Cut, brothers, cut. Cut carefully ...

Spring and half of winter have passed since then, when I set foot on the personally suffered way of conquest by the appStore.

- All that is in the furnace - everything in the appstore swords is not the best slogan, but it has a right to exist.

Now, I scribble as Jules Verne, weekly filling up the iOs Review Team with freshly baked code.
iOs Review Team winces but eats. They have to try all the dishes from customers who have paid $ 100 for entering this wonderful apple establishment.
')


Misadventures and conclusions of the extensive way of conquering the appStore I post under habracut
Ps. Is it possible to transfer this topic to the Game Development section for general reading?


In the depths of the conscience of every developer casualgame are moral principles. There are seven of them.

1) I despise advertising. No ads in your product.
2) I do not notice the publishers. No communication with publishers.
3) I play only intellectual games. No pop apps.
4) I do not like beggars. No requests to users inside the author's programs.
5) I am above the press. No paid reviews or purchase interviews.
6) Not a line of someone else's code. I am the greatest magician.
7) And finally, do not steal, crud, music and pictures.

Of course, in six months of development, I committed all 7 deadly sins.

The author is a scoundrel !, exclaim you, and you will be right.
But not a scoundrel. Scoundrel - who does nasty things with pleasure.

Sin is the first. Advertising

Advertising has been tested in five or six games.
I placed it only in the backyard of applications, somewhere on UIWebView and only for residents of the United States of America.

After the release of advertising applications, I looked at the daily reports on advertising revenue in surprise and stupidly - a lot of numbers. Many abbreviations like "Impressions on click". It looks beautiful, but useless. Statistics update time is not amenable to analysis. Poked into advertising reports for a week, completely lost interest in this page.

Final earnings - $ 10-15 per month. The maximum daily earnings of $ 3. He jumps about every seven to ten days. But the standard daily profit is from 1 to 10 cents.
Having slept with advertising, I no longer sin with it.
But $ 12 for April I will drink with pleasure.

Sin of the second. Publishers

414,000 applications in the appStore . How can a poor peasant be heard amid such wealth?
Having read article on Habré about publishers, sinned and sent out 5 letters on the first five google-publishing links.

Of 5 publishers, only one responded instantly and immediately. Somebody Ed from some Chilingi.
Wonderful man. In the signature, he keeps IMEA 3 of their i-devices. I included them in the developer profile and sent him about 5 of my handicrafts.
Politely praising a couple of applications, he sent me the fuck rejected all 5 for various reasons.
From We do not work with already published applications and until It will not have commercial success .
Among other things, he gave a bunch of correct tips on the design and layout of the buttons, to the availability of hints and translation quality. Thanks, Ed.
So that I get rid of him, Ed promised to buy a couple of my new games. He fulfilled the promise, and I brutally set a price of $ 3 for my free apps on the day of his purchase.
Forgive me Ed and goodbye.
Your 6.5 pounds sterling I will drink in the best English pub of Mordovia.

Third sin Pops

Smart games swing smart people. They are smarter and smarter than me. They do not buy bones and preference, they are waiting for a desperate author to declare them free.
The download statistics for these applications are sad.

In the status of paid - 20-50 races per year.
In the status of free - 2000 - 10,000 per year.

Despite the lack of financial success, I feel immensely, like the Sun, moral satisfaction - 500 people from 60 (already 80) countries of the world compete in author's toys every day.
I like when you go naked around the apartment to re-read the names of their iPhones and respectfully convey to them the warm greetings from Russia.

But the money (10 races a day) I still drip.
They're not dripping from smart games, but from randomly crafted pop apps. I have two of them. The boy and ... also the boy.
Potter and ... also Barber .

I made them very quickly, I do not play myself, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of downloads.
In my opinion, they are chosen by 10-14 year old girls and boys. And the whole article is colored with hairstyles made by these young creatures. A collection of their hairdressing can be seen in the hair salon .

