Everything is all about marketing now. Getting coverage and the word out there - makes a big difference (not that I've done that with my apps).
How are you going to compete with the likes of EA, LucasArts, ngmoco, Konami and capcom with massive budgets and connections? For me it seems you need to create something different/wonky that people will talk about, or the staff likes, to get on the top 25 or other lists.
Simply making something and putting it up there won't make you shit, I know I got one up there.
>> An Orwellian review team which does not communicate to anyone (even inside Apple), uneven policies which change at random times leading to horror stories form Shaken Babies to Google Voices
I agree for the most part with this. Any sort of crazy idea I have, I immediately think I'm not gonna bother with this because it takes to much time to develop just to be denied by Apple, for some arcane reason, and get a rejection letter with a nondescript problem. Other problems with the review process, you have absolutely no idea how long it will take.
I would love to get some sort of lead time, or amount of apps before yours.
For me it's a crap shoot, but I make things I like and want, if I plan to send it to the store, because I think others might enjoy them, I test them out to the best of my potential and try to conform to Apple's HIG.
This demonstrates that whilst there's plenty of valid criticism of Apple's handling of the AppStore, it's your job to build something that people want.
Another developer who fails to grasp the difference between distribution (the App Store) and marketing (the bit you must do to raise awareness of your application).
I don't see why the developers can't do additional marketing outside of the App Store. If the App Store didn't exist they would need to do their normal indie developer advertising. Why can't they do that now? And just treat random App Store sales as gravy?
So the dude becomes an indie Mac developer. He's going to have advertise and promote his new Mac app. Why can't he do the same with the iPhone app?
number of reasons make it much harder to advertise to the app store.
there's so many steps. you go from your marketing iPhone site, to the app store page of you app, and then you have the chance to buy it. thats at least one, if not two more steps. why can't you have a nice big "buy now" button on your website?
it's a black box. you can't see what works, you have no way of knowing if 75% of your tweets convert into a sale, and only 10% via fusionads.net - its not possible to tell.
iTunes or iPhone only. Good luck buying an app if you're at work, or on any computer where you don't have your iPhone set up on. Instantly preventing a) apps over 10MB from being installed, b) the casual news browsing "oh that looks like a cool app" you do whilst at work.
no refunds or trials. it prevents users from downloading ~$5 applications just because - you're not allowed to make apps that "explode" after 30 days. If you give away free trial apps thats fine, but a ton more work for the developer.
and lets ignore the fact you might get your application held up for weeks after you've been told it'll launch 1st August - after you've got all your press ready and such, they might just decide to not release it then. no reason why.
note: we're launching an iPhone app, and i agree with you - its all about the marketing, and thats why I've switched from dev to marketing for the next ~2 months before launch to get our iPhone app rocking.
These are all valid complaints. And yet, somewhere, a Procter and Gamble marketing executive from the 1950s is laughing at you.
Before 1997 (more or less) companies built mighty marketing empires on print ads, radio ads, and TV ads. No direct way to track sales, except for coupons, which had a down-market vibe. No selling soap to people while at work -- people had to physically go to a store to buy. (People at work couldn't even see the ads for your soap, unless they were allowed to read the paper on the job.) Yeah, there were refunds and trials for many products, but they required driving back to the store to return something.
It was like the dark ages! And, yet, go to a grocery store, or even a toy store, and count the successful products that were launched back then.
My interpretation of the current iPhone developer malaise is that the gold rush is over. Many of the people making theatrical exits from the platform are its fair-weather friends -- they were bound to leave, in droves, once they discovered that it's no longer a matter of putting up your farting app on the Store and watching the money roll in. The reason 99% of iPhone app marketing is via the Store is that this strategy used to work, in the early days, so nobody bothered to learn any other strategy. Now, faced with the grim reality that marketing software is slow, patient work, a lot of people are getting right back out of the business again, or desperately lobbying Apple to somehow turn the magic spigot back on (as if their competitors will vanish once Apple fixes some of its problems). Or they're cutting their prices to the bone, starving themselves in the process, like a desperate gambler throwing everything into the pot.
