Yummy

Other developers reported some success by building their own support links and mechanisms into their Apps.

In Flower Garden, I did go out of my way to make sure users can contact me and give me feedback. There’s even a button in the app itself for people to give feedback.

– Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch, developer of Flower Garden

As Darlington mentioned, Apple has just recently started providing developers with access to crash reports via iTunes Connect. Trent Shumay, of Finger Food Studios, is one of many developers welcoming the new addition:

As soon as I heard of the crash reporting, a sense of warmth and happiness entered my soul after years of battling it out on platforms where it simply wasn’t an option. For the average independent iPhone developer, access to crash reports is a major equalizer in the delicate balance between limited resources for Beta Testing and product quality.

Our apps will receive thousands (or hopefully hundreds of thousands) of executions by a group of users not conditioned to its quirks and intended usage. No QA process can possibly reproduce this, so it’s incredibly valuable to have a safety net in case something goes wrong.

Apple’s crash reports deliver key information directly back to the developer, and have the potential to reduce the timeframe for correcting crash bugs by an order of magnitude. This is only a good thing, and a very welcome tool in the development process.

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App Store Roundtable: Transparency and the Approval System

Wed, 06 May 2009 18:00:24 +0000

For our next installment of the App Store Roundtable, we talked with developers about an issue that comes up time and again: the application approval system and the overall transparency of the inner workings of the App Store. When developers submit their products to Apple, we have to cross our fingers and hope they’ll be allowed into the App Store, as there’s very little consistency or feedback.

My biggest gripe about selling in the App Store is Apple’s lack of status updates during the review process. Even a “we received your app and are reviewing it” would be a big help.

– Doug Davies, developer of JiggleBalls

I guess the single most burning issue with the App Store is the intransparent review process. One submits an app, then after an indeterminate time it is approved or not; there are no clean cut rules; there is no public timeline; there is no ETA; there is no feedback (even a page in the dev center with “Status: Waiting for review,” “reviewing” or something equally vague would help).

– Martin J. Laubach, developer of Moonlight

The whole process needs a lot more transparency because developers are the lifeblood of the appstore and they need to plan their future development and marketing initiatives based on some general time line. If Apple subjectively rejects an app for “being too simple” when there are literally hundreds of simpler apps already in the store, they are hurting the development process. There currently aren’t any guidelines for what is “too simple.”

– Dan of Rareapps

I also feel that apple is not giving the approval process enough attention, we should not have to put up with scandals such as the port of the famous Nintendo Duck Hunt (exact graphics ) in there. Apple should develop a quality assurance process within its approval process so completely ridiculous games wont get through.

– Brynjar Gigja of On The Rocks, developer of Tiltafun

The biggest issue for us is the lack of information on how the App Store really works. So much of what we do hinges on how the store operates- how and when applications are approved, which apps are featured, exactly how the top 100 list is computed, and how release dates work. Knowing how these details work is key, but in depth information has never been provided.

– Andy Korth of Howling Moon Software, developer of Crayon Ball

Featured Slots

If you gather two or more iPhone developers together at any time the conversation will inevitably touch on the featured lists. These are the suggested apps you see in the various App Store lists (What’s New, What’s Hot etc.), and most apps that are lucky enough to get one of these slots find themselves with many thousands of dollars worth of extra sales. This is another area where developers would welcome more transparency.

I’d really like Apple to be clear how they choose to feature apps. Is there anything that can be done to help, or anything which definitely blocks you from being featured?

– Tim Haines, developer of BurnBall

I would like to know more about how Apple chooses it’s featured products, I would like Apple to give us developers more heads up to changes in the market place, what they have in mind for the future so we can adjust.

– Brynjar Gigja

There’s this feeling that the app review and featuring department is completely isolated from the world. There seems to be nothing, or very little you can do as an independent to get their attention.

– Mike Kasprzak

It would be nice if you could pitch your app to Apple (or even a monetary model) so that you could be displayed at the top level (other than by release date) for a few days. As an “indie” it’s frustrating trying to get exposure.

