The first experience of developing iOS applications and thinking about marketing and advertising
... well, I created the game. And it was like that.
A few months ago, my boss approached and was pleased that from today, in addition to my main responsibilities, I would have to do iOS applications (not very complex, but necessary for work), that Mac mini was bought for me and that I am the most experienced of all on the part of Apple products (this is true, since your humble servant has been walking with the 1st iPad for the fourth year already). Okay.
After two or three weeks, when I had a little experience with Mac OS X, XCode and Objective-C, I realized that it would be great to create my application from scratch and get to know the development process from idea to uploading in the AppStore. So I did, sacrificing laziness and free time in the evenings.
As a development environment (I don’t have a MacOS X computer at home), the VMWare virtual machine with MacOS X Mountain Lion was chosen from the guys from iAtkos (on my laptop with an Intel Core i7, the machine worked very decently). The idea that I was going to do was chosen as an idea, but I couldn’t reach it: a simple tile puzzle. I reasoned that for an inexperienced developer (this is about me) to create game mechanics will not be difficult (as it turned out). To make the game unique, it was decided to use pictures that my dad draws (yes, he is an artist) in his spare time for entertainment. And to make it absolutely good, it was decided for some puzzles to show videos of how they were drawn (many people like YouTube videos and I am not an exception).
')
The skeleton of the game was made quickly and the creation of design began, which was given, honestly, with difficulty. The basis was taken my old sketch:
With Photoshop magic, this drawing was turned into this:
This is not a masterpiece, but, as it seemed to me, and not quite a nightmare, so they stopped at this option.
When the game was 70% ready, it was shown to work colleagues, from which very good advice was obtained on the graphic part (“terrible icon”, “change label colors,” etc.). In addition, it was advised to quickly upload to the AppStore when I’ll fix everything. But I became stubborn, because I wanted to attach a helper who would tell the user what to know when starting the program. So the release was postponed.
Music and sounds are a very important part of the game program, so it was decided not to skimp and spend money. As a result, media files for 2115 rubles were purchased on the site www.pond5.com . Yes, a little expensive, so the music that accompanies the video was decided to be taken from the good guys from Destiny Records and OnAirStudio , about which I accidentally learned from the Russian fighter Arthur (BlackSilverUFA), for which he was especially grateful. These teams create good quality music and allow them to be used in their projects, provided that you say about them somewhere: inside the program or in the YouTube video description. I thanked them in the About section.
In the process of working on the music, it was decided to buy for a change the license of the Apple developer and check how the game works on the physical device (we had bought an iPhone 4 for four with colleagues). As it turned out bad. The point is that for saving I use SQLite database (with which I work, by the way, via https://github.com/ccgus/fmdb , which greatly simplified the development process) and nothing was written to the physical device, although on the emulator everything was great. The site stackoverflow.com helped, on the cat I found out that the base needs to be copied to the directory available for writing. As a result, the code was added to ViewDidLoad:
There were no more problems in the program and everything worked surprisingly well on the physical device.
The option with In App Purchase was chosen as monetization. Advertising in mobile applications I do not really like. From how to work with the In App, I wrote epazzz very well in the article “iPhone Development: Integrating In-App Purchases” . But I still took the code and additional information here (see the answer from Jojodmo ): stackoverflow.com/questions/19556336/how-do-you-add-an-in-app-purchase-to-an-ios-application . This greatly simplified and accelerated development. The result was this logic: the game has 15 free puzzles. Then a window appears with a very sad cat, which offers to unlock the entire game. After that, money is supposed to never be asked for.
Now the game was completely ready and it was time to lay out in the AppStore. Check lasted 10 days. Apparently, because the review took place both the game itself and the In App Purchase. Once they returned with the status of Metadata Rejected and the censor wrote that he did not understand how I could find it in the In App program. Apparently, in the fields marked as Notes, it was necessary not to leave the emoticons, but to write clear instructions to the person. It happens. After the steps were provided, the game quickly appeared in the store. And the last phase has come ...
Promotion. To be honest, this phase is still ongoing. The game is already available for a month and a half, so a number of articles were read about marketing, the knowledge of which is being tried. So far, it turns out not very much, accumulated experience. So, what was done:
1. Requests for a FREE review were sent to sites: appsafari.com , tuaw.com , appstoreapps.com , 148apps.com , mobilestartupz.com , iPhones.ru , appadvice.com , iPhones.ru , techmafia.net .
Bottom line: only people responded to techmafia.net (now we need to write an article for them in English). From the rest, there is no answer yet, but on most English-language sites there is a very convenient form for sending requests for review, so maybe someone will come in handy.
2. Advertising on Facebook was made for 300 rubles. This brought a stable 3 downloads per day. With social networks in general in terms of advertising a mobile application did not work effectively. But, probably, it's about me, because I do not use them and have little idea how it all works.
3. They say that you can make a post on pikabu and 9gag and this will increase the number of downloads. And there is even a positive experience. But I don’t use these sites, I’ve been cursed at pikabu, so I decided to leave the idea for later.
4. What doubled the number of downloads was the fifth update, which brought the game optimization for the iPad screen (there used to be only the iPhone version).
