AppleInsider.ru application: development, statistics, errors

Greetings to you, readers Habra!

Last week we released the AppleInsider.ru application, which on the first day hit the top 50 of the Russian App Store segment, and in this article I would like to tell you a little about its creation, the tools used, and also share the statistics in the first days launch.
I hope that my story does not seem boring to you, and you can learn something useful from the above.
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I will begin, perhaps, with the fact that Unreal Mojo acted as a developer, and as it seems to us, we did not lose the choice of company for developing the application.

It is worth making a reservation that at first we tried to create an application with our own resources, attracting our readers on a voluntary basis, but the reality made its own adjustments, and we finally agreed with one of the leading mobile application development studios.

At the initial stage, we had “TZ” on two A4 sheets describing the approximate functionality of the application and Napoleonic plans for its development. And then the first problem arose, namely the communication between the designer (from AppleInsider.ru), the administration of the resource involved in the development, and the developer directly. We were offered a fairly convenient program for Mac OS X called "Kickoff". With a minimum number of functions, it has the necessary tools for such development.
In it, you can add tasks to ToDo, shared files, notes. In addition, the application has a built-in chat, which in practice has proven to be an indispensable tool when discussing a particular functionality. For example, here are a couple of screenshots of this program, so you can appreciate its minimalism and functionality.





On the pages of Habr, stories about the development process have been written more than once, so I will not go into this area. Here we had everything like everyone else: too high expectations, an increase in terms, a search for compromises, and as a result - a finished product under version 1.0. Unfortunately, as in most applications, it was not without errors, and today we are preparing version 1.0.1, in which we will try to eliminate most of them.

Next, I would like to share some, I think, interesting moments, and talk about them in a little more detail.

Download statistics

As you know, Apple is quite poor in the statistics provided, and all we can say at this stage is that on the day of launch, the application was downloaded about 3000 times, and on the second day the number of downloads exceeded 7000.
It is a lot or a little - an open question. For competitive reasons, we cannot post a review of our application on Apple-related sites. For them, it would be anti-advertising, so we were content at the first stage of launching only our own audience. At the time of launching the application, the site had about 20,000 unique visitors per day. Thus, it can be said that every third visitor of the site has downloaded our application.
In my opinion this is a good result, although, of course, there is room to grow and something to strive for. We think over other options of application promotion, and one of them was the given post in the appropriate Habr column.

Application usage statistics

To get more or less extended statistics, we have embedded Google Analytics in the application. Thus, we were able to obtain a fairly large amount of data on the use of the application in an easy-to-read form.
In addition, the application has a collection of statistics from Yandex.Metrica, but for reasons that we do not understand so far, it does not work correctly.

Below I will give a few screenshots of statistics (for the first two days after launch). For example:
Number of unique visits to the application:> 7000
The number of page views per entry into the application is more than 8 (on average). For example, on the web version, we have an indicator in the region of 3 pages per unique visitor.
At the same time, about 150-250 people use the application. It is very interesting to watch a quality jump in the application immediately after receiving a push-notification by the user. This information can be obtained through the real-time Google Analytics feature. True while she is in beta.
The number of visits from Russia is 78.3%, from Ukraine 10.5%
The application is launched from the iPhone in 78.33% of cases, iPad 10.92%, iPod touch 10.75% (it is worth mentioning that the application is written for iPhone 3GS and higher, with iOS 4.x and higher)
For two days, the number of views of news (or any other materials) was 152,757. This is almost comparable to the number of views of the web-version of the site, with the only proviso that the number of unique visits to the site is three times more than the application.





Attendance of the resource after the launch of the mobile application

We had some concerns that after the release of the application, attendance of the web version could fall. However, they were in vain. Attendance not only did not fall, but even slightly increased. I think this happened for two reasons:
- Due to the release of the application in the top 50 (33 place in the general Russian App Store and 1 place in the News category), we attracted new visitors who previously did not know about the existence of the resource;
- Using the application does not affect the visit to the web-version. When a person is at the computer, it is more convenient for him to use a large site, and when he goes home, or is resting in front of the TV, a mobile solution is preferable.

