Position: Engineer
Background: Christopher Brown is the co-founder of TapMetrics, which was acquired by Millennial Media in early 2010. He has also served as the CEO for Bitfire Systems, an iPhone application development and consulting company.
Links: http://www.millennialmedia.com/; http://tapmetrics.com/
Ken: Discuss the importance of choosing the right category for an app. How does Apple use the secondary category, and will an app show up in it?
Christopher: An app will be listed under the primary category in the App Store. The secondary category, however, provides an additional search term, allowing customers to use the search bar to browse for your app. Although the secondary category is optional, it is easy to select and costs nothing, gaining additional ways for your app to be noticed. The difficulty lies in choosing which category “best describes your application,” as Apple says to do. While most people can easily pick two or three categories their app falls into, it is more difficult to pick a primary category for an app that most likely does multiple things. The most ambiguous categories usually fall between the Utilities/Productivity/Travel categories and the Games/Entertainment categories as well. I think the best course is to pick a category that best describes the key “pain point” your app solves.
Ken: During the App Store submission process, many developers don’t think carefully enough about their Availability Date. What sort of lead time is recommended between submitting the app and having it available on the App Store?
Christopher: I recommend submitting an app to the store three to four weeks out. This creates the freedom to do two things. First, it gets you past the review gates of the iTunes Store. By shifting your launch date to the future, you can give Apple sufficient time to review your app, and you will have ample time to fix issues if they reject it. The average approval time has varied from a couple of days to more than two weeks, depending on the review load they have at the time. If you plan events and start telling everyone your app will be in the store in three days, only to find out you violated a rule in the Human Interface Guidelines, you may experience large delays that severely hamper the typical sales bump on initial launch.
Second, this forces you to create a marketing plan. You have time to get the app to bloggers that like to preview apps. You can create an ad campaign that starts a couple days before launch. You can tell the media when your app will be available. It means taking control back from Apple; you control the release, not them.
Ken: Recently, developers (especially of games) seem to be launching their apps exclusively into smaller markets first (like Canada) before distributing them globally. Is that a smart strategy, and does such an approach make sense for all apps or only a particular type of app? How would you caution developers about proceeding this way?
Christopher: I think this could be beneficial if you are releasing into a specific market that is known to appreciate the characteristics of your app(s). Games or entertainment apps come to mind here in particular. Certain applications may be loved in France or Japan but are simply not understood in the U.S. or the UK. Releasing an app in a market that is unfamiliar with the nature or culture of your app may earn you poor reviews. Giving it time to gain momentum in a market that is more likely to accept it may help it catch on later in other countries.
In markets where cultures are similar and popular content tends to spread more quickly, such as Canada and the U.S., it doesn’t make much sense to me to “test” or “delay” the release. Get the app out there, take feedback from users, and make it better.
Ken: What are some of the biggest issues developers have with installing analytics and what can be done to avoid them? How is TapMetrics’ tool being built to address these problems?
Christopher: What we are hearing about now is rejection of apps that use location simply for analytics or advertising and not for any utility within the actual application. The TapMetrics library allows a developer to release an application with or without location-based analytics simply by setting a parameter to “YES” or “NO” in one line of code.
Ken: How can developers test that analytics are installed properly before going into the App Store? Specifically, can or should that be done during ad hoc distribution and beta testing? If so, what are the benefits?
Christopher: We’ve seen success from developers who install analytics and then give the app out to beta testers. In addition to verifying that the analytics are functioning properly before release, they can measure usage and get feedback. This approach reveals problems you might not be aware of after focusing on the app for a long period of time.
Company: PoweryBase
Position: President
Background: PoweryBase, Inc., was founded in 2009 by Dominik Balogh and his colleague Pavel Serbajlo. They are the creators of, among other software endeavors, the successful iPhone applications NotifyMe and Bills.
Link: http://www.powerybase.com/
Ken: It’s more than a fair statement that PoweryBase is an expert on push notifications, as seen through your NotifyMe application. For a new developer, what are the biggest challenges with push notifications and what advice would you give for getting started with them?
Dominik: PoweryBase was among the first developers to start benefiting from push notifications as soon as Apple provided this technology. Therefore, it’s fair to say that we’ve gained expert skills with it over time. Nowadays, it’s not as difficult to implement push notifications into any application as long as the developer owns a highly reliable server. No special advice is needed if the developers follow Apple’s implementation guidelines. At least in the past, some of the biggest challenges have been automated repeating notifications and support for time zones and daylight saving time.
Ken: NotifyMe seemed to be a pretty successful application. At least from an outsider’s perspective, the second app you launched—Bills—appeared to narrow down the scope of NotifyMe and yet it became even more popular. Describe how your Bills app got started and why you eventually launched it even though an existing app basically already had the same functionality.
Dominik: Bills (full name: Bills ~ On your table) was specially designed to manage bills, bill amounts, and their due dates. Comparatively, NotifyMe is a more versatile to-do reminder. Sure, NotifyMe can also be used to remind you to pay bills on their due dates, but it’s not as convenient. The reason we developed Bills was that we saw a potential and found that we weren’t satisfied with other bill management applications available. Apple really liked our effort and picked Bills as a featured spotlight on the App Store.
Ken: What are some good ways for developers to ensure that they are launching something unique and creative into the App Store?
Dominik: With so many applications on the App Store, it’s really hard to launch something unique. Recently, we’ve started asking ourselves whether the software has to be completely unique in order to gain success. There are many apps already available that can be made much better. Users are picky and mostly know how to determine the best one. If a developer is trying to figure out how to reinvent the wheel, maybe it’s time to start thinking the other way around. Identify what is lacking on the App Store, add your innovations, and make it much better.
You could build a multibillion-dollar business this way. In fact, isn’t that what Apple has been doing with their computers, phones, music players, and tablet device (the iPad)? Sometimes uniqueness and creativity means just making things that are already available better and more focused than your competitors.
Get App Savvy now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
