You gotta love the guys at Apple.
This week four updates of my iOS apps got rejected by Apple because their “what’s new” descriptions mentioned “iOS 6”.
As in: * Fixed: some iOS 6 compatibility issues.
I love the mobile apps business. If done right, there’s a lot of money to be made here. At Collectorz.com, we’ve been selling apps since May 2009 and it’s a big part of our business now.
However, from a software marketing perspective, I keep running into 3 main problems of the current mobile apps biz (one of which is App Store specific):
Here’s the full story on all three, including my suggested workarounds:
The Kindle Fire is live and it’s a huge success. Even before launch, it was clear that this would be a hit, an Android tablet device at this price point, coming from Amazon.
I figured this could be a nice extra channel to sell our existing Android apps.
About a month ago, as a test, we created a special build of our CLZ Movies app and submitted it to the Amazon Appstore for review. Approval took 2 weeks, but it got approved in one go. So we quickly prepared builds of our other 4 apps and submitted them too, hoping to get them all live before the launch of the Kindle Fire on November 15. We just missed that deadline, but still, on November 17 we received the OK on the other 4 as well.
After which I proudly announced to my Facebook fans that our Android apps were now available for the new Kindle Fire. Some customers had been asking about apps for Kindle Fire, so I told our support guys that they could tell them the happy news.
In the meantime, we had already sold some copies of CLZ Movies through the Amazon Appstore, so things were looking good. Continue reading
This week, in my post What happened to “asking for help”?, I wondered about a trend I was seeing regarding the user attitude in case of software problems. A short summary:
10 years ago, when users ran into a software problem, they just contacted the developer for help, resulting in a useful conversation where the user got his problem solved and the developer got useful information about possible bugs.
However, nowadays a user is more likely to just complain about the problem in a public place like Facebook, Twitter, the App Store or the Android Market. No request for help, no conversation and therefore: no solution. Continue reading
About a year ago, I already wondered: Is there a market for Android apps?
The conclusion at the time:
“Yes, there is, but it’s still much smaller than the market for iOS apps.”
Since then, the marketshare of Android devices sold has become much larger. Here’s a chart from a June 2011 article about the worldwide smartphone marketshare:
See the steady light-blue diamond line (iPhone) and the purple dotted line (Android)? A more recent article at the Android Authority site indicates that the Android Marketshare is now at 42%, vs 27% for iPhone.
It looks like Android is growing fast and has gone way past the iPhone. That is, in terms of devices sold. But how does the increasing Android device marketshare translate to actual sales of Android apps?
Let’s look at the Collectorz.com numbers again. Continue reading
If you are developing and selling iPhone apps, you may have been wondering: Should I create Android versions?
Is there actually a market for Android apps?
Well, yes there is, but it may be smaller than you think.
In any case, if you are trying to estimate the potential market for an Android edition of your iOS app, do not just look at the Android market share in terms of devices sold.
And don’t even think about judging the market by the number of user requests. 2 words: vocal minority.
The average Android owner is an animal that is completely different from the typical iPhone owner, and not nearly as app-hungry.
Let’s look at some recent market share news and then at my numbers for the Collectorz.com apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.
Continue reading
We’re on a roll here. Another new platform : the iPad.
Our first iPad app is now available in Apple’s App Store (after being in their review queue for about a week). Like our CLZ Movies edition for iPhone and Android, it’s a viewer app for movie collections created with Movie Collector for Windows or Mac OS X. Users can export their existing database to the iPad app and then browse their list in several cool looking views, including an “home-built” cover flow view.
We added a new platform to our already sizable list of supported platforms. Yesterday we released our first mobile app for Android: CLZ Movies. It is a viewer app for Movie Collector databases, similar to our CLZ Movies app for iPhone.
First day sales were good, but a bit less than expected. I was hoping for a higher number for the first day, mainly because the demand for Android apps seemed to be quite high. But maybe Android users just tend to make more noise 🙂 They do seem to feel a bit “left behind” because of most companies’ focus on iOS development.
I will post more sales results later, when I have more data.
I can’t wait to see how day-to-day Android sales compare to those of our iPhone apps and the upcoming iPad apps.
