Auto Acceleration: windows marketplace, in-app billing and what else we learned over the year
In this publication, I will talk about how slowly - but surely - the project published a year ago is developing, which appeared as a simple hobby, but now (still) promising.
I already wrote about the project here and here . In a few words, this is a mobile application oriented to car enthusiasts for measuring acceleration time of 0..100 and a website where you can download data, view statistics, etc.
During the year of the project’s life, we have gained a certain amount of experience that I want to share with readers.
I'll start sharing right under the cut ...
The articles referenced above describe both the application itself and the beginning of its life path: victories and defeats, unexpected successes and deceived expectations. Today I will tell you what happened next. But first I will give a plan that was drawn up even before the publication of the appendix: the plan that we are following. And we are trying to understand whether he is good or not. Here is:
')
About points 1 and 2 it was a lot written, I summarize: the popularity of the Android version in Russia surpassed my expectations, the best way to advance was the creation of topics in the specialized forums of motorists.
A little ahead of the plan, and therefore unsuccessfully, there were attempts to communicate with investors and business angels. In fact, it is obvious: this project is of little interest to such organizations, because if it is profitable, the scale of this profit may be significant for a team of several people, but for a large company - a drop in the ocean. Most of the organizations to which I wrote, answered kindly: the project is interesting, but not for us. All the more my surprise was when a representative of a venture office contacted me and showed interest in Auto Acceleration. We have overpowered for a month, made a business plan, considered the possible profit, necessary expenses (with a fair amount of optimism, of course), and the project was presented for discussion among partners. Investigated was not “for internal reasons”. Nevertheless, this event increased the degree of inspiration of the participants, and had a positive effect on further development. After all, who knows - whether the project has already been brought to mind in terms of appearance, breadth of platform coverage and verification of monetization paths - everything could be different. You should not start searching for an investor until the prototype looks complete.
Holivary between owners of smartphones on different operating systems is an inexhaustible topic for jokes in the team. Android vs iOS is fun. In a particularly advantageous position are people with old school phones without any prefixes "smart" - because they can be humorous in both directions. One of our comrades did so until he bought, for some reason, Nokia Lumia with windows phone on board. True, the reason for smiles, basically, was not the operating system itself, but torn jeans. Due to the very "ergonomic" shape of the device: the size of a shovel, with sharp corners. Pants are torn after a week, if you carry it in your pocket.
In the head of the future developer of the WP version (we will call him Alexey), plans to conquer the market of mobile applications for WP were born. Of course, I immediately offered to take part in the project: on equal terms with the team members who have been working on Auto Acceleration for a long time (that is, completely free). But Alexei was carrying another business idea, seemingly doomed to success: create an application for viewing the weather forecast.
The situation with the weather forecast is as follows: information providers (for example, RP5) provide it completely free of charge, to a certain degree of detail. Next - already for the money. The genius of Alexey's idea was to make an RP5 proposal that they could not refuse: to offer them a completely free application to write for WP, and RP5 would give free access to paid forecasts for this application. About what a letter was written to this supplier of forecasts. From the “height of my experience” of the manager, I expressed a fair amount of pessimism, explaining why this particular advantageous offer would not interest the RP5. But Alexey is stubborn and believes in the best, the letter was sent. The answer with a refusal came on behalf of the most important superior, which is also pleasant.
Coping with disappointment, Alexey joined our ranks and very quickly wrote Auto Acceleration for WP. The design has so far taken from the Android application - we will still redo it. It looks, according to reviews of experienced WP adepts, rather poorly - but it works well.
The application was not moderated the first time: it turned out, we do not give the user the ability to disable receiving geodata. The fact that the program cannot work without them, and this is not written, did not help. I had to make a meaningless tick to turn off the GPS, and after a couple of days Auto Acceleration was published.
To promote it, we have become the usual, proven way: through specialized forums. But immediately noticeable: interest at times lower. The most popular question is “what is windows phone?” (A joke, but with some truth). There are fewer applications in the windows marketplace than on Google Play, and ours immediately got on the list of new ones. Went "flurry" downloads:
By the way, there are quite a lot of them.
