iPhone still has a whole lot more users then Android. I think you are asking important questions though. I'm expecting the users to come to Android, so now I would focus on getting the ratings up for my applications. That way, when that user count hits critical mass, and the $$$ starts flowing, it flows to you ^_^
Your Android market page is important. It is hard to respond to the ratings you get, but those ratings usually come with a batch of comments, and you can respond to those. You want your Application listing to accurately reflect your application. If users are expecting more, perhaps you should add the word "lite" or "demo" to your application description. If you have upcoming features you are working on, you may want to let them know. If you do though, you will have users who start looking forward to those features, so you have to deliver. I wouldn't recommend mentioning a feature that you won't be able to deliver on in the next 2 weeks. If the new "feature" is really a bug fix you are working, on, you may want to put that in the description. Encourage your users to email you with bug details, rather then rant about the bug in your comments. Perhaps you will want to add feedback functionality directly in your application. And let them know how much you appreciate the feedback! I'm a big fan of professional Quality Assurance. I enjoyed my time in it, and I'm sure it has improved my abilities as a developer. Given how the Android Market is run, your users will inevitably provide a lot of your QA. You have to pay attention if a user says it's not working on handset X, on carrier Y, for feature Z. If you can't reproduce the problem... you still have to fix it :-) Also, you can not depend on the Android Market to provide all of your visibility. It is wonderful that some application do not have to market themselves at all. If you were the first developer to ship a solitaire application, you added 1 result to search queries on the market that were turning up zero results. But that doesn't last, that was only true in the infancy of the market. Now you have professional developers, competing with part time developers, competing with students, competing with major brands. Once you feel your application is "ready for prime time", you should start marketing your application. You can link share with other developers, you can swap advertisements, you can use your own application A to market your own application B. You can get the word out you are willing to sell your whole source code, and all associated rights, to a major brand, or small investment firm, who wants to expand your application, and port it to other platforms. Or you can start buying other peoples applications, perhaps to combine the feature sets. My 2 cents, -MK On May 4, 8:32 am, Totalgeek <[email protected]> wrote: > My 2 cents on what I expierenced so far on the Android market. Just > wondering if anyone has advice or opinions on the topic. > > How do you guys deal with ratings on applications, especially free > ones? I don't understand why people would give an app 1 star when the > application runs fine but they feel features aren't up to par. I would > agree with 2-3 stars but 1? I would give 1 to apps that crash not run > without features you feel are necessary. How do you entice the people > who are enjoying it to post a rating? Just like tangible good items > you only hear from people who have had a bad expierence I want to make > it better but can't without feedback. I all for fair constructive > criticism, if I deserve 1 star then great let me know why and i'll fix > it, or look into why it has to work the way it works. People will > either rate 1 or 5 and nothing in between, and most of the time you > only get a rating during 'uninstall' and if its within hours of > install its usually a 1. > > The problem with low rating is that visiblity drops on the app. There > is no way to make something better if people don't use it and leave > constructive criticism. What's troubling is I've written 3 apps to the > 1 app I wrote for the Iphone, that doesn't serve any usefulness like > the 3 I wrote on Android, it was a 'test' app. But based on ad > requests data it gets used a lot more then any of the apps I've > written on the Android. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Android Discuss" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group > athttp://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