I was just reading about the real California gold rush. In 1848 you could literally walk to the right place in the Sierras, turn over one rock, and find a gold nugget the size of your fist. By 1849 thousands of miners had arrived and had turned over every rock, there was no more easy money to be made, and a lot of aspiring miners were staggering around the landscape, hungry and poor. Of course, the majority of the gold was actually mined in later years, by mining companies using gigantic hoses that could turn entire mountains into dust and pass the dust through separators. But that required capital, and a relatively long-term plan. The pick-and-shovel miners often preferred to just look around for the next gold rush; a lot of them ran greedily to Alaska when gold was found there. Not such a great plan: The post-rush climate was a lot colder and harsher in Alaska.
I firmly agree with both of your points, pclark and mfish. Marketing is the missing piece for a lot of developers, but having tried a fair amount of marketing ourself (news interviews, print/newspaper, blogs, etc.) — there are some inherent problems and particularly for indie/bootstrappers.
The pricing pressure to .99 distorts consumer's perception of value, therefore your marketing margins are often wiped out if you give in. A lot of people think $.99 is what every app should cost, they really do.
It's impossible to get quality metrics on your advertising initiatives. There's no way to really track an accurate conversation so you don't really know what works and what doesn't. You can loosely connect a few stats you setup yourself, but it's pretty weak and time consuming of a process - certainly a step backwards.
The inability to offer a demo of your product is a secondary issue with conversation. And, the inability to have a two-way conversation with user reviews, especially the ones that leave arm-chair feedback about your product and have no idea what they are talking about.
It's easy to say "marketing is a quick fix" for everyones problems. It's not, believe me, but that's not to say we're quitting anytime soon. The beauty of our company structure is that we're so low cost to operate that we essentially have an infinite number of iterations. We can pickup the mic after the fat lady has sung.
We can pickup the mic after the fat lady has sung.
Yeah, that's the problem here -- you may need to be very patient.
For six months the iPhone platform looked like a gold mine for indie developers. Then the gold mine tapped out. Now we still don't know what the long-term prospects for indie developers are, because the data we have to date was tainted by the presence of the gold rush. The platform was too successful too soon:
If the market really is non-viable for indie developers, it will take time to figure it out and take steps. Apple won't fix something if it doesn't seem to be broken.
In the meantime, the iPhone app market may be dominated by major players with deep pockets, the way software marketing used to be before the Web. You might want to band together with some peers. Read up on the early history of personal computer software -- in which new companies like Broderbund, Sierra On-Line, and Electronic Arts recruited teams of formerly independent developers who wanted more marketing and sales clout than they could get from placing classified ads in the backs of computer-hobbyist magazines.
The problem is that when you're forced to sell your product for $0.99 (actually $0.69) none of the traditional marketing methods are cost effective. So the only way to make money is either getting mainstream press coverage, or having Apple feature your app. Both of those are random events unless you have a brand name or a big marketing budget.
The bottom line is that publishing an app is essentially playing the lottery.
You don't necessarily have to have a huge marketing budget to get you app out there. It's possible things like freebies and word of mouth to get you product off the ground.. that is assuming that it's any good.
And if you have a particular niche market/customer base that you are aiming at you should already know what forums/places that they frequent. Just figure out a way to get the message/word of mouth to them. Offer a limited amount of 'free' copies as a 'beta' test round or something. Make sure you have an open dialog if it is a close-knit community. Or consider purchasing some sort of targeted advertising on those particular sites... It's not too hard to come up with a laundry list of things to attempt.
I'm sure that people smarter than I at marketing have book galore to peruse... People complaining because the AppStore isn't doing a good enough job of marketing _for_ them don't gain any sympathy from me.
Rubbish. How on earth does a distribution channel limit ones marketing ability? These are completely orthogonal aspects of producing a successful product.
Do you think movie studios hope that you'll stumble across their film by looking at the show times of your local theater? Do Authors pray that you'll stumble across their book in the M-R fiction section of a bookstore?