The history of our project’s relationship with Apple products began in September last year, when I paid a hundred dollars for a developer’s subscription, and wondered what to do next. To do something, you need devices. After reading the stories of developers, I came to the conclusion: it is better to have an appropriate computer. It’s not very cheap, I haven’t found any familiar programmers with this good, who are ready to join the project on an equal footing with other conditions.
An attempt was made to raise money on our analog kickstarter. Unsuccessfully. In the end, I bought myself an iPad, painfully put Mac on a virtual machine, and started programming, periodically falling into despondency from the grace and flexibility of Objective C. I must say, I gradually got used to it, and now the sensations from this language are not so oppressive.
As for the development process itself, the framework, how just some things are done that we had to tinker with on Android - I have to say: iOS is nothing. The bulkiness of simple things on Objective C is partially compensated by the conciseness of complex things. Thanks to thoughtful libraries, of course. And with the advent of the wide-screen monitor at home, even the IDE has become quite convenient. Especially I want to note the wonderful mercurial client SourceTree, it is a pity that it is not for Windows (only Git).
In general, I rolled up my sleeves and practically made a measurement application for iOS, but I didn’t have enough time and energy for the future. Long-standing hatred for GUI programming manifested itself, the project for iOS has faded. Although the forums people often asked for the version for the iPhone.
And now, recently, I was contacted by a complete stranger from St. Petersburg, and offered his participation in the project on equal terms with the other developers (remember, in our case, this means free of charge)! I readily agreed not to take money from him for it, said what and how, opened the repository, set the task. A little embarrassed by the lack of real experience with Sergei, but, as it turned out, in vain. If a person is passionate about something, he can figure it out and do everything. At the moment, the application is almost ready in terms of functionality, we are waiting for the designer. I think it will be a separate publication on Habré in I am promoting, so I’m finishing up on iOS.
From advertising in the application, I immediately refused. In order to have clicks on adMob built-in ads, the user must spend a long time in the application. In our case, this is not the case. The use of Auto Acceleration is episodic, almost one-time, in nature. AirPush type advertising is a great way to kill the rating of even a good application, which I have already seen from the example of my other project. Advertising on the site - why not, but need attendance. At the moment, a day more than a hundred people come to the site. This is negligible. However, we will try: a new design is already being designed with the ability to display ads from Google or something else.
The current trend in the world of mobile software is in app billing. Shopping inside the app, if in our opinion. Check how it works, it was decided on the Android version. On May 20 of this year, an update was posted with an appropriate opportunity: buy a Premium Account for 50 rubles, making available the settings of the upper speed limit, memorizing and resetting the maximum speed via GPS and ... for now. Since then, approximately one person per day makes such a purchase. The number of installations per day is about 80. There are about 50 deletions. Therefore, approximately 30 users install and not immediately remove the application, one of them buys: 3.3% of new active users are a source of income. With an income (minus Google margin) of 30 rubles from the purchase, we have an income of one ruble from one active installation. This is a very approximate calculation, but it is interesting to understand how much you can earn on this program. Simple calculations show: last summer there were more than 10,000 active installations. So, we immediately implemented the in-app purchases, could earn about 10,000 rubles. What would not pay off even the current cost of the designer. By the way, an interesting point: If you take the number of active installations 3 months ago and now, then we will get only 350 users per month, approximately 11-12 per day. The difference of active installations and deletions per day, on which we relied earlier, is 30, which is 2.5 times more. If you use this indicator, then the potential income could already be as much as 25,000 rubles. It is clear that this calculation is extremely approximate, but it allows to evaluate the order and the picture before entering the world stage. Perhaps we should make the cost of a premium account higher!
Here is a picture of income statistics:
With the windows phone version, a nuance has surfaced: 7.x does not support in app billing, and many existing devices (including the ones we have) do not support windows phone 8. Given the current distribution of this platform, you must make a free application: otherwise feedback will not receive. It was decided to make a free and paid (Pro) version. This is a slightly different model, let's see how it works: laid out, watching. While there is nothing to boast, it is not in demand.