5. Using the sensortower.com , searchman.com and www.mobiledevhq.com sites, we worked on keywords. Also in iTunesConnect, in addition to the name of the application, keywords were also inserted in the Name field (that is, instead of, for example, “From Seville to Grenada”, there was “From Seville to Grenada - an excellent puzzle for girls” (these names are not real, but just an example )).
6. In addition, according to the latest rumors, the downloadability of the application is greatly affected by the fact that the page in the AppStore is translated into different languages. For me it is Russian, English and French. I can’t say anything about the effect, because The last language was added quite recently and there are no users in France yet.
7. And of course the standard: availability of the site with a link to the program and a promotional video on YouTube. We made the site together with a work colleague (I have a lot of good people at work), and the video was recorded using the built-in Mac OS X Yosemite, processed on the iPad in iMovie, and then sent to Photoshop to overlay the background. In the end, it turned out like this:
And the last thing that has been done so far - an analyst has been added. This was very easy to do using Parse.com . It's easy, because there is a very thoughtful interface and step-by-step instructions with instructions on what exactly should be done. So the analytics was added in a few minutes and now I will at least know how many users reached the In App dialog, and how many could not even solve the first puzzle.
To complete: development cost. As you can see, I managed to meet a small amount:
- 2 000 rubles for iPhone 4;
- $ 100 (at the old rate) for a developer license;
- almost 2 115 rubles for sounds and music;
- 300 rubles for advertising on Facebook;
- 340 rubles for a cake for colleagues.
I read on the web that the minimum cost of developing an iOS application is $ 5,000. Apparently, when this amount was calculated, some other parameters were taken into account, since in my case, obviously less. On the other hand, I had very good development conditions: there was no limit on time, there was no shortage of test devices either, sinceat work there is a whole range of devices ... In general, there were no problems with the devices. Testing was conducted jointly, together with colleagues, and the translation into English, French and German was done by two fellow translators, for which I am very grateful to them. And I translated it into Ukrainian myself (although so far there are only Russian and English in the game; I will attach other languages ​​later). The design was created by me in Photoshop. When there was a need for new pictures (buttons, cats, assistant girl), I explained everything to my artist and he drew everything he needed. Then, after a violent outburst of emotions, the pictures were adjusted, drawn and given to me. And everything, naturally, is free.
Earn yet. I think, maybe, after all, give people a choice: either buy an In App, or turn on advertising (despite the fact that at the beginning of the article I said I was against it). I will be glad to good advice.
I say goodbye to this. Who read - well done, and who is tired - I sincerely apologize. Bye Bye Bye.
A few months ago, my boss approached and was pleased that from today, in addition to my main responsibilities, I would have to do iOS applications (not very complex, but necessary for work), that Mac mini was bought for me and that I am the most experienced of all on the part of Apple products (this is true, since your humble servant has been walking with the 1st iPad for the fourth year already). Okay.
After two or three weeks, when I had a little experience with Mac OS X, XCode and Objective-C, I realized that it would be great to create my application from scratch and get to know the development process from idea to uploading in the AppStore. So I did, sacrificing laziness and free time in the evenings.
As a development environment (I don’t have a MacOS X computer at home), the VMWare virtual machine with MacOS X Mountain Lion was chosen from the guys from iAtkos (on my laptop with an Intel Core i7, the machine worked very decently). The idea that I was going to do was chosen as an idea, but I couldn’t reach it: a simple tile puzzle. I reasoned that for an inexperienced developer (this is about me) to create game mechanics will not be difficult (as it turned out). To make the game unique, it was decided to use pictures that my dad draws (yes, he is an artist) in his spare time for entertainment. And to make it absolutely good, it was decided for some puzzles to show videos of how they were drawn (many people like YouTube videos and I am not an exception).
')
The skeleton of the game was made quickly and the creation of design began, which was given, honestly, with difficulty. The basis was taken my old sketch:
With Photoshop magic, this drawing was turned into this:
This is not a masterpiece, but, as it seemed to me, and not quite a nightmare, so they stopped at this option.
When the game was 70% ready, it was shown to work colleagues, from which very good advice was obtained on the graphic part (“terrible icon”, “change label colors,” etc.). In addition, it was advised to quickly upload to the AppStore when I’ll fix everything. But I became stubborn, because I wanted to attach a helper who would tell the user what to know when starting the program. So the release was postponed.
Music and sounds are a very important part of the game program, so it was decided not to skimp and spend money. As a result, media files for 2115 rubles were purchased on the site www.pond5.com . Yes, a little expensive, so the music that accompanies the video was decided to be taken from the good guys from Destiny Records and OnAirStudio , about which I accidentally learned from the Russian fighter Arthur (BlackSilverUFA), for which he was especially grateful. These teams create good quality music and allow them to be used in their projects, provided that you say about them somewhere: inside the program or in the YouTube video description. I thanked them in the About section.