Unfortunately, smaller independent films and authors probably do hope you stumble upon their works -- it's notoriously difficult to sell books unless you are picked up by a major publisher.
I think his point is that things like the App store should be more of a meritocracy (like the web), but it's becoming increasingly difficult for smaller players to get noticed to due the economics (strong downward pricing pressure) and Apple's policies (random rejection can destroy months of work). One thing they don't mention is how difficult it is to figure out where your sales are coming from; there's no Google analytics or referrer logs for app sales -- you have to do things like become your own affiliate through LinkShare and assign different codes to your own links if you have multiple distribution channels.
A list of all the things one can do to raise the profile and track the marketing of a single developer app would be a useful resource. Hell, if you put together a decent sized ebook, it would probably be a reasonable successful product. If you could reach the right audience.
You're right that the App Store distribution channel does not limit a developer's marketing ability. It does, however, limit the pricing. The App Store is structured to directly reward high sales with exposure, creating a feedback loop that drives prices down. As an indie developer, I can support a modest marketing budget that creates modest sales if I can charge $29 for my app, but I can't do it at 99 cents.
Not all distribution channels are created equal, and this particular one is so biased toward high volume/low price that an indie can't get any traction.
The distribution channel for SmartPhone software is the Internet. You don't see BlackBerry apps being sold at retail B&M stores in tiny little boxes. Developers sell their apps usually through a web site with their own checkout system that delivers a binary to the user who then must figure out how to install it. With the iTunes store the first part of the model should be the same -- the developer creates a web site and promotes their application through ad buys, promo copies to reviewers, and whatever other tactics they think will work. The only difference is the checkout stage would link to the iTunes Store URL to complete the transaction.
I think all these developers are really missing the point that built in App Stores on devices are simply a delivery medium. You shouldn't rely on it to be a discovery medium for potential customers.
As I note in my comment above, the App Store is not merely a neutral distribution conduit, it is also (by far) the primary discovery medium. The vast majority of app shoppers buy from the top lists. And the top lists are systematically structured to promote high volume, which causes devs to lower their price. That's why even the EAs of the world are calling on Apple to at least go by revenue rather than units.
The App Store is 'simply a delivery medium' only in the same sense that Fox News is 'fair and balanced'.
The app store is not awesome for consumers. Like he says, it is poorly organized (why can't they implement tagging?). Finding something worth spending money on is time consuming and near impossible. Finding something that is free and interesting is also quite difficult. I monitor Pinch Media's feeds, and filter based on free, but most of the apps are worthless.
As for pricing, I think the realistic price for a well developed app is $5-10. I have spent money on a few games, but most of the non-game apps are either useless or targeted at something outside my wants.
A great example of a free app is Word Warp. It is one of my most frequently used apps. Supposedly, they make serious cash from advertising. If it's a game, and worth replaying, you can make good money. Maybe there's a way to do this w/ non-games that isn't too intrusive.
Oh wait, so it's just like the criticism thrown at Windows Mobile devices by Apple fanatics that "sure there's lots of software [for Windows Mobile] but there's so much of it it's impossible to sort through and determine quality."
How are you going to compete with the likes of EA, LucasArts, ngmoco, Konami and capcom with massive budgets and connections? For me it seems you need to create something different/wonky that people will talk about, or the staff likes, to get on the top 25 or other lists.
Simply making something and putting it up there won't make you shit, I know I got one up there.
>> An Orwellian review team which does not communicate to anyone (even inside Apple), uneven policies which change at random times leading to horror stories form Shaken Babies to Google Voices
I agree for the most part with this. Any sort of crazy idea I have, I immediately think I'm not gonna bother with this because it takes to much time to develop just to be denied by Apple, for some arcane reason, and get a rejection letter with a nondescript problem. Other problems with the review process, you have absolutely no idea how long it will take.
I would love to get some sort of lead time, or amount of apps before yours.
For me it's a crap shoot, but I make things I like and want, if I plan to send it to the store, because I think others might enjoy them, I test them out to the best of my potential and try to conform to Apple's HIG.