The load on the server after running the application

Needless to say that the load has increased? I think no. If you look at the numbers above, the number of calls to our servers has increased by about 30%. At the moment we are working on expanding capacity and willingness to take the load ten times more than the current one, but this topic deserves a separate post. I just want to bring a screenshot of the load on one of the servers after launching the application. Red marked the launch day.



Bugs in the application

This is our pain. But the ability to recognize mistakes and promptly correct them will allow us, as I hope, to make the application even better, and get ahead of possible competitors a few steps ahead.
After publication in the App Store, literally within an hour, we received such a number of messages with praise, criticism, comments and other things that it took us a lot of time to structure all this and make the necessary Kickoff edits for further analysis and, if necessary, corrections .
In addition, the first users of the application suggested a huge number of ideas for improving it. Some of them are quite simple to implement, but at the same time they add convenience in using the application. Now we are engaged in planning the introduction of certain "features" that will be constantly added with the updates of the application.

Unfortunately, at the stage of testing the application you can never catch all the bugs. This is due to many factors, but it always comes down to the fact that the number of testers is always less than the number of end users (in mass-use products).

For example, after launching the application, messages began to appear that on phones with a jailbreak installed, the application does not start. There were not many such messages, but perhaps a dozen have gathered. If we are able to identify the problem, then, of course, we will fix it, but frankly I can’t imagine how this can be done given all that “zoo” of methods proposed and offered for the Jail.

Another interesting note was that the application does not correctly handle voiceover in all places (this technology allows people with disabilities to use the application). Before launching into release, we couldn’t even think about testing this aspect of the application. Repent. We will try to eliminate everything in the next updates, so that users of our application can use it the way they used to do it with Apple's built-in applications.

Creative flour

Initially, when we were just starting to develop an application, we had a completely different design, but at the testing stage we realized that it was too gloomy, although at first glance it looked pretty nice. Eyes quickly tired, and we did not get pleasure from using the application.
As a result, the entire design was redrawn from scratch. As an example, let me give you some screenshots of the old design.



Highlight

We sincerely believe that in each application, in addition to ease of use and beautiful design, there must be a “highlight”. To tell you the truth, we didn’t have it until the last moment. And only after Apple’s redjack (the application in the 3G podcast playback mode consumed more than 5Mb of traffic in 5 minutes) we had a great idea that would distinguish our application from similar ones. And let it be just a small touch, but as shown by the reaction of users of the application, it fell into the “apple” itself.
When you receive a push-notification on your iPhone, you will be spared from the standard sound, and instead you will hear the crunch of a bitten ripe apple. This sound is absolutely not annoying, and allows you to catch the interested views of others with each alert. Of course, this sound can be turned off in the settings of push-notifications.

Another "highlight" can be considered the presence of all releases of podcasts in a special section of the application. They get there automatically (parsim RSS). However, we had to turn a small trick in order to be able to listen to podcasts got into the application: if you turn on the player without connecting via Wi-Fi (with a 3g or edge connection), the files will be broadcast not from the main server where we store all our podcasts, but with additional. We had to limit the speed of access to files on the server side and lower the podcast bit rate in order not to fall under the restriction of Apple to 5 MB in 5 minutes for 3G / edge connections when playing media files.

Our expectations

While testing the application before launching into release, we were sure of two things:

The convenience of commenting from the application turned out to be so high that we did not in the least doubt that users would comment, and would comment a lot. In fact, it turned out. An eye increase in the comments on the site was 25-30%
We have added a social component for sharing the news in various social networks. Using the AddThis SDK, their number is several dozen. The most popular soc. network, we brought separately for ease of use. But here we were disappointed. For two days of using this application, just over 300 people took advantage of this functionality.

Where to go next

In the next big update of the application, we plan to add a live broadcast of our weekly podcasts and do in-app chat not only for live listeners, but also leave it in the app for direct communication between users.
It is already available on the podcast page in the web version and works via the jabber protocol. We hope that you will appreciate our work, and we will be happy to hear any constructive criticism or suggestions for its development.

You can download the application from iTunes at this link .

UPD: To date, the application is used by over 11,000 people (according to Google Analytics). The increase in traffic on the site for the week increased by more than 20%
Already we can say that the investments in the application are fully justified in our particular case.