Development of a content application for iOS, attack Russian App Store

Introduction

I have recently become a developer of mobile apps for iOS. It all started with the usual hobby, when the thought came to try their hand at new technologies. After several successful freelancing projects, I decided to develop my own application - business cards for the company in which at that time I worked as a design engineer. Unfortunately, after all the approvals and statements, when the project was already in working condition on my phone, I could not get the go-ahead to publish it in the App Store. The bureaucratic machine in our country is working properly.




I was upset that the attempt to launch my application to the masses failed. Deciding not to give up, I started working on a new project. For a long time, studying possible ways of immigration from Russia, I came to the conclusion that people everywhere ask the same questions: “Where? Why? How?". It is impossible to cover everything, because there are many countries, various programs and ways of immigration. It was necessary to choose. I stayed in Canada - one of the most friendly immigrants in the country. I saw my application as a reference book that contains not only the most up-to-date information from various sources, but also makes it possible to communicate with those who follow the same program, compare the deadlines and nuances of the case.
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Filling information

The lion's share of development time, apart from writing code, was occupied by filling the application with information. The scattered facts published on the forums needed to be arranged, to find confirmation on the official sites and to support the source. I translated part of the information from English on my own; I took another with the permission of the people who published it. When the first part of the application with general information on immigration was ready, I began to create an “immigrant’s private office”. To access this section, I planned to do authentication, with the input of personal data and country of residence, chat between users and so on. Subsequently, it turned out that this, in my opinion, the most important and necessary section in the annex, with thorough information on each immigration program, turned out to be practically unclaimed. At first, I thought that this was due to the lack of visibility of the icon, and changed it to a brighter one. Also in the start-up training, I emphasized the button, but the situation has not changed.

Interesting: Only 17% of users registered in the dashboard.

Technology

For the server side, the ideal option was Parse service. On it, I was able to organize a repository of information, user registration, sending push notifications, and so on. This made it possible not to be distracted by web programming and fully concentrate on developing the application. The service is absolutely free, with a small amount of requests to the server. He recently bought out Facebook.



At the time of developing the application, I did not have my own hosting, so I decided to use Twitter feed to display news in the application. Twitter has a very convenient and flexible API, so there were no additional difficulties. Unfortunately several times it was that the twitter server did not respond, but I do not presume to judge how often such interruptions are.

The application runs on iOS, starting with 5.0. I think this is right and sincerely do not understand the recent tendency to not support this version, because it may turn out that the most devoted fan of the first iPad uses this system. Therefore, in the program code, new things that only appeared in iOS 6 (in particular, the attributes of the crossed out text and the resize of pictures with insets), I screened by making them check the version of the operating system.

if ([[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue] >= 6) { UIImage *stretchableImage = [buttonImageNormal resizableImageWithCapInsets:UIEdgeInsetsMake(2, 0, 0, 2) resizingMode:UIImageResizingModeTile]; NSDictionary *attributes = @{NSStrikethroughStyleAttributeName: [NSNumber numberWithInt:NSUnderlineStyleSingle]}; } 

With the design of the icon and general advice on the application, a good friend helped me, for which she thanks a lot. But in general, I drew inspiration from the various design options of successful applications presented on Pttrns.com . And, to be honest, sometimes I borrowed some interesting solutions from them.

For analytics I decided to use the Flurry service. The choice was between Google Analytics and Flurry, but since I already use statistics from Google for sites, I decided to explore a new product. In Flurry, I don’t like an unfriendly interface, many things are completely unintelligible and inconvenient. A significant drawback, the inability to reset the statistics, for which we have to use the date range, which goes from report to report. There is also a significant delay in providing statistics on sessions, approximately 20 hours. In the next project, I hope to try out the Count service, the infographics from them looks great.



One of the interesting things that analytics services allow you to do is to track any events in the application. I could not pass by, not satisfying my curiosity. It was interesting to find out how many people will pass the introductory training, and how many will miss it: only every fifth person has found the strength to look through the 5 screenshots of training to the end.

Interesting: 75% of users of my program are men.

In order to have user feedback, I decided to add the ability to send a comment to the developer, that is, to me, directly from the application. For this, I used the Apptentive service. The user during the n-th approach in the application is met with the question: "Did you like our application?". If the answer is "yes", it is proposed to evaluate the application in the App Store, and if not, write a comment to the developer. For all the time, I do not know whether to rejoice at it or be upset, I have not received a single comment.

