About how to release a great iOS application that someone needs
Do I have déjà vu?
Some habrayuzers may have a feeling of deja vu. The thing is that this article was already published on the Habré a month ago, but out of ignorance I put links to the application and its reviews in it. The punishing hand of the moderator very quickly overtook me. Publish again, this time without links.
The motivation for writing this article was something else habtopopic "About how to release a great iOS application that no one needs." I will try to talk about how to release a great application that someone still needs, but which did not work to earn.
Another motive is to sort things out for yourself. Nevertheless, the story is quite voluminous and until you systematize everything on paper, it is very difficult to realize all your mistakes. You will constantly think that you did everything correctly, and it will seem that negligent users who feel sorry for the dollar are to blame for everything. And the brain will push its miscalculations to a distant shelf. Well, some less obvious things, perhaps, will be suggested by the habraauditorium.
It’s not for me to judge whether this story can be considered a success story. Probably not. This project is my success as a programmer and project manager in one person and at the same time it is my failure as a marketer and a person who does not mind making some money.
And, of course, the unambiguous success for my wife Alexandra and her brother is the design of the application in question, this is their first mobile application design, which gave way to further interesting work.
Also for lovers of numbers I’ll say - all the numbers in the article will be . I’ll tell you how many downloads, how much is earned, how many inapps are bought and how many times they tried to break them.
Development
There is no single answer to the question “why converter”. For example, at the time of the decision to write the application, I did not like any of the paid or free currency converters. But besides this, there were, of course, “hidden” reasons. For example, I really wanted to have my application in the app. It so happened that I started writing under the iPhone from the very SDK (and I can’t stop everything), in the middle of 2008, but I did it mainly on order and “for my uncle”. And I wanted to do my thing from the very beginning to the very end, bring my product to the end user and see that real people use the application.
One way or another - a currency converter. Initially, it was decided to focus on ease of use - yes, there are a lot of converters in the store that do about the same thing - they suck in courses with yahoo.finance and give out something that can be used exclusively as "well, probably, that's how much it turns out" . Differences in the exchange rate of the ruble against the dollar relative to the exchange rate of the CBRF can reach one ruble, which, of course, cannot please the user.
By features, everything was simple: they took the most popular currency converters, wrote out killer-features of each of them, and tried to implement them all in their own way. In the first version, this happened only partially. So, the main features of our application were:
- nice and localized interface (now - 19 languages);
- iPhone and iPad support;
- selection of sources of exchange rates (currently there are more than 20 different sources, including the CBRF and Sberbank);
- Convert multiple currencies at the same time (4 for iphone / ipad and 6 for iphone 5);
- simple calculator;
From what the application clearly gave way to competitors, there were two points. The first is graphs. The charts in the first version did not work out for one reason only - because of the support of different sources of courses. It is unlikely that the user would be interested in charts from yahoo.finance, if the European central bank was chosen as the source of the courses. And if, for example, for the CBRF, the European Central Bank and several other sources, it was possible to get exchange rates for a certain period, then the vast majority of banks had an API only for current rates, no history. Thus, the solution to this problem was postponed until the second version of the application (and solved it).
The second point that was lost to competitors - support for portrait orientation for iPad'a and landscape for iPhone. It seemed to us not very important, but some users complained. This problem has not been solved so far and, apparently, it will not be solved.
"Promotion"
The marketer of me is useless :). However, I outlined a “launch strategy” for myself: the very first month we distribute the application for free, we recruit a user base, and in version 1.1 we add iPad support and we will ask for $ 0.99 for it.
In the month since the release of version 1.0 to the release of version 1.1, there were about 3 thousand free downloads. I agreed on a free review on AppleInsider.ru, created a post on leprosy, but in addition to this, the release was almost unnoticed.
They tried to “unwind” the paid version in some way: I wrote a devstory for iphones.ru (for free, I had to tinker with it, but it was worth it). Two days of sales after the publication of the devstory were the most profitable days in the history of the 1st version of the application. The application rose to the top 50 in the Russian app store, which brought us a total of about 150 euros for these 2 days, and for another week a certain effect on the fading effect was noticeable.
The review on iPadStory.ru also helped a lot, also for free (the owner Dmitry turned out to be a very pleasant person to talk to). In terms of return, the publication went even better than iphones.ru: it brought about 200 euros. 50 immediately after the review, and at the end of the year the application was included in the list of the best applications of 2012 and immediately after the publication of this list, sales grew well - about 120-150 euros were earned on this.
A good effect was from publishing on Deepapple.com and AppStudio.org. And again for free.
