How to promote the application in the Pebble App Store



    Six months ago, I bought Pebble, found out about the “cloud” IDE Cloud Pebble and wrote a watchface application for myself, showing the current position of the Moon and planets. It seemed to work out pretty well, and I posted 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 of 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. Whether it is a lot or a little, decide for yourself - in the beginning of February, the millionth Pebble was sold.

    Looking through the Pebble documentation for developers, I noticed an interesting point in the Publishing FAQ :

    How do I get my application in one of the featured collections?
    Submit your application on the store and make sure it is “published”. You can then contact us to discuss featuring your app.

    It was not very clear what these “featured collections” are, and I wrote a question to support. As a result, the following dialogue took place:

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

    Support: This just means we'll put up your app in the banner in the appstore or in the pebble picks section. So if you have an app that you'd like us to consider featuring just let us know through this email. We do new features every Thursday.

    Me: Yes, I have a watchface 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 this to feature next Thursday for a week in the banner section under Watchfaces.

    On the night of Thursday to Friday (do not forget about the time difference with California), I climbed into the Pebble mobile application to watch the “get watchfaces” section and with chagrin I found ads of three completely extraneous applications there. I had to write to support again. It turned out that because of some kind of overlap they forgot about me, but promised to correct me in a week. Finally, after a week I saw such a nice-looking picture:



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

    • PNG image of 720x320 pixels.
    • The banner should contain 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” (white and gray circles in the screenshot above) will be superimposed at the bottom. Keep in mind that these circles do not overlap important information.

    Here's what happened, life-size:



    Here, in addition to the aforementioned Pebble UI Template, I used screenshots from Space Engine and Stellarium , as well as predefined filters in GIMP .

    In general, the banner met expectations, because everyone sees itPebble user when he wants to look for a new dial. Every day began to bring almost a thousand new users. Thanks and wishes began to come to the mail, and one person even offered to work together on the application. I expected the banner to hang for a week and be replaced last Friday, but strangely enough this did not happen. It is still shown in the Pebble mobile app under the “get watchfaces” section and the number of downloads is reaching ten thousand. Apparently, there is no influx of people wishing to promote. Therefore, I am sharing this article with you and hope that on Friday my new “Ecliptic” will be replaced by new interesting watchfaces from readers of Geektimes.

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