Fourth Sin Begging

Ban Ax pretended not to hear the comments, and asked:
- Isn't it a shame to you, pop, to collect alms? Begging is a grave sin.
Brother Macarius laughed, and in his eyes merry sparks ran.
“How, your grace, begging can be a sin if mercy is a virtue?”
(c) Tadeush Kvyatkovsky

The first and only application of the Tower of China , where I ask the user to purchase functionality. It brings 200 free races per day and 3-5-7 daily purchases from the app. In comparison with the same paid application, the income increases exactly by an order!
Waiting for the New Year 1000 dollars from the Chinese Towers.
Thanks to epazzz for the wonderful article that pushed me to the coding mechanism of purchasing in app - it took half a day of unhurried work for the first application and 15 minutes for all subsequent ones.
Attention! Do not forget to click the Ready for Review button for purchase in the app bundle in the appStore. I forgot - and lost two weeks to check. This bundle is checked for as long as the application itself.

2 weeks ago I posted a new casual game Cli Cli (live Dirichlet cells) in appstore. The application contains the mechanism of a beggar inside me and I look forward to the results. Even Chinese success. No need to laugh! 1000 bucks a year from an application is a success. Do not believe in millions of fairy tales.

By the way, I check the overwhelming idea of ​​a dream. If the game is dreaming, then this is a potential hit. Cli Cli I dream. Like the Tower three years ago.

Sin is the fifth. Fifth power

Reviews. Journalists. Press. All the elections!
I sent it to two resources - Russian (on a tip from a habrauzer) and Chinese (at their request) 10 promotional codes of the Barber application.
I did not see any reviews.
No reply to emails.
But he suffered a lot - in the week the application bought 50 people. +20 promo codes. + 10 friends. total should not be more than 100 users.

And there are more than 3000 of them (I secretly spy on users through NSURLRequest). What the fuck am I sorry ??
And who is to blame, Russian or Chinese, who is so cunning ??

Sin of the sixth. Someone else's code

Thoughtless use of other people's libraries and examples leads to errors for which you will have to answer.
As a result, I use only native iOS frameworks - OpenGLES for 3D graphics, AVFoundation for background melodies and QuarzCore for animation effects, and carefully shovel examples from StackOverflow.
But the first applications, the same King , still keep the mistakes of others examples.
Nevertheless, the skill of coding under iOS is growing evolutionarily. I do an iteration. I post new versions of old applications in the appStore. I do not hesitate, as a schoolboy to solve on Obj-C programming tasks, set for other languages. For example yeti . Helps a lot.

The seventh sin. Don't steal

Thank God, there are a lot of free music and free images on the net. And if they are copyrighted, then the e-mail of the author sometimes lives nearby, which is almost always ready to give you a 100% discount or get a promotional code. If the author is not found, then help programs-editors that turn other people's pixels into native ones.

It’s a sin, of course, to snatch other people's pictures, but agree that the original image of 1024 by 768 pixels scaled to 57 by 57 pixels is already not quite original.

so

Following the results of half a year, I threw about 30 versions of 15 different applications onto the market and reached the level of income of 300 ye per month.

Cons of the extensive approach

The process of creativity begins to get.
You do not have time to introduce new solutions and improvements to the old application.
The main work begins to suffer.

pros

Growing experience.
Growing profit.
You can move into the category of teachers - you are no longer at the bottom of the pyramid built by Steve Jobs.

As a teacher, I will tell you about one scam trick. Tested on the application fortune teller . A typical situation is that a paid application is not purchased, but it is actively downloaded after being declared free. Apply the following trick. At 12-00 MSK, when in Kalifoniya one o'clock at night, we declare it free. In the evening at 20-00 MSK we close the shop. For 8 hours, it is managed to download a hundred or two users, somewhere in the ratings it takes off and 2-5 people buy the app by inertia.
Applied this trick 5 times from boredom or cunning - it always worked.

I apologize to the developers for fiction, the complete lack of code and useful examples.

Just a mood like a joke.

-Why are you so sad?
I don’t know - I don’t want to work the third day.
- So Wednesday!

Bibliography

The article used hairstyles made by girls with the help of the application Barber .
As a model used the face of a famous Hollywood star.