Good luck and failure in the AppStore

On the wave of increased attention to the mobile software, and in particular to the App Store, we also decided to try our hand at this chaotic, at first glance, mass. There is an iPhone, a MacBook is, it remains only to choose what to write. The requirements are simple: it should be simple, it should not take a lot of time and it should be cheap. And I also wanted to write something that would be useful for myself. But things did not go exactly as we expected.

Our plans

We stopped our choice on creating an English language training program, since Himself wanted to pull it up. The method of studying chose the easiest - cards Everyone knows them, everyone knows how to use them, so the program should be simple in terms of usability. So, with the program decided. Now it remains to assign roles and get to work.

One of us was engaged in the actual writing of the program, the second - the selection of dictionaries, advertising. None of us had done such things before. The programmer did not know Objective-C, and for the second the word “advertising” did not mean anything.
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We will not describe the program. Who cares, can read reviews here , here or here .

Tasks have set the following:

1. The terms of creation should not exceed 1 month, taking into account that we will write the program in the evenings, after work.
2. The program should recoup the costs.
3. Bring some money so that there is at least simple self-satisfaction.

According to our estimates, $ 500 is the maximum that we could get.

Knowing that our market is very small and should not be relied upon, it was decided to create not only the option “I know Russian, I learn English”, but also “I know English, I learn Russian”. In addition, we decided to make another program - English-Spanish-English, because Spanish is the most popular (from foreign) in America.

There were no special problems with programming and in a month everything was in principle ready. It remained the case for dictionaries. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to find good ready-made options, so you had to manually check each of the dictionaries. As a result, ready-made versions were ready only 1.5 months after the start of work. Along the way, work was underway to create a website, design a program, and translate.

At the stage close to the final stage, we started registering a developer account on the App Store. Everything went pretty smoothly, except for small problems with the card. A week later, we already tested our program on phones. It should be noted that the Apple support service responded fairly quickly.

Account received, program tested, no complaints.

Program approval process

May 20, send for review. Google suggested that sales usually grow a little on weekends, so the date for the start of sales was set for May 29 (Saturday). For a very long time (as it seemed to us) no news, then on May 27 a message arrived that our program began to be considered and, following it, that it was rejected. The reason is simple - we used the “Reply to letter” symbol for another action. Quickly change the icon, send for review and set the date of commencement of sales on June 5 (Saturday).

And again, time stretched slowly, slowly. On June 3, the program moved to the “In Review” status and a few hours after receiving the notification of this, we receive a second letter stating that the program has been approved.

We look forward to June 5 and in the morning monitoring the App Store. At about 12 noon in Moscow we find our program at about 30-40 place among the new programs in the section with the release date of 3 June. Our hopes to immediately get up the new programs and start climbing ratings failed. It turns out that Apple puts the release date on the date when they approved the program. Therefore, if there are no special reasons, then the date of commencement of sales should be set to the date of consideration and hope that the program will be approved very quickly.

Advertising

Program in the App Store, it's time to announce it. We are starting to send a pre-prepared and translated review of the English-language and Spanish-language sites devoted to programs for the iPhone. As a result, 9 Spanish and 15 English reviews were sent. The review was posted on only 1 English-language site.

Now for the Russian-language sites.

• On May 23, a preview of the program was posted on the iCodeRu website
• June 3, a review was sent to iphones.ru with invented contests. But Arthur did not want to write about our program.
• On June 6, the topic was created on the iphones.ru forum, where we distributed some promotional codes. Also on this day they wrote in LiveJournal to a group dedicated to the iPhone.
• On June 8, a review was made on the site macradar.ru , in the evening of the same day a review appeared on the site ukrainianiphone.com and created a topic on the forum ru-iphone.com
• June 10 review was posted on the site applabs.ru

As a result, only reviews on macradar.ru and ukrainianiphone.com brought tangible effect. A review of the English-Spanish-English version on the English-language website brought 2 jumps, a post on the forum ru-iphone.com also hardly brought any great benefit, because for the day there were only 23 topic views.

But thanks to all these actions, on June 10 we were in the Top 10 Paid in Russia. June 15 began to fall gradually and made a 50% discount before the release of the update. This again threw us up to 5th place. As a result, in the top 10 paid applications in Russia lasted exactly 2 weeks.

There was also a twitter posting to people who learn Spanish (they advertised the English-Spanish-English version). The result of this action tends to 0.

Results

Graph of the number of downloads of the English-Russian-English version


The number of races in the regions of the English-Russian-English version


As a result, at the moment there are only 2195 downloads (of which 39 are free) for the English-Russian-English version and 52 downloads (of which 7 are free) for the English-Spanish-English version.

The development costs were as follows:

• Developer license - $ 99
• Domain - about $ 16 (12 euros)
• Hosting - $ 4.75 * 3 = $ 14.25
• Translation of the program, website and reviews - 2000 rubles. (approximately $ 66)
• Advertising (review on ukrainianiphone.com) - 1500 rub. (about $ 50)

Subtotal: $ 245.25

Payments for the first reporting month (Apple’s reporting month slightly differs from the calendar one) amounted to $ 2,901.50.

In the end, our hopes were justified, but not in the way we expected. We pinned our main hope on the English-Spanish-English version, which failed. There was also a great hope for Twitter, which did not bring any results.

An effective way of promotion in the Russian App Store is posting reviews on thematic sites. How to promote the application in the American App Store remains a mystery for us.

Upd: Transferred to the thematic blog

Upd 2: If anyone needs it, here is a link to the program.

Upd 3: As requested, I write about the effect of this post. Although this effect is almost not felt. All within daily fluctuations. Yesterday there were 20 races, the day before yesterday 15. As usual, there is a slight increase to the medium. Why - we do not know :)