My BlackBerry Development Experience

Foreword

Ladies and Gentlemen! I want to tell you a story related to the development of games for the BlackBerry OS. All conclusions in this post are made solely on the basis of their own experience and are not an axiom.


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Start

What is the game Alchemy and what it eats.

The beginning can be considered the day when I bought myself a BlackBerry 9700, and my wife - 9550. And now, after six months, I had the idea of ​​"whether or not to develop some kind of application." Having gathered all my thoughts in one pile, I met with my good friend, who works as a Java programmer. We talked, discussed, but in the end the first pancake was a lump. Realizing all the mistakes, the second pancake stove, I gathered alone.

Concept

First of all, I thought of the interface. The problem was that in the line of smartphones there are devices with a touchscreen, and there is simply a keyboard. In this regard, the game must be playable on all types of devices. Having thought over the “design” I turned to my colleague with a request to draw a design. In my plans was to create a full-fledged commercial product, and it should look appropriate. Agreed on a percentage of sales.

In mid-May, I began to recruit betta testers. I posted a topic on crackberry.com. The betta version had 116 elements. In gratitude for the work done, I promised that each tester will receive the full version for free. In the process of testing, I realized that 116 elements are very few, and therefore 76 more were added urgently (to the full version).

Release

On May 31, the game was released in the mobihand.com store, and on June 14 - in the AppWorld. The first version was adapted only for one resolution and had 192 elements.

As soon as the game went on sale, I began to send applications to specialized forums with a request to write a review. I will say right away that all this did not give a special result. Some resources required $ 30-50 per review, some simply did not respond (like crackberry.com for example). Those resources where the review was published traffic almost did not generate, sometimes even promotional codes were not used during the week.

For all the time 8 releases were “shipped”. Some of them fixed various kinds of bugs, some added functionality. In early August, support for two more permissions was added and 68 more elements were added. A couple of months later, functional tips were added, integration with Facebook and ranks: junior alchemist, master of alchemy, etc ...

Experiment

On the eve of US independence day, I reduced the price to 99 cents for one week, but this had a negative effect on financial income. Those. There were more purchases than at a price of 1.99, but less than 2 times.

Statistics

And now the most interesting part. As I wrote above, the application is hosted at two sites. But the mobihand is so dead (a total of 150 copies were sold there all the time), that I neglect it.

Below is a download schedule. On it we can see bursts, as in August for example. These bursts mean the release of the update. All, with the exception of the November surge. In November, my application was one week in the featured category, but more on that later.



The shopping schedule is similar to the download schedule, but without bursts during updates.

Featured

In order for an application to fall into the featured category, the developer himself must send applications. In the late summer - early autumn, I sent a couple of applications, but to no avail. Then on twitter I came across an account of the company that had the app in Featured. I asked what is their secret. And they told me that we must persistently send applications, at least once a week, which I actually started to do. And one fine evening I discover that my application has become featured.

November Shopping Schedule

November download schedule

Based on the month of November (because new devices have already come into use, and there were plenty of purchases) I collected statistics on screen resolutions, operating system versions, and countries.

I will share my experiences

Contact developer button

In my application, on the Help page, I added a support button, after clicking on which the mailer opens, with the topic already entered, the shipping address and additional information: the application version and device ID is PIN (the registration code is generated based on it). Some users do not receive a registration code for several reasons (for example, a glitch of a store, for this reason that they would not ask them to provide their PIN (and some people strongly oppose this), I also included this information in the letter.

Judging by their experience, about 80% of all calls are initiated by this particular button.

Communication with customers

The most important part of the whole process. If you look at the reviews , then quite a few users mention a good tech. support The whole point is that users want their problems to be solved, and as soon as possible. I try to respond to emails immediately. But, it is not always possible, because there is a main job (and it’s not ethical to solve personal affairs during working hours), and it’s necessary to sleep once. In this case, I begin to respond to incoming letters, starting with the most recent. If a person sent a letter 3-4 hours ago, then 15 minutes will not play the role. But if the user sent a letter a couple of minutes ago, then the same +15 minutes will not lead to a “wow” effect. Responding to requests immediately, users have the feeling that they are special. And what's the difference how positive emotions are delivered: by the application or support?

In order to be able to respond as quickly as possible, I wrote a phone application that generates a PIN-based registration code, so when I receive a letter asking me to send a number, it takes me 15 seconds maximum.

Finally a little advice

When developing your project, do not dwell on any amount of features. For starters, it is better to make the basic minimum functionality, release the application in a short time, and then release updates. In this case
users will have a constant interest in your product
have the opportunity to enter the market before competitors and collect cream
reduce the risks if the project does not go.

Results

At the moment we have

• 16662 downloads, of which
• 1872 purchased copies
• 47 feedbacks

Thank you for your attention, I hope it was not very tedious. Please report errors in PM.

I will be glad to answer your questions.