Another useful service that I decided to try out is Crittecism . As soon as the application is closed with an error, this add-on sends a report with information about which user, where and with what exception it happened.



Unfortunately, it is not always possible to understand the exact cause of the error. For the entire existence of the application in the App Store, I received two such messages. The cause of the first error, from an unknown user to me, I, unfortunately, did not find. The second message was from my friend who bought the application, thus deciding to give me a birthday present. Interestingly, a similar service provided by Apple cannot cope with this task and did not report any errors.

Interesting: 10% of users used the application on the iPad, before the universal version.

Since there are a lot of texts in the application, I decided to use web technologies and almost all the layout of the screens with an abundance of text was made on the basis of html pages with jquery scripts. As for the speed of work in the iOS application, Jquery did not fully justify itself - when entering the screen, there is sometimes a slight delay, however, it allowed to format the text nicely.

Price policy

Initially, I planned to release the application on the Freemium model and make paid access to the odds calculator, user account, and some other unique things. Having discussed my position with those who already have successful applications at AppleStore, I agreed that the topic of immigration is rather narrow and in any case there will be very few purchases. However, for someone who needs this information, the price of $ 2.99 will not be high. I decided to stop at this amount. Subsequently, I experimented with the prices: with the price of $ 0.99, the number of downloads remained the same, and with the cost of $ 4.99 per day, the application was not downloaded once.

Promo site and title

To try a western service, I registered a domain with the American registrar GoDaddy . The promo site itself, since it is static, is located on Amazon S3 storage . Most likely, the site will never exceed the limits set for free use, so that the cost of hosting is $ 0.

Name for the application, I decided to choose a provocative. And in general, the subject itself rarely leaves anyone indifferent: in the comments there are always serious disputes between those who consider traitors to people who want to change their lives and those who support them.

The cost of developing an application is a month of personal time in the evenings and, perhaps, everything.

Application marketing

I approached the “promotion” of the application very seriously: I ordered banner ads on the two most popular Russian-speaking forums about Canada, made paid posts in the Vkontakte immigration community, advertised Facebook, VK, Begun and Google adwords through contextual advertising. It's nice that Google issues a gift certificate for 1000 rubles to new users from Russia, provided that they refill the account for 500 rubles.



On a popular Apple news site, a paid review of the program was organized. My announcement about the application was placed in the LJ profile community for free, offering to evaluate the cost of such a service and donate to children who support orphanages.

The widely advertised project from w3bsit3-dns.com for the support of individual developers in the publication was refused to me without explanation. The chief editor of iPhones.ru also did not accept my article in the DevStory rubbish, citing illiteracy and laziness to correct mistakes. Since I checked the test with a professional proofreader-editor of the magazine, then most likely he simply did not like my syllable.

In total, $ 650 was spent. The most effective advertising seemed to me on Facebook. The cost of installation was almost equal to the cost spent on advertising. However, at some point, the downloads stopped, and I decided to give up this advertisement due to lack of budget. I tried to make contextual ads as detailed as possible and even indicated the price of the application in them in order to get the maximum conversion, but according to my observations, they do not work at all.

Result

The application at the start has risen to the top 40 Russian top paid applications. But, unfortunately, because of the narrowness of the topic, it could not promote itself and smoothly "rolled into the abyss." The application is marked by the editors of Apple in the “Reference” category as “Most Popular”, but I think it doesn’t bring any additional downloads.

In the few days that the application was in the top, I was able to return the money spent on advertising. And although now there are quite a few downloads (on average 2-3 per day), they make up the net profit from the application.



I decided not to invest money in advertising anymore, but I make small updates - in particular, I added support for the iPad in the latter, at the request of users. Gradually, I optimize keywords, for which I use the very convenient SensorTowers service, in which you can see the frequency of keyword queries and the “complexity” of the competition for it.

Conclusion

To date, there are plans to create reference books on immigration to other countries, on the platform of this application. According to the statistics of queries on Google, the word “immigration” is searched 1 million times a month, and the word “immigration” is only 27 thousand, so localization of the application is at least in English.
I do not remember the exact numbers, but, according to statistics, a very small number of applications pays off. Due to the fact that my work was “free”, the application has paid off and it pleases. Suppose I have not earned a million, but the realization that the application I created is in demand by those who are interested in this topic brings satisfaction. Successes to all!