In the course of thinking, for iOS, they gathered to conduct an experiment with an exclusively paid version: after all, users of apple devices are more willing to buy programs than owners of android, and there are many more of them than owners of windows phone. As they say, we will see. I’ll notify about the release of iOS version separately, and will talk about the initial results of monetization in this way.
Everything stated in this section is new and poorly studied for us. In the comments to the publication I will be glad to hear tips, learn about the experience of readers in these matters.
About the market of mobile applications they write a lot, and sometimes interesting. After our Android application had already “settled down”, I began to study other platforms, to read everything. With the release of the windows phone version, the first reviews appeared. Based on all this, I concluded: Android users are the least demanding on application design. In the AppStore, without external beauty, there is nothing to catch at all, and the owners of windows phone devices get annoyed when they do not see tiles that are traditional for the system.
Therefore, on the AppStore, we will not get at all with what is now, and the win phone application will be redone first.
In general, design is the most expensive item of expenditure in this project: it was not possible to find a good designer-enthusiast, an inexpensive freelance designer did the work according to the cost of services, and as a result we completely remake it. It’s not worth saving on design, it should be taken as a rule to all authors of applications for smartphones.
I will try to summarize everything that we have learned and understood during this time, based on a specific example:
And most importantly - do what interests you. I finally came up with a good answer to the question of the evil skeptics “Why do you need this application !?”: for those users who do not have such a question. If any, this is a good prospect to use.
I already wrote about the project here and here . In a few words, this is a mobile application oriented to car enthusiasts for measuring acceleration time of 0..100 and a website where you can download data, view statistics, etc.
During the year of the project’s life, we have gained a certain amount of experience that I want to share with readers.
I'll start sharing right under the cut ...
The articles referenced above describe both the application itself and the beginning of its life path: victories and defeats, unexpected successes and deceived expectations. Today I will tell you what happened next. But first I will give a plan that was drawn up even before the publication of the appendix: the plan that we are following. And we are trying to understand whether he is good or not. Here is:
About plans
- Development and publication for the Russian-speaking audience of the application on Android, publishing the site (in the ru zone, in Russian).
- Promotion of the application in various ways, a comparative analysis of effectiveness.
- Development and publication for the Russian-speaking audience of the application on iOS, windows phone.
- Testing of various ways of monetization.
- Ordering a new site design and applications from a professional designer, changing the appearance of the site and applications to look serious, and not as a collective farm craft.
- Analysis of the possibility of attracting an investor, publisher, partner - for competent output of the application to the world market If there is an opportunity - we attract.
- Development of a bilingual (Russian and English) version of the site, development of a separate English (or adding a language choice in the current) version of the application, publishing a project for the whole world (taking into account the experience gained in paragraph 2 and 4)
- Profit.
')
About points 1 and 2 it was a lot written, I summarize: the popularity of the Android version in Russia surpassed my expectations, the best way to advance was the creation of topics in the specialized forums of motorists.
A little ahead of the plan, and therefore unsuccessfully, there were attempts to communicate with investors and business angels. In fact, it is obvious: this project is of little interest to such organizations, because if it is profitable, the scale of this profit may be significant for a team of several people, but for a large company - a drop in the ocean. Most of the organizations to which I wrote, answered kindly: the project is interesting, but not for us. All the more my surprise was when a representative of a venture office contacted me and showed interest in Auto Acceleration. We have overpowered for a month, made a business plan, considered the possible profit, necessary expenses (with a fair amount of optimism, of course), and the project was presented for discussion among partners. Investigated was not “for internal reasons”. Nevertheless, this event increased the degree of inspiration of the participants, and had a positive effect on further development. After all, who knows - whether the project has already been brought to mind in terms of appearance, breadth of platform coverage and verification of monetization paths - everything could be different. You should not start searching for an investor until the prototype looks complete.
Expansion on windows marketplace
Holivary between owners of smartphones on different operating systems is an inexhaustible topic for jokes in the team. Android vs iOS is fun. In a particularly advantageous position are people with old school phones without any prefixes "smart" - because they can be humorous in both directions. One of our comrades did so until he bought, for some reason, Nokia Lumia with windows phone on board. True, the reason for smiles, basically, was not the operating system itself, but torn jeans. Due to the very "ergonomic" shape of the device: the size of a shovel, with sharp corners. Pants are torn after a week, if you carry it in your pocket.