– Doug Davies

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App Store Roundtable: User Review System

Mon, 04 May 2009 14:27:01 +0000

For our next installment of the App Store Roundtable, we asked developers what they liked and/or disliked about the iTunes review system. It should be noted that the review system for the App Store has seen a few updates since these comments were made, but concerns voiced by these developers are still valid.

For me there’s a few things I’ve seen in my small amount of time in the store. One being the inability to respond to negative ratings. I’ve got some that say “Doesn’t work” or “its garbage” but nobody sent a support request. Developers need a way to respond and put these “reviews” where they belong.

– Brandon Steili, developer of gCalWall

An area which needs looking at is the review system on iTunes — it would be great to have more control over this, to stop people posting 1 star reviews + a bad word. Objective reviews are great, but not silly stuff. Also — there needs to be a feedback loop for the publishers/developers to respond to individual reviews (where an update has been posted which fixes a particular issue.)

– Chris Byatte, director of Chillingo

It’s great that Apple gives people a way to provide a star rating for applications, but users should be able to do this for any application at any time; not just for the ones they’re deleting. Why? Well, this approach clearly skews the ratings low. (Users delete the applications they dislike and not the ones they like.) Apple needs to provide a way for users rate an application they like without deleting it or writing a review for it.

– Adam Talcott of Atomic Powered, developer of Napkin Genius

There’s a lack of standardization among reviews and ratings. A 5 Star Farting app isn’t actually better than a 4 star RPG that offers hours of combat, items, quests and amazing 3D graphics. Not enough people look into what a game offers. It needs to be accepted that not all games are equal, so maybe it’s time to rethink how you the consumer are rating a game.

– Bruce Morrison, producer at Freeverse

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App Store Roundtable: The Gold Rush

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:00:37 +0000

Welcome to the first App Store Roundtable. The iPhone and the App Store are always hot news, and for good reason. It’s a fantastic marketplace for developers, and there’s always something exciting happening somewhere for the press to report on. But sometimes the issues faced by everyday developers working on the platform get left in the dust.

The goal of this column is to give the development community a regular outlet — and to give the rest of the world a window into our lives. We’ve recruited an army of iPhone app developers willing to share their thoughts and opinions on the state of the App Store. The participants range from part-time hobbyists and one-man band independent developers, to big developers and publishers with dozens of titles under their belt. We hope you’ll enjoy hearing from them all.

To get things started, we talked about the App Store’s initial “gold rush.” Many developers brought up the fact that a few high-profile success stories have created the impression of easy money on the iPhone. This is driving more and more apps, making it increasingly hard to stand out, but relatively little is known about how to create a sustainable business in the App Store.

The word circling the media is that the iPhone is still a place where a developer of a flatulence app can earn an instant six- to seven-figure income. In development circles, though, we all know the glory days are over. You can’t just release crap and score mint anymore. In fact, it’s tough even to release something good and get noticed. The shear volume of apps available for iPhone in such a short time is unreal.

– Mike Kasprzak, developer of Smiles

We keep hearing the gold-rush stories, and the overnight success of fart or wobbling apps, or whatever the craze is that week. What I’d like to see discussed is the viability of having a sustainable business by writing games (or apps) independently and selling them through the App Store. Is that going to be possible, or are we doomed to the results of the shareware PC market? Do we need to cast our nets further (Android, web, desktop), or can developers carve a niche in the App Store and make a (good) living out of it?

– Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch, developer of Flower Garden

iTunes is to the music industry what the App Store is to iPhone software. If you’re not a Top 20 musician, you do not expect people to learn of you via iTunes, so why would we expect it to work for Apps? The issue at hand is what the proper venues are for advertising your App to your target market and the best bang for the buck for small developers and startups to enter the more traditional advertising space to get the mass market to know about their products.

– Trent Shumay of Finger Food Studios

Not to sound all “doom and gloom,” but inventory of the App Store is rapidly growing, and individual apps’ chances of exposure are diminishing. It’s getting harder and harder to climb into the “Top XX” lists. Apple doesn’t seem to be making any significant moves towards making developers’ lives any easier as far as the “marketing” aspect goes — they can only feature so many apps, after all.

– Peter Bakhyryev of Byteclub, developer of Scramboni

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