

Being Featured on the App Store - dirtae
http://blog.anylistapp.com/2012/08/app-store/

======
ftwinnovations
My app has been featured three times now by Apple (TextPics)
www.textpicsapp.com. The first time, in early 2011, it spent around two weeks
at around the #3 Top Paid app position, the second time (late 2011) it made it
to #8 I believe and the third time it was a lesser feature in a subsection
specific to valentines apps but still did top 25.

I've spent a LOT of time thinking about how to get featured and how the whole
mess works, and as for my experience, my first feature was simply based on
being a new idea (TextPics was the first app for ASCII art texting - before I
experienced Attack of the Chinese Clones) with excellent growth, lots of
updates, and a positive rating. These three points were actually laid out on
Apple's developer portal and TextPics satisfied all the points and was lucky
enough to be chosen.

The second time around I specifically made a move with the aim of getting
featured - I made a Christmas edition update. I changed the icon (put a Santa
hat on the bunny), the loading screen, and new content was almost exclusively
holiday pics. Apple appears to put Christmas features on the main feature
page, rather than a sub-page like our Valentines edition. Lucky me, my plan
actually worked.

And although it did not matter for us from a server standpoint, Apple did
actually contact us before the first featuring asking for artwork and assets.
I assume we were in line to be one of the few apps featured so prominently in
the hero section, but that did not end up happening.

Every feature for us started on a Thursday, lasted one week, and then moved to
the What Hot section for another week.

Between being featured multiple times and being at the top of the app store
multiple times I learned a hell of a lot about app store customers, apps store
sales dynamics, ratings, and everything else App Store related, though beyond
"make a great app and update it often" I can't think of what else can help
other apps get featured.

I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has, as I know first hand what a
mystery the whole process can be.

    
    
      (\(\ TextPics :)
      ( -.-)
      o_(")(")

------
mikek
My understanding is that there is an editorial meeting once a week in which
Apple decides which apps to feature. I'm assuming that bigger companies have
contacts in the editorial group. Can anyone speak to this?

~~~
uuilly
This is true. They will contact you if they need "brick" sized art for the
horizontal auto-scroll headline apps. They also may contact you if your app is
in "hold for developer release" while they're making their decision. If you
are in contact with them, I advise against releasing an update during the
process. It muddies the waters with the editorial team and you really just
want to make their decision simple.

Featuring changes every thursday. The week after featuring you end up in the
"new and noteworthy" section which is like getting 1/2 to 2/3rds of a
featuring.

------
ntharani
Good blog post, we have a similar one we're posting shortly about our
experience with App of the Week. And sharks. :)

We're a small company and our app Opuss (opuss.com) was app of the week for
UK/Ireland. While we were contacted in regards to "brick" sized artwork, we
had no such expectation and just dutifully provided what they requested.

For the next 4 weeks we got a nervous twitch each Thursday around 5PM GMT
(about an hour before 10am Cupertino) as it can also set a precedent for other
stores. (In our case the Nordics and Germany as well). If your server logs
look fishy around this time and you have EC2 or equivalent, fire up a few
extra servers for those few hours. Trust me.

------
bentrengrove
From what I have worked out I believe the "What's Hot" section may be
automatic based on current download trends. The fact that most apps from the
New and Noteworthy section end up in there is because they are suddenly
getting a lot of downloads.

------
mmariani
> responding to a constant stream of incoming user feedback and support
> requests via email (we make it really easy for our users to contact us
> within the app.

Best tip of them all. Deal with user support requests trough email so they
won't get back at you with bad reviews. Seems obvious, but lots of devs don't
do it.

------
daemon13
>> we make it really easy for our users to contact us within the app

Care to elaborate on the details?

Are you using someone else's service or you built your own?

Why did you decide to provide 2 feeback mechanisms - email _and_ in-app?

I see the value of user feeback, but isn't it quite burdensome?

------
FrankBooth
"Architectural performance problems" in a grocery list app. I feel like I'm in
bizarro world.

~~~
dirtae
I was referring to some decisions we made in our server implementation. A big
part of our app is the ability to share your lists with other people and see
changes in real-time, which is mediated by our servers.

------
hoi
We had a similar new and noteworthy experience with our app (labelbox) in
spring 2011. We were asked a couple of days before to provide artwork and
assets. The app got featured and we got similar results. We peaked out at 100K
downloads in one of those days, enough to get us just inside the top 25 in the
US charts.

We've also had an experience were we were asked to provide assets and graphics
'incase' we were featured that week, but ended up not being featured at all
(phototreats). The process is a mystery, but one thing that seems common is
that almost all apps that are featured have great beautiful, easy to use
design.

------
pagliara
Producing an interesting, well-functioning, nicely-designed app is the best
way to improve your chances of getting featured. There's no guarantee, but
half the battle is really just standing out from the incredible amount of crap
apps released on a daily basis.

My first app, Foodmatic, actually got featured in New & Noteworthy as well
when it launched. Unfortunately, sales fell off as soon as the feature ended
and the app was kind of a failure haha. But no doubt getting featured can be a
huge factor in the success of an app.

------
alpb
Interesting,both of these cofounders worked at Apple for 6 years and they
still ask readers to "privately" send them a contact address for getting
featured on iTunes if there exists one.

------
unlimit
Congrats, it looks very polished. Couple of questions - How many months and
how many developers did it take to build this? And how do you plan to monetize
this?

~~~
dirtae
The path to creating AnyList was long and winding, so it's hard to say
exactly. It wasn't always going to be a standalone app, and we built some
stuff that we ended up not using as a result. We've been working on the app
since last fall, but we weren't always working on it 100% of the time.

See: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/19-months-and-1-pivot-
later...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/19-months-and-1-pivot-later-
anyleaf-relaunches-as-anylist-to-build-a-better-grocery-list-app/)

The company is just me and my co-founder right now, but we also hired some
outside graphic design help.

We aren't ready to discuss monetization plans, stay tuned.

------
albybisy
the two founders were Apple employees before.... and i think that helped too..

------
nrmehta
Really appreciate you sharing this so openly. Excellent stats for the
community to leverage.

------
mirsadm
The name of your app is not ideal. Googling it seems to produce lots of
irrelevant results. Otherwise well done on getting featured!

~~~
roryokane
7 out of 10 results on <https://www.google.com/search?q=anylist> are for the
app itself, including the top 5 results. Maybe you searched for “Any List”
instead of “AnyList”?

~~~
cnu
Maybe that is his point. Good product names with two words must be able to
rank high for both "twowords" and "two words"(with space).

