Average application size on the rize

According to  ABI Research, the average application size has increased by 16% since march 2012. Why? Retina display graphics, universal binaries are certainly the main culprit.

App Store Review Status

I think some people are on vacation at Apple since the App Store Review Status was last updated on July, 6th.

 

Update on Saturday, August 11, 2012 at 16:19 by JF Martin

Last sunday night, I submitted a new release of Ultimate Password Manager for review. Five days later, Apple review and approved this release. It took Apple less than two minutes to review and change the status to Ready For Sale. Two minutes. Waited five days.

On allowing developers to respond to user reviews

Last week Google announced that developers could start to respond directly to user's reviews in the Google Play store. When the news broke, I immediately tweeted something like "Hey Apple, are you listening?". Many of us complains about the lack of interaction between the users and the developers on the App Store. Personally I thought that instead of killing Ping (as the rumors goes), Apple could make it available to the App Store and allow people (developers and end-user) make the interaction there. But as Apple will probably kill Ping this fall with the next major release of iTunes and the tight integration of Twitter and Facebook in iOS 6, I seriously think that we'll have to wait. Then, I read this article from Matt Gemmell "Replying to user reviews" and changed my expectations from Apple. Here is why I think Google is wrong and Apple could be right.

The whole concept of publicly responding to someone's bad feelings (bad reviews) about your application is flawed because of two main things: emotion is involved and the process happens in a public place. The emotional part is all about a mad customer who just bought a 1.99$ piece of software and who think he paid 199.99$ and you the developer who spend nine months of your life working and shipping an application that maybe not ready for prime time. How do you expect the developer will respond? Defensively. The other part of problem is the fact that publicly we don't behave the same way as in private. Maybe the customer will post a really bad review in order to make other potential buyers stop thinking about buying the same piece of s*** he or she just bought. The whole idea of allowing the developer to step in and respond calls for trouble and a lot of waste of time. The problem is with the review system and Apple can improve the process very simply.

Apple should make the following improvements to the App Store:

• make the Support link more prominent on the application's App Store page.
• invite the user to visit the developer's web site and seek for support before writing a bad review. This could happen right in the write a review process by presenting a reminder at the beginning of the process. 
• allow the developer to respond privately to a public review by sending the respond to the user's Apple ID's email.
• improve the notion of flagged reviews and review's usefulness in order to help others make their own decisions before posting a really bad review.

As you can see, there is room for improvements in the App Store review system. Let see how Apple will move forward with announced stores redesigns this fall with iOS 6.

How to influence your presence on the App Store

This week, UPM 3.1.2 came out and I noticed something interesting. According to www.appannie.com, my application was being featured in 122 countries on the App Store in the Productivity category.

I did a little search in order to find an explanation for this. Before the update, my app wasn't featured at all in the App Store all over the world. Meh. By having a mere 175 updates downloaded by users on the first day and nearly 600 hundreds the following day, this seems to generate enough traffic on the Apple servers to trigger something. Could this traffic be influencing Apple algorithm for select which apps to feature on each App Store category? If yes, maybe I should plan smaller but more frequent updates for my application! What is your experience on this matter?

Apple's App Store review status breaks a record!

A picture is worth a thousand words.

BREAKING: Apple post fastest App Store review times!

Since the App Store inception, I don't remember seeing those App Store review times. They are the best to my knowledge. Wow.

In a few weeks, expect a deterioration of this score as Apple's start to accept updated apps from developers that take advantage of iOS 5's new APIs.

App Store review time trend updated

Here is an update to Apple's App Store review times.

Being featured on the App Store's What's Hot - Who decides?

Apple is full of mysteries. The App Store is full of mysteries for developers.  This is why I'm still puzzled with Apple's choices of apps that are featured in general but in particular in the What's hot category. Take for example one of my application, Ultimate Password Manager. This app is consistently featured in What's Hot in Productivity in a few countries.

As of this writing, it was featured in Canada, France and Slovakia. Some day, only Canada will get it. some day it could be France. Never been featured in UK or in the US. Why is that? I mean, Slovakia? I never sold a single copy of my apps in this country. Is this choice related to traffic on the application's App Store page? Is it related to user reviews? I don't know. 

As the following chart shows, more than 50% of revenue in the last 60 days comes from the US. 

Why not feature my app in the US productivity's category too? This is where the action is happening. Maybe Apple want to "expand" sales of my apps to other countries but what if Apple would emphasize exposure it in the US, sales would certainly increase a lot. Apple, are you listening? To other iOS devs, what is your experience in that regard? Is there a way to get in touch with Apple on this subject? Any hint will be greatly appreciated. 

Get your iOS applications noticed on the market

There are many ways to promote your apps on the App Store. You can buy ads (for indie, forget that, very bad investment). Or, you can try to send pulses on the market. Here is how I did it.

In the past few weeks, I made an experiment: every friday, I set the price of one of my app (Password Validator) to become free. The promotion lasts all weekend.

Playing with application pricing is one of the way to send a "pulse" on the market as many web sites hooked on iTunes Store data feeds know about new apps, apps that becomes free, price increases, decrease, etc. Think of this as a network where the App Store (under the iTunes umbrella) is the centre. 

Satellite sites monitors iTunes feeds and build part of their content for changes. Their user community who follow them will notice and may download the app.This will in turn drive attention to your apps and maybe convert into downloads. 

The following is a graphic showing the promotion effects on ranking for two weeks. 

Then, the unit downloaded graphs shows something interesting, the effect is diminishing over time. So, doing price changes every week is kind of too much, maybe every month would keep the unit downloaded at the same level each time.

The net effect is your app is downloaded more often and may get notified by one of these satellite sites. Also, if your promoted application is a downscaled version of a paid one, up sale can happen here as some users may want to pay for the big ticket. So far, the net result is that more people get to know my apps as they visit www.tinysofty.com but sales are still lagging behind for Password Validator's brother, Ultimate Password Manager. But remember, it doesn't cost a lot of money to get these small pulse of exposure on the web.

BREAKING: App Store approval time still improving!

Today Apple updated the App Store View Status widget with really good numbers.

The vast majority of the iOS submissions are reviewed within 7 days. Steady improvements can be observed on the following graph since october 2010.