How to promote an application in the Pebble App Store

Six months ago, I bought a Pebble, found out about the “cloudy” IDE Cloud Pebble and wrote for myself an application watch face showing the current position of the moon and the planets. It seemed to work out pretty well, and I published the result in the Pebble App Store. Here I must say that the Pebble App Store does not involve the placement of paid applications, and I myself am not even a programmer, so everything was done just for fun . On the first day, the watchface was downloaded 70 times, then this figure gradually decreased and stabilized in the corridor 2-10 downloads per day.

And recently, I accidentally discovered a very simple way that allowed me to attract about six thousand users in a week. It's a lot or a little, decide for yourself - in the beginning of February the millionth copy of Pebble was sold.

Looking through the Pebble developer documentation, I noticed an interesting point in the Publishing FAQ article:
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How do I get my application collections?
Submit your application on the store and make sure it is “published”. You can contact your app.

It was not very clear what kind of "featured collections" it was and I wrote a question to the support. As a result, the following dialogue took place:

Me: The "PUBLISHING FAQ" document (at developer.getpebble.com/guides/publishing-tools/publishing-faq ) say that I can "get it". Would you please clarify what these "featured collections" are?

Support: or in the pebble picks section. So if you’re an app. We do new features every Thursday.

Me: Yes, I have a watch face called "Ecliptic", please consider featuring it. The watchface is published at
apps.getpebble.com/applications/54250a8d5394589fee0000d3 . The UUID is "40e2b243-7e1e-4f2e-bbe4-d2a6740017af". You can also find some user feedback at forums.getpebble.com/discussion/comment/127866

Support: Very cool! We'll set the watchfaces to the next section.

On the night from Thursday to Friday (do not forget about the time difference with California), I climbed into the Pebble mobile application to look at the “get watchfaces” section and was disappointed to find an advertisement for three completely foreign applications. I had to write again to the support. It turned out that they had forgotten about me because of some lining, but promised to improve in a week. Finally, a week later I saw a picture that looked so nice looking:



Here it is necessary to tell a few words about the banner. I drew it six months ago when I posted a watchface. True, I didn’t really imagine why it was needed, but I downloaded it for an emergency. Here are the recommendations for the banner (information from Pebble plus my comments).

• PNG image size of 720x320 pixels.
• The banner should contain a text with the name of the application and a brief description of what it does.
• The banner should show a screenshot of the application.
• Watch image can be taken from Pebble UI Template
• Banners are shown in groups of 2-4, and the “page indicator” will be superimposed at the bottom (white and gray circles in the screenshot above). It should be considered that these circles do not overlap important information.

Here's what happened, full-scale:



Here, besides the aforementioned Pebble UI Template, I used screenshots from the Space Engine and Stellarium , as well as pre-installed filters in GIMP .

In general, the banner met the expectations, because every Pebble user sees it when he wants to look for a new dial. Every day began to bring nearly a thousand new users. Thanks and wishes began to come to the post office, and one person even suggested working together on the application. I expected the banner to hang for a week and it will be replaced last Friday, but oddly enough it did not happen. It is still shown in the get watchfaces mobile app Pebble and the number of downloads is ten thousand. Apparently, there is no influx of people wishing to be promoted. Therefore, I am sharing this article with you and I hope that on Friday new interesting watchfaces from readers of Geektimes will replace my “Ecliptic”.