In the head of the future developer of the WP version (we will call him Alexey), plans to conquer the market of mobile applications for WP were born. Of course, I immediately offered to take part in the project: on equal terms with the team members who have been working on Auto Acceleration for a long time (that is, completely free). But Alexei was carrying another business idea, seemingly doomed to success: create an application for viewing the weather forecast.
The situation with the weather forecast is as follows: information providers (for example, RP5) provide it completely free of charge, to a certain degree of detail. Next - already for the money. The genius of Alexey's idea was to make an RP5 proposal that they could not refuse: to offer them a completely free application to write for WP, and RP5 would give free access to paid forecasts for this application. About what a letter was written to this supplier of forecasts. From the “height of my experience” of the manager, I expressed a fair amount of pessimism, explaining why this particular advantageous offer would not interest the RP5. But Alexey is stubborn and believes in the best, the letter was sent. The answer with a refusal came on behalf of the most important superior, which is also pleasant.
Coping with disappointment, Alexey joined our ranks and very quickly wrote Auto Acceleration for WP. The design has so far taken from the Android application - we will still redo it. It looks, according to reviews of experienced WP adepts, rather poorly - but it works well.
The application was not moderated the first time: it turned out, we do not give the user the ability to disable receiving geodata. The fact that the program cannot work without them, and this is not written, did not help. I had to make a meaningless tick to turn off the GPS, and after a couple of days Auto Acceleration was published.
To promote it, we have become the usual, proven way: through specialized forums. But immediately noticeable: interest at times lower. The most popular question is “what is windows phone?” (A joke, but with some truth). There are fewer applications in the windows marketplace than on Google Play, and ours immediately got on the list of new ones. Went "flurry" downloads:
By the way, there are quite a lot of them.
IOS Pro
The history of our project’s relationship with Apple products began in September last year, when I paid a hundred dollars for a developer’s subscription, and wondered what to do next. To do something, you need devices. After reading the stories of developers, I came to the conclusion: it is better to have an appropriate computer. It’s not very cheap, I haven’t found any familiar programmers with this good, who are ready to join the project on an equal footing with other conditions.
An attempt was made to raise money on our analog kickstarter. Unsuccessfully. In the end, I bought myself an iPad, painfully put Mac on a virtual machine, and started programming, periodically falling into despondency from the grace and flexibility of Objective C. I must say, I gradually got used to it, and now the sensations from this language are not so oppressive.
As for the development process itself, the framework, how just some things are done that we had to tinker with on Android - I have to say: iOS is nothing. The bulkiness of simple things on Objective C is partially compensated by the conciseness of complex things. Thanks to thoughtful libraries, of course. And with the advent of the wide-screen monitor at home, even the IDE has become quite convenient. Especially I want to note the wonderful mercurial client SourceTree, it is a pity that it is not for Windows (only Git).
In general, I rolled up my sleeves and practically made a measurement application for iOS, but I didn’t have enough time and energy for the future. Long-standing hatred for GUI programming manifested itself, the project for iOS has faded. Although the forums people often asked for the version for the iPhone.
And now, recently, I was contacted by a complete stranger from St. Petersburg, and offered his participation in the project on equal terms with the other developers (remember, in our case, this means free of charge)! I readily agreed not to take money from him for it, said what and how, opened the repository, set the task. A little embarrassed by the lack of real experience with Sergei, but, as it turned out, in vain. If a person is passionate about something, he can figure it out and do everything. At the moment, the application is almost ready in terms of functionality, we are waiting for the designer. I think it will be a separate publication on Habré in I am promoting, so I’m finishing up on iOS.
Trial of the pen in monetization
From advertising in the application, I immediately refused. In order to have clicks on adMob built-in ads, the user must spend a long time in the application. In our case, this is not the case. The use of Auto Acceleration is episodic, almost one-time, in nature. AirPush type advertising is a great way to kill the rating of even a good application, which I have already seen from the example of my other project. Advertising on the site - why not, but need attendance. At the moment, a day more than a hundred people come to the site. This is negligible. However, we will try: a new design is already being designed with the ability to display ads from Google or something else.