Points on the chart from left to right:
- release 1.1 (the leftmost point);
- another review on AppleInsider.ru (the first and last paid review of the application);
- iPadStory review
- devstory on iPhones.ru;
- review on DeepApple.com;
- release 1.2 (the rightmost point);
As you may have noticed, all sites are Russian. Not a single owner of English- (Italian-, French-, etc.) language sites reviewed the review at my request. Perhaps I somehow wrote to them in the wrong way, I entered the wrong door, but, most likely, currency conversion there is simply a less popular thing.
There was still a handful of obscure Russian sites that wanted a review of some money (a range of $ 20 to $ 150), but I decided that it was necessary.
Competitors
At the same time, another currency converter, Vkurse, began to spin up with us. Very cute, with an interface in the form of denim. At first they tried to “spud” the user with in-app purchases of skins - jeans of different colors, the application itself was free, but later they abandoned this idea and began to ask for a dollar for the application. The idea was not very clear to me - the features application is very poor, but people liked it - often in the rating of financial applications they turned out to be higher.
Of the “successful” competitors, I can also single out the Currency! Application, which launched a few weeks after us, immediately got to the main page in the New & Noteworthy section and, judging by the appannie statistics , it’s still selling better.
Sales
And in the summer of 2012, two sales happened. The June sale in a day doubled the number of users - from 3.5 to almost 8 thousand, but I, of course, didn’t get a penny from this, and a month later I dropped the price to zero for three days.
I’ll dwell on this point in more detail, because the effect was very good: in three days the application was downloaded more than 70 thousand times, several reviews were written in Polish, Portuguese, English, French. Of course, I was very lucky - a representative of appgratis.com came to me and offered to place the application on their sites (all but the American one) in exchange for what I would write in the description of the application “today is free thanks to appgratis.com”.
Unfortunately, Apple at that time changed the application ranking algorithms in the appstore and we did not get into the tops of free applications anywhere. That is, they generally disappeared from everywhere - even in the financial applications section we were not there. Although 10K + downloads in Brazil, Spain, Germany, this is a minimum of the top 3 free in these countries. But not lucky.
The effect of the sale was very good: if on average they bought the application 12-15 times a day, then immediately after two to three days the sales were at the level of 80-100 copies, and then it went down to 30-40 copies in the decaying one day. Something like this has remained to this day.
Thus, by the end of the summer, the application had 80 thousand downloads (~ 10K sessions every day), about 2500 earned euros and very vague prospects.
2.0
Surprisingly, but I decided to try to "squeeze" the application. Still, it’s very difficult to give up and set aside something that spent a lot of time, effort and that started to grow from the very “int main ()”. It was decided to try to monetize the "running" on the sale of users using in-app'ov.
They chose a simple strategy: we release a major update (version 2.0) with a store, where we add a number of in-apps for the buck and one “cumulative” purchase, which will be a dollar or two cheaper than the rest of the total. Features for sale have chosen the following:
- schedules;
- date selection for conversion;
- “Additional” sources of rates (PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Sberbank, Bitcoin);
- Push notifications when updating courses on the server;
- the ability to set exchange rates manually;
A bot was written and configured to collect exchange rates, a server that gives the history of rates for a given period of time.
In general, it was very joyful to tear myself away from the already bored Objective-C and pee a little on my favorite "non-browser" javascript. I decided to make the maximum use of technologies hitherto unknown to me, so the choice fell on node.js and mongodb.
Another interesting idea came (and most likely I read it somewhere, but now I can’t remember exactly where) to me somewhere a month and a half before the release. Give one of the in-app purchases for free, provided that the user places a semblance of an advertising message on his Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte and a couple of other social networks. networks to choose from. In my case, there were no two opinions on which of the in-apps to choose: 4 out of 5 used and, accordingly, loaded my server, and for it I had to pay some money to Amazon. One of the purchases - custom exchange rates - did not create a load. ShareKit was quickly connected to the application, I found on the leprosy a girl who wrote me a dozen different phrases and the question was closed.
Adding in-apps solved another problem - the problem of subsequent sales. Of course, not everyone needs in-apps, but a certain percentage of users who receive the program for free will buy them. Everything is more pleasant.
Apple “spoiled” the mood a bit - it turned out that you can’t take money from the user for using push notifications, so it was decided to refuse this built-in purchase so as not to delay the release.
In addition to in-app applications, support for different buying and selling rates appeared (i.e. for $ 1 at the bank you will be given 30 rubles, at the same time you will buy it there for 31), various cosmetic trifles that make life more pleasant.
And now...
