
A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery - jndsn402
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/20/a-developers-guide-to-the-wild-west-of-app-discovery/
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duncanawoods
I wish Apple/Google/MS would realise that they could stop operating an App
Store and start running an App Mall instead.

Inside their Mall, different third party stores could focus on different
niches and demographics with totally different criteria for including and
rating apps with different UX to browse and discover products. Some could use
expert reviews, some user reviews, others taste based recommedations. Its
crazy to think there could ever be a "one size fits all" store for all types
of people and all types of activity that digital devices are used for. Maybe
an IGN store, a LifeHacker store, a ThinkGeek store, a Fortune store etc.

Apple/Google/MS could spend their time on the simpler effort of curating and
promoting good _stores_ instead of good apps and offer them a typical referral
fee on each purchase. I think everyone would benefit - better shopping
experience for users, better niche surfacing for developers, new revenue
source for tech reviewers, simpler curation job for the platforms.

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Aqua_Geek
There's nothing stopping anybody from doing this. Apple offers a DB dump of
the store's content (including music). You could build a curation platform on
top of that. They do, indeed, offer a referral fee for iTunes purchases.

I'm actually currently working on such a setup.

~~~
walterbell
Is it difficult to become an "Enterprise Partner"?

[https://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentat...](https://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes-
enterprise-partner-feed.html)

~~~
Aqua_Geek
Nope. Or at least it wasn't when I applied: fill out the form, get an email
with username/pwd.

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themartorana
I'm not sure I agree entirely on the press thing - although my experiences are
from owning a mobile game company, not a mobile app company. For games, online
press is great to start to be recognized within the community of peer
groups/companies, but has never moved the needle for us, user-wise.

We haven't been featured either, but that's made things harder on us. Getting
featured is still huge for visibility. We're pressing for it pretty hard when
we release our next game. It's 90% likely we won't get one, but its a huge win
if you can pull it off. (It does increase the already silly graph of first-
week downloads vs. the-rest-of-time-ever downloads, but it definitely makes
sure that second part averages a bit higher.)

~~~
prawn
What has moved the needle for you?

We had a dev relations contact and got featured worldwide with Hexiled, then a
smaller feature later when we added more language support. I argue with my dev
partner about press - I think the best tactic is more decent apps in the store
trying to get a home-run feature by honing the app style, rather than begging
little app reviewers for coverage.

I think if your feature gives your virality a launch pad, that's the best bet.
We had the feature, but at the time our app was flawed and we had not yet
introduced a couple of sharing functions.

~~~
archagon
Out of curiosity, if you're willing to share, how did you get in touch with a
dev relations person at Apple for (what looks like) your first game? I'm going
to release my first big app soon (music creation) and having someone at Apple
know about my product would be so helpful!

I agree with your thoughts on tactics, BTW, which is why I'm working hard on
polishing the UX.

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prawn
Co-developer has built apps in the past and met a dev relations guy at a
conference or WWDC or something. We give them heads up on product releases or
major updates and they forward it to editorial teams (local or worldwide) for
consideration.

~~~
archagon
Thanks!

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dazzla
IMHO most of the success was due to being featured. Being featured was mainly
due to having contacts at Apple and Google. Having contacts is out of reach
for most developers. There are only so many developers Apple and Google can
have a relationship with and there are only so many apps that can be featured.

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MilnerRoute
Jesus. The road to success, judging from the article, boils down to this.
"Know somebody who works for Apple App's Store who can help get your app
featured on launch day."

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seiji
Everything is back room deals. Didn't Instagram have a months-long deal to be
a "featured app" as long as they didn't make an Android version?

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irl_zebra
Those animated gifs throughout the article were awful. But as for the
substance, does it really take knowing people on the inside to have a
successful app these days? That seems surprising.

~~~
mromanuk
> you need a relationship with someone in the Cupertino saloon.

That is no advice at all, just a confirmation of how biased the app stores
are. All the big guys can do that. How is supposed a small indie dev, across
the world can success at this, now?

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raphael_o
Look - it's really what business comes down to. Most of what seems to happen
organically was actually facilitated by creating and maintaining
relationships. But that's not the main point I was trying to make, rather that
as developers, we need to understand the mindset of the team behind it. They
think of themselves as store managers and they want to bring the apps that
will do well with their users above revenue. Another point to seriously
consider which I didn't incorporate in this post is that both Apple and Google
will push forward apps that make use of their latest APIs in a way that they
approve of, to serve as examples to other developers and increase traction of
the new OS features (example: material design, Wear SDK, Apple Watch, etc.)

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Zigurd
There is a lot of good experience presented in that article. But there is one
place where they screwed up: It's easy to make apps for Android that scale up
to tablet-sized screens. Failing to do that isn't Google's fault, and whinging
about Google's preference to feature apps that run on tablets is unhelpful.
Especially so since they previous, correctly, decided to build an Android
design from scratch. If you do that right, it will run on tablets. Based on
the tablet issue, their idea of building specifically for Android is still
infected by a lot of iOS-itis.

~~~
raphael_o
You have a point here. A lot has been done in the Android framework to enable
developers to build app that will scale up and down elegantly. However, keep
in mind that there is more than supporting the physical form factor to it. To
build for tablets vs phone is a different product mindset, with different
goals and user experience. I don't expect people to open BillGuard every day
on their tablet, rather to take their time on weekends to go deeper into the
more advanced tools for example. Since the app is used differently, the UX has
to be thought through specifically to take advantage of the specific platform
you're building for.

~~~
Zigurd
That's a very complex issue. In some ways, Google's recent design trends and
libraries, e.g. as in Inbox, do not take good advantage of large screens on
the desktop or in tablets. I suspect Google aimed for a cross-platform UX
first, before really tackling the screen real estate issue.

On the other hand, a tablet layout that "flattens" a UI hierarchy by
displaying a list Fragment to the side of a display/edit Fragment is pretty
simple to do. Material Design works just fine for this, too.

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coldcode
We had good success at my last job at a big brand travel company, because our
Apple rep really liked us. But me as an individual has no chance. I don't
think Apple really cares about you as a developer as long as there are enough
to make iPhone sales happen. It's sad though, I wish I could build an app
discovery app which would be a lot of fun to do, but it's stupidly verboten.

~~~
egb
How did you get your Apple rep? I have never quite found out how to "apply" to
get one, or if it's all self-selected from within Apple...

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jarjoura
From what I understand, once your app crosses the 1 million download mark,
Apple's Developer relations will reach out to you.

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ThomPete
If it was up to me Apple would shut down the Mac app store and give the
audience back to the indie developers.

They kind of already completely gave up on it because of the iOS appstore is
much more popular and it's not really adding anything good to the consumer.

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M8
Apps are now discovered outside of the stores.

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tempodox
If you know where, please let the rest of us know (i.e. if the source has
better discoverability than the AppStore).

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sjg007
Facebook in stream app ads.

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tempodox
OK, I didn't say the source should be searchable with multiple criteria...

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dirkdk
Apple cares about your app if it displays unique features of their platform.
So build a new Apple Watch app, use extremely nice design, integrate with
HomeKit. Otherwise, they don't care

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ksk
I'm wondering if there is any marketing/sales strategy crossover from other
domains which also have limited product placement opportunities - like
supermarkets?

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richardbrevig
In supermarkets, I understand it's common to pay initially to get the shelf
space so you can demonstrate your product will have traction.