The current trend in the world of mobile software is in app billing. Shopping inside the app, if in our opinion. Check how it works, it was decided on the Android version. On May 20 of this year, an update was posted with an appropriate opportunity: buy a Premium Account for 50 rubles, making available the settings of the upper speed limit, memorizing and resetting the maximum speed via GPS and ... for now. Since then, approximately one person per day makes such a purchase. The number of installations per day is about 80. There are about 50 deletions. Therefore, approximately 30 users install and not immediately remove the application, one of them buys: 3.3% of new active users are a source of income. With an income (minus Google margin) of 30 rubles from the purchase, we have an income of one ruble from one active installation. This is a very approximate calculation, but it is interesting to understand how much you can earn on this program. Simple calculations show: last summer there were more than 10,000 active installations. So, we immediately implemented the in-app purchases, could earn about 10,000 rubles. What would not pay off even the current cost of the designer. By the way, an interesting point: If you take the number of active installations 3 months ago and now, then we will get only 350 users per month, approximately 11-12 per day. The difference of active installations and deletions per day, on which we relied earlier, is 30, which is 2.5 times more. If you use this indicator, then the potential income could already be as much as 25,000 rubles. It is clear that this calculation is extremely approximate, but it allows to evaluate the order and the picture before entering the world stage. Perhaps we should make the cost of a premium account higher!
Here is a picture of income statistics:
With the windows phone version, a nuance has surfaced: 7.x does not support in app billing, and many existing devices (including the ones we have) do not support windows phone 8. Given the current distribution of this platform, you must make a free application: otherwise feedback will not receive. It was decided to make a free and paid (Pro) version. This is a slightly different model, let's see how it works: laid out, watching. While there is nothing to boast, it is not in demand.
In the course of thinking, for iOS, they gathered to conduct an experiment with an exclusively paid version: after all, users of apple devices are more willing to buy programs than owners of android, and there are many more of them than owners of windows phone. As they say, we will see. I’ll notify about the release of iOS version separately, and will talk about the initial results of monetization in this way.
Everything stated in this section is new and poorly studied for us. In the comments to the publication I will be glad to hear tips, learn about the experience of readers in these matters.
About design
About the market of mobile applications they write a lot, and sometimes interesting. After our Android application had already “settled down”, I began to study other platforms, to read everything. With the release of the windows phone version, the first reviews appeared. Based on all this, I concluded: Android users are the least demanding on application design. In the AppStore, without external beauty, there is nothing to catch at all, and the owners of windows phone devices get annoyed when they do not see tiles that are traditional for the system.
Therefore, on the AppStore, we will not get at all with what is now, and the win phone application will be redone first.
In general, design is the most expensive item of expenditure in this project: it was not possible to find a good designer-enthusiast, an inexpensive freelance designer did the work according to the cost of services, and as a result we completely remake it. It’s not worth saving on design, it should be taken as a rule to all authors of applications for smartphones.
findings
I will try to summarize everything that we have learned and understood during this time, based on a specific example:
- If you have an interesting free application, and you attach a paid opportunity to it at least a little interesting, but not solving other problems, then you can count on ~ 3% of purchases from the number of users.
- If you have an interesting free application, and you make a paid one, you still have to manage to promote it and sell it: in this aspect, in-app purchase looks preferable.
- Meet on clothes. A well-designed design will allow you to avoid negative feedback from users who simply didn’t like it - and didn’t begin to understand the functionality.
- Windows phone is an interesting market in terms of entry threshold. Our application without a special promotion fell under the heading "new", and already on the 4th page in the "top free" (right next to the "Tickets for traffic rules of the Russian Federation!"), And the number of downloads in the first weeks is more than it was on Google Play. But about the Android version, I wrote much more where I could, including on Habré
- Do not rush to engage in dialogue with investors, publishers. For such projects, this should be done when it is already good.
And most importantly - do what interests you. I finally came up with a good answer to the question of the evil skeptics “Why do you need this application !?”: for those users who do not have such a question. If any, this is a good prospect to use.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/186618/
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