

The iOS App Store: Needles in Haystacks - semilshah
http://semilshah.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/the-ios-app-store-needles-in-haystacks/

======
vanelsas
At Zwapp (I am the founder) we've actually attempted to address this issue,
and yes, we use users and their social networks to see if we can make more
apps discoverable than just the top popular lists. So far it seems to work out
really well, people are interested in sharing their apps and providing each
other recommendations. You see this in real life all the time. We meet up, put
our phones on the table, and often the conversation is lead to "what apps do
you use". We try to stimulate and support these types of conversations. There
are more reasons why this approach is valid. Gaming reviews is less important
because you wil trust a review of a person you know. It may be more
interesting to see the most popular apps of your friends instead of the most
popular in the app store. And finally, we have spend a lot of effort trying to
provide excellent app detection. The reason for this is two-fold. it helps you
get started quickly as a user, but more importantly it helps us to understand
what apps people have and use, allowing us to provide qualitative
recommendations. It is better to get a few users to download your app and then
really use it, then get a whole lot of users downloading it and running it
once because of a mismatch.

~~~
semilshah
Cool. Are there examples of folks using Zwapp to reach the same number of
downloads as being featured by Apple, ro something close to it?

~~~
vanelsas
There is Zwapp, the community, and there is Zwapp Connect, our service that
helps developers reach the users that are actually interested in their app. We
use our recommendation engine to match between user needs and app to drive
downloads. We've tried several app download services and found the quality of
the downloads very poor. By using a lot of social/app and meta data that we
have build up we can target much better and help devs to drive downloads to
people that are more likely to use your app. (sorry about the pitch). It is
actually a tough problem to crack that involves reach, matching tons of data,
providing the right call to actions and then measure the success and improve
the process again.

~~~
semilshah
Cool, there are also some iOS apps explicitly for "app discovery," but I still
think it's impossible to break out. I read somewhere that 4% of app downloads
account for about 3/4 of all app revenues.

~~~
vanelsas
Zwapp is one of those app discovery apps. And it is a platform for developers
wanting to promote their apps to passionate app users. See :
[http://itunes.apple.com/app/id426360184?mt=8&ls=1](http://itunes.apple.com/app/id426360184?mt=8&ls=1)

------
chubs
I can totally relate to this article: as a frequent launcher of iOS apps, i'm
always open to suggestions for how to promote them. At the moment my
(admittedly very vanilla) strategy is:

* Set up a promo-page at www.blahapp.com * Use adwords ads to send people from google to my website * At the website, provide links to the app store.

However, any suggestions will be well noted.

~~~
dave1619
How has your strategy worked so far?

~~~
chubs
So far, i've just been putting my apps on the app store with no promotion.
It's going alright, making ~$100/day. For my next app, since i'm putting a bit
more effort into it, so i'm going to match that with more effort into
promoting it too so i'm trying to figure out where would be most effective.
So... long story short: i'll find out soon.

~~~
semilshah
Good luck, would love to know what you end up doing.

------
Apple-Guy
Ever heard of PR?

Hire a PR company, or send copies of apps for review, etc.

Apple also reviews new Apps, and if it's outstanding, Apple typically promotes
the app.

So, if you are not enjoying success, perhaps improve the app and improve
visibility as mentioned.

~~~
semilshah
Hello, I'm afraid PR isn't the answer. Some folks can afford to hire big guns
and/or get lucky, but it's not so easy to just plunk down cash for copy.

------
nirvana
I'm working on technology related to this problem. I'm interested in hearing
anyone's thoughts (ideas are cheap, right?) about the best way to curate the
app store at scale.

The biggest challenge seems to be that there is a very limited amount of
information available. Marketing text, category, and maybe rating (Though I
think you have to violate Apple's ToS and scrape to get that.) Apple already
offers free-text search, but I think few use it.

Most approaches so far have gone for trying to create a social network around
app discovery, which seems like a lost cause to me (how many people are going
to join such a network?) I could be wrong though...

~~~
ceejayoz
> The biggest challenge seems to be that there is a very limited amount of
> information available.

Not only that, but there are trivial ways of gaming it. I've seen a number of
apps in the bestselling categories with four or five star reviews, but when
you look at the actual reviews they're all one star because the app promises
abilities that aren't possible. They just release a point version and use
Mechanical Turk to pay a few people to review.

I don't understand why Apple doesn't make reviews a rolling average instead of
resetting it entirely with a new release.

------
sabat
I've thought about doing an App Store wrapper around the App Store, more than
once.

~~~
semilshah
Cool how would you do it, or design it?