So, in the middle of March 2013, exactly one year after the release of version 1.0, version 2.0 saw the light. The first version for a year of existence has earned 6 thousand euros. The total cost of translations / de-accounts / sites (for both versions) amounted to about 2.5 thousand euros.
The results of the first and second days of sales of the second version of the application were encouraging, but of course, far from millions. Profit increased 5-6 times: 90 and 125 euros per day, respectively. Quite a lot of in-app purchases were made and, which is nice, basically we bought the very “cumulative” one.
However, the effect quickly waned. Complaints about in-app's began to come to comments on the application: they say, I paid a dollar for the application itself, and here they also demand money inside; as well as the fact that perfect in-app’s are not returned (I did an in-app check on the server on the recommendation of Apple and I don’t miss invalid purchases). Apparently, someone is already very accustomed to the fact that any in-app on a hacked device can be obtained for free and the opposite situation angered a person to the core so much that he considered it necessary to complain about it in the comments.
If you look at the conversion, then it is very good - about 5-7% of new users who run the application make a purchase inside the application. Another thing is that the number of new users is quite small and there is no certainty that there will be more numbers, the conversion will not fall.
60-70 percent of the total number of purchases within the application is an attempt to steal. And this taking into account the fact that the application itself is impossible to steal . That is, the percentage of jailbroken devices on which the application runs on average is less than that of others. I don’t miss such in-app beyond my server, but I think that the figure itself may be interesting to someone.
Hopes for word of mouth also did not materialize. Many smart people (~ 60%) after sending a message to a social network immediately delete it. In principle, this behavior is understandable, but this is no less unpleasant.
At the time of writing, there was only one untested option: make the application free and see if the influx of users buying in-apps will cover losses from lowering the cost of the application. I will definitely try this option at the beginning of next week. But in general, I do not think that this will give any tangible positive effect.
Conclusion
Support for the application, of course, will be implemented, as long as it is profitable. Nevertheless, 1000 euros per month is a good passive income, and it is quite possible to do something for this. At the same time, if you take a sober look at the costs, you can easily howl — a year of programming (albeit evenings, weekends and snippets), a little less time is invested in design, but it’s still not a pound of raisins. And although I didn’t count the total labor costs exactly to the penny, I would have estimated them by the eyes of thousands at forty euros. The bottom line is a hard minus.
However, not everything is so sad. Firstly, a number of new technologies have been studied. For example, I wrote my first Python script to communicate with iTunesConnectthrough the command line. If you knew how many mats I put together, you would fill in the pens with localized screenshots for all devices and 20 different languages. And the script is fute, and in 15 minutes everything is ready without my participation.
Secondly, there is such a moment as the satisfaction of the finished product that people use. Yes, I already had one (a reader of personal finances written in the same way from the very first line of code), but this is not my own, and now I have nothing to do with it.
Thirdly, the project that was originally written for fun brought, and continues to bring some kind of profit. Sitting and playing in the evenings at kongregate is not a good alternative.
And fourthly, it’s certainly very nice that it turned out to realize what was originally set for itself as the main task: to create a high-quality application that people would like. 88% of the reviews for the app are five stars, another 8.5% are four. Unfortunately, in-app spoiled this statistics a little: users cannot yet realize that good is rarely given for free.
Funny reviews
In parallel with the development, I made a lot of new things for myself regarding application localization: how to do it better, which languages to support in the first place, and most importantly - how to do it. Well, I did not miss the opportunity to share my ideas with Habr.
A little bit about the effect of publications on Habré
Тут, к слову, стоит сказать, что обе статьи о локализации приложений изначально содержали в себе ссылки на приложение. Эффект был следующий.
Первая статья (публикация 27.02.12 почти сразу после запуска, Free):
Вторая статья (02.08.12, стоимость приложения $0.99):
Собственно, это было одной из причин по которой я без задней мысли воткнул название приложения и в эту статью — от публикаций на хабре эффект был нулевой, и невозможность упоминать название — в моем случае создает неудобство при написании, не более.
Первая статья (публикация 27.02.12 почти сразу после запуска, Free):
Вторая статья (02.08.12, стоимость приложения $0.99):
Собственно, это было одной из причин по которой я без задней мысли воткнул название приложения и в эту статью — от публикаций на хабре эффект был нулевой, и невозможность упоминать название — в моем случае создает неудобство при написании, не более.
If we talk exclusively about the financial side of the matter, then, of course, I would consider success everything that would bring an average of more than 200 euros per day. In this case, I would probably try to continue to improve the application and trust something. And so ...
It's time to put a bullet. Here is one .
I would like to express my gratitude to the habrauser jeck_landin , the twitter players @ivanovaos and @ 5g6r for their help in preparing and proofreading the article.