On 7/29/2011 3:01 PM, Mike Wolfson wrote: > I am afraid this will become another "Android Market Bashing" thread, > so I am not going to unfurl my soap box.
I didn't really intend it that way, though I see your point. While it's frustrating for small developers, I feel like it's more "end of an era" than "Google is doing it wrong!" Honestly it's a difficult problem to solve -- which doesn't mean Google won't eventually solve it, but they haven't (as far as I can tell) solved it well yet. On 7/29/2011 5:50 PM, John Coryat wrote: > As for the "Just in" category. I think it has been a totally abused > feature. Why would an app with an update show up in that category? > Does "Just in" mean "Just updated to force me to the top of the just > in category?" If so, then it should be named "bogus updates" instead. Understood; it certainly has been abused. And they could have limited the abuse in a number of ways; I don't know whether they did. Every one of my updates has had either bug fixes or new features, so my conscience is clear. :) > As for ways to promote your app, consider that there are over 150,000 > apps in the market. How else will you get traction in any market if > you don't do some promotion. Promotion costs money usually so that > should be in your budget before you start writing the app. Direct promotion costs unreasonable amounts of money for a small developer. Paying $0.75/install to get the hundreds of thousands of installs you'd need to rank in the market isn't a reasonable option (Flurry). AdMob will do $0.10/click, but in my limited testing, buying $50 worth of clicks didn't even register at a time when I was getting only a few hundred downloads a day, so at best you're still talking tens of thousands of dollars. That's a huge risk. I'm also wary of incentivized installs (of paid versions), though if I ran out of options I'd give it a try. It worked for a friend of mine on iPhone. At this point it seems you either have to get very lucky or know someone at Google before you can get a low-budget indie game in front of a wider audience. You're right, John, that maybe I'm just wanting it to be easy, where I should have expected to have to work harder at it. It's even hard to get in to review sites; none of the sites I've sent the game to have actually reviewed it, though a couple sites picked it up on their own. [1][2] My game has some really, really enthusiastic fans, but not nearly enough of them, and short of spending a LOT of money on ads, along with writing to a lot of blogs, I don't know how I'd change this. My game was featured on AppsLib for a week and a half, and now it's hanging in the #2 app spot (behind Flash, but ahead of NinJump, the game I ported to Android for Backflip). To me that's an indicator that people -- if they KNOW about the game -- like it. That translates into about 1000-1200 new users a day (for the free app), if anyone cares. I'm only seeing between 100 and 200 new users a day in the market at the moment. Under the old system (I'm talking about a month ago) I was getting new users at a good (and increasing!) pace, and people were really liking the game. It ended up the #2 free app on AppBrain for a few days, and that gave me another boost in the Market. It broke the top 200 in the Arcade game category, and seemed to have a lot of momentum, rising a few ranks per day, when suddenly the rise flattened off and its ranking fell like a rock. Now it's not listed anywhere in the top 480, while classics like "Pimple Popper" still rank, along with dozens of instances of stolen IP. I suspect the game was the victim of the magical "Active Users" calculation, since the free version (at first) had a limited number of levels, and a lot of people eventually stopped using it (?). What kind of "active users" percentage should I be looking for? Anyone willing to share their numbers? I'm down at 43% now for the free version, though holding at 84% for the paid version. Tim P.S. I'm in talks with a publisher to take over distribution and marketing of my game. If that goes through, then I can go back to ignoring marketing myself. :) [1] http://www.androidappsreview.com/2011/07/19/hamster-attack-android-app-review/ [2] http://www.getandroidapps.net/news/n-o-v-a-2-hd-hamster-attack-and-bits-widget-pro-new-android-apps/ -- 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.
