

Prognosis : Lessons learnt from developing a top 10 iPhone app - npsomaratna
http://blog.medicaljoyworks.com/prognosis-lessons-learnt-from-developing-a-to

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arn
So, first thing to note is the difference between Top 10 in the free Medical
category vs. Top 10 of all free apps. Not to talk down about their
achievements, but the #1 Top Free Medical App doesn't even break the Top 200
Overall Top Free Apps.

My thoughts are if you are planning on adding ads eventually, you should ad
them with version 1. Otherwise, people will complain when they come later.

We launched a free App (AppShopper) a couple of months ago, and we did hit the
top 10 overall free.

We planned ahead with a dedicated server with a caching system (Squid) and the
ability to spin up EC2 instances to mirror further. Fortunately, the one
server (and the db server behind it) was able to handle the single traffic
peak (which was over 100,000 downloads in a day).

I can identify with the testing thing (or lack thereof), as you can't fix a
problem quickly, since you have to go through App approval. Which can be
frustrating when there's a crashing bug.

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npsomaratna
You do have a good point about adding advertisements later on.

We thought that having advertisements at the very start might turn off some
users - but there is also the possibility of a backlash if we add them later.

Note that we were not planning on adding a generic ad network, but rather
partnering with a pharma company and deploying ads customized for the iPhone.

The other possibility is to have 'sponsored cases', similar to what they have
on Medscape - there would just a be a single line of text, i.e 'Sponsored by
XYZ"

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whyleym
I have recently released a paid app - which has turned up in the top 10 sports
section in the UK for both iPad and iPhone. I have designed this for the very
latest version of the iOS - i'm guessing i'm losing sales doing this - have
you or anyone else for that matter found any statistics around the numbers of
users who download the app from previous versions of the iOS ?

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npsomaratna
Unfortunately Flurry's new SDK does not collect iOS version info, so we're as
much in the dark as you are.

However, 90.9% of our users are listed as having iOS4 devices - I am not sure
whether this indicates the iPhone 4, or whether iOS 4 prevents flurry from
detecting the device type (in which case this would be an accurate estimate of
the number of devices running iOS 4)

I guess that the percentage of users with iOS 3 devices should therefore be at
most 9.1% - probably less than that.

Another statistic is that 7.43% of the users had jailbroken devices - I
suppose that a significant portion of them would be using iOS 3, as it is so
painful to upgrade to iOS 4.

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gyardley
The 'iOS4 devices' listing in Flurry means the operating system is running iOS
4 or greater. It doesn't mean the device is an iPhone 4.

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callmeed
Re: #2 ... I'm about to launch my first app and it will talk to a Rails app on
Heroku.

Should I also keep a slicehost/linode vps running the app?

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BornInTheUSSR
Regarding the ios testing issues, would setting the iPhone emulator that comes
with apple developer tools to the various versions have worked here?

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xsmasher
The emulator doesn't contain older versions of iOS, and it should not be
relied on for real testing. It links against different libraries, runs
different code, and won't find issues with iPod music, sleep/wake, memory
usage, multi-touch, case sensitivity, and more.

It's great for development and testing functionality, not good for testing
compatibility.

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zackattack
you can't afford $50/month even with a top 10 iPhone app? does not compute. if
you're waiting to get your monies from apple, just email tim and i'm sure
he'll let you pay on net 60 terms (or whatever apple's terms are)...

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npsomaratna
Our app is free. We do have plans to add advertising later on - but not for
several months at least.

All costs are out of my pocket (and Sandaruwan's and Parinda's)

Note that $50 is a LOT when bootstrapping from Sri Lanka - my salary as a
Doctor (which is much higher than that of the general population) was only
$400 / month - with most of that getting burnt up in living costs.

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bjonathan
I'm sorry if it's a dumb question but why do you plan to wait to add
advertising? You are on the TOP10 right now, you are having good review (by
users AND blogs). Its seems to me like the perfect moment to add ads to your
product.

Arent you afraid that you loose your momentum without made any dollar from
your app? You can find clean way to do advertising on an iphone app (look at
Twitterific for example)

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sandaru1
At the moment we have no way of knowing whether our users are health care
professionals or not. We are releasing a new medical case each week(or more
often), so that would keep the medical professionals from removing it - but
others who are just downloading to checkout the app would get rid of it
(that's our guess - we are still learning, trial and error). Advertising to
medical professionals is much appealing than a general crowd.

Yes, we have several clean advertising plans. i.e - sponsored cases.

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bjonathan
It's not "really" your problem or at least you can made somebody else pay for
the mistake if your users arent really health care professionals. With your
app and your actual ranking you could cold call a few medical magazines and
offer to them to be feature in the app for a couple thousand bucks.
Advertising in medical publication is VERY VERY VERY expensive, I'm sure some
big co or medias have moneys to spare on ads in your app.

If you are not confortable with that maybe you could contact them offer them
that to have an idea of what they are ready to pay to be in your app. Maybe
the amount will change your mind :)

I dont mean to be disrespectful with my comment but I made that mistake to
wait to long before monetising my startup because I always wanted more and
more data before selling ads on it. I lost a lot of time (and money) for
nothing.

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sandaru1
Actually, that seems to be a good idea :) We should try to do it now.

Now that I think about it, another point that should have gone into the blog
post is that "be prepared to monetize if your app goes viral in few days"