In the process of working on the music, it was decided to buy for a change the license of the Apple developer and check how the game works on the physical device (we had bought an iPhone 4 for four with colleagues). As it turned out bad. The point is that for saving I use SQLite database (with which I work, by the way, via https://github.com/ccgus/fmdb , which greatly simplified the development process) and nothing was written to the physical device, although on the emulator everything was great. The site stackoverflow.com helped, on the cat I found out that the base needs to be copied to the directory available for writing. As a result, the code was added to ViewDidLoad:
NSArray *cachePath = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSCachesDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES); NSString *cacheDir = [cachePath objectAtIndex:0]; gameSavesDB = [cacheDir stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"gameSaves.db"]; NSFileManager *fileManager = [NSFileManager defaultManager]; if (![fileManager fileExistsAtPath:gameSavesDB]){ NSString *databasePathFromApp = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath] stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"gameSaves.db"]; NSError *error; [fileManager copyItemAtPath:databasePathFromApp toPath:gameSavesDB error:&error]; if (error != nil){ NSLog(@"[Database: Error]%@", error); } } There were no more problems in the program and everything worked surprisingly well on the physical device.
The option with In App Purchase was chosen as monetization. Advertising in mobile applications I do not really like. From how to work with the In App, I wrote epazzz very well in the article “iPhone Development: Integrating In-App Purchases” . But I still took the code and additional information here (see the answer from Jojodmo ): stackoverflow.com/questions/19556336/how-do-you-add-an-in-app-purchase-to-an-ios-application . This greatly simplified and accelerated development. The result was this logic: the game has 15 free puzzles. Then a window appears with a very sad cat, which offers to unlock the entire game. After that, money is supposed to never be asked for.
Now the game was completely ready and it was time to lay out in the AppStore. Check lasted 10 days. Apparently, because the review took place both the game itself and the In App Purchase. Once they returned with the status of Metadata Rejected and the censor wrote that he did not understand how I could find it in the In App program. Apparently, in the fields marked as Notes, it was necessary not to leave the emoticons, but to write clear instructions to the person. It happens. After the steps were provided, the game quickly appeared in the store. And the last phase has come ...
Promotion. To be honest, this phase is still ongoing. The game is already available for a month and a half, so a number of articles were read about marketing, the knowledge of which is being tried. So far, it turns out not very much, accumulated experience. So, what was done:
1. Requests for a FREE review were sent to sites: appsafari.com , tuaw.com , appstoreapps.com , 148apps.com , mobilestartupz.com , iPhones.ru , appadvice.com , iPhones.ru , techmafia.net .
Bottom line: only people responded to techmafia.net (now we need to write an article for them in English). From the rest, there is no answer yet, but on most English-language sites there is a very convenient form for sending requests for review, so maybe someone will come in handy.
2. Advertising on Facebook was made for 300 rubles. This brought a stable 3 downloads per day. With social networks in general in terms of advertising a mobile application did not work effectively. But, probably, it's about me, because I do not use them and have little idea how it all works.
3. They say that you can make a post on pikabu and 9gag and this will increase the number of downloads. And there is even a positive experience. But I don’t use these sites, I’ve been cursed at pikabu, so I decided to leave the idea for later.
4. What doubled the number of downloads was the fifth update, which brought the game optimization for the iPad screen (there used to be only the iPhone version).
5. Using the sensortower.com , searchman.com and www.mobiledevhq.com sites, we worked on keywords. Also in iTunesConnect, in addition to the name of the application, keywords were also inserted in the Name field (that is, instead of, for example, “From Seville to Grenada”, there was “From Seville to Grenada - an excellent puzzle for girls” (these names are not real, but just an example )).
6. In addition, according to the latest rumors, the downloadability of the application is greatly affected by the fact that the page in the AppStore is translated into different languages. For me it is Russian, English and French. I can’t say anything about the effect, because The last language was added quite recently and there are no users in France yet.
7. And of course the standard: availability of the site with a link to the program and a promotional video on YouTube. We made the site together with a work colleague (I have a lot of good people at work), and the video was recorded using the built-in Mac OS X Yosemite, processed on the iPad in iMovie, and then sent to Photoshop to overlay the background. In the end, it turned out like this:
And the last thing that has been done so far - an analyst has been added. This was very easy to do using Parse.com . It's easy, because there is a very thoughtful interface and step-by-step instructions with instructions on what exactly should be done. So the analytics was added in a few minutes and now I will at least know how many users reached the In App dialog, and how many could not even solve the first puzzle.
To complete: development cost. As you can see, I managed to meet a small amount:
- 2 000 rubles for iPhone 4;
- $ 100 (at the old rate) for a developer license;
- almost 2 115 rubles for sounds and music;
- 300 rubles for advertising on Facebook;
- 340 rubles for a cake for colleagues.
I read on the web that the minimum cost of developing an iOS application is $ 5,000. Apparently, when this amount was calculated, some other parameters were taken into account, since in my case, obviously less. On the other hand, I had very good development conditions: there was no limit on time, there was no shortage of test devices either, since
Earn yet. I think, maybe, after all, give people a choice: either buy an In App, or turn on advertising (despite the fact that at the beginning of the article I said I was against it). I will be glad to good advice.
I say goodbye to this. Who read - well done, and who is tired - I sincerely apologize. Bye Bye Bye.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/247489/
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