I'm getting close to the point of releasing this beast I've been working on for the better part of four months. This get into an area I am very interested in - product management. It's basically a full time job in itself, but the payoff is in sales. One of strategies I've seen discussed is releasing an app into the Amazon App Store and basically giving it away for a day for free. This hopefully garners some attention and gets some eyeballs on the app, and maybe some buzz going on. Although, frankly the nature of this app is "long-tail", a Japanese vocabulary builder and study app oriented toward the Japanese Langauge Proficiency test. But, it would really nice to get a splash of publicity. I just don't know if it's the type of thing that really garners publicity. It's nichy, but it's crowded niche - especially on the IOS side, but that can wait for another day.
The first hit on Google brings us to the leading app store page:
http://www.amazon.com/mobile-apps/b?ie=UTF8&node=2350149011
The main part of the page start out with this heading:
Amazon Appstore for Android
Get a great paid app for free every day <=== Right, I should be looking at this.
They have an "App of the Day" which is offered for free, presumably just for today, with $1.99 regular price crossed out. There's also a clock underneath which shows how much time is left before the giveaway runs out.
Underneath that is a headline that says "Featured Categories and Developers". The categories are PopCap games, whatever that is, Games, "Citizen 12 Games" (a developer?), Music, Entertainment, and Productivity.
Then came a heading called "Most Recent Free Apps of the day", then, "Popular Apps for Android". then "Popular Games for Android" then "Great Games from HandyGames for Android", then "Bestselling Android Phones and Tablets".
The game apps seem to be 1 or 2 bucks, while two of the four productivity softwares headlined are as high $7 and $8 bucks. This goes to show that if theres's money involved, people will pay more. I don't know if that applies to educational apps, though.
Then, on the left side, there's a whole list of categories:
Browse
Popular Features
Bestsellers
Top Rated Apps
New Releases <====== interesting
Free Apps
Deals <====== interesting
Amazon Apps
Test Drive
Most Engaging
All Test Drive Apps
Hot Links
Android 101
Android Phones
Android Tablets
Categories
Books & Comics
City Info
Communication
Cooking
Education <====== my app's category
Entertainment
Finance
Games
Action
Adventure
Arcade
Board
Cards
Casino
Casual
Educational <==== more of my apps category
Kids
Multiplayer
Music
Puzzles & Trivia
Racing
Role Playing
Sports
Strategy
Health & Fitness
Kids
Lifestyle
Magazines
Music
Navigation
News & Weather
Novelty
Photography
Podcasts
Productivity
Real Estate
Reference
Ringtones
Shopping
Social Networking
Sports
Themes
Travel
Utilities
Web Browsers
Featured Developers
Adobe
Evernote
Gameloft
GAMEVIL
Glu Mobile
Handmark
HeroCraft
Namco Bandai
PopCap
Real Networks
Rovio
Ok, a quick question - what are Deals? I will check that out after checking out the right site of the pages, which contains the following:
Educational Fun For Kids
Teach your toddler words by association: zebras, toucans, fire trucks, and more with Sound Touch. Hundreds of colorful real life images are included--simply touch one to hear its accompanying sound. $1.99 (regularly $2.99)
At least 50% off Premium Apps
OfficeSuite Pro
Keep a feature-rich mobile office solution by your side with OfficeSuite Pro. Create, view, and edit MS Word and Excel files -- this app for Android also supports viewing of PowerPoint and PDF files. Read more
$4.99 (regularly $14.99)
DioPen Handwriting & Keyboard: $4.99 (regularly $10.40)
Droid Scan Pro: $1.99 (regularly $4.99)
Cardio Trainer Pro: $4.99 (regularly $9.99)
Gaia GPS - Topos and tracking: $4.99 (regularly $9.99)
›See more
Ok. So, that's a thing - it will list deals. But clicking on the link reveals that it's only listing 10 apps altogether. Perhaps the "deals" link on the left side will have more? Nope, it takes you to the same page. That's disappointing.
Anyway, continuing down the right side, we have another block add for a game, then underneath that, the following link:
Bestsellers
Appstore for Android : Amazon Appstore
Updated hourly
And then two tabs, "Top 100 Paid", and "Top 100 Free", and then icons, titles and prices of the top 10 apps in each category. Underneath that, we have this link:
›See all bestsellers in Amazon Appstore
And then underneath it all an Amazon-ish "recently viewed" including apps and books.
Ok, so, clearly a lot of thought has gone into this setup. Of course, I'm viewing from my macbook, and it's a web page, not the actual app store app. But they seem to allow you to download from it - it must get used quite a bit.
I should also note that the apps that are displayed also show a rating and number of reviews, and if you drill down you get to look at the reviews, which are just like the regular Amazon book reviews.
Oh, yeah, there are "test-drive apps" which I just figured out mean you can try the app on your computer. How does that work? Ok, here we go:
Clicking the “Test drive now” button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you interact with the simulated phone using your mouse and keyboard, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 — just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.
That's just cool. The customer can actually try out the app, and if they like it, they can buy it.
Ok, let's drill into education, then "Japanese". There are 3 pages altogether. Not that huge. A lot of the apps are free, but some are paid. Uh-oh. I just saw one review that said it didn't work on their phone. That's one thing I haven't done - tested on other phones. That's why it would be cool to distribute the free one first, work out the bugs with less pressure, and then come out with the paid version.
I just realized that if you want to do an in-app upgrade, you'll need different code for Amazon or Google's App marketplace. Just another thing to keep track of.
I think a good beta-testing option would be to just release the app with a limited number of words available, like 100. That will keep the reviews from getting too nasty of they don't work. The problem is that you can't put adds in until you have released thea app on the google marketplace. Actually, I think I read somewhere that there's a way to add an app to the Google Marketplace "secretly", or something. Let me check into that.
Here we go, from Google Marketplace's upload instructions:
APK file size: Maximum supported size is 50MB.
Draft application .apk file: When you upload an .apk file, it can be saved as a draft while you edit the other aspects of the list.
Please note that package names for app files are unique and permanent, so please choose wisely. Package names cannot be deleted or re-used in the future.
Important note;
Copy protection: Copy protection may help prevent applications from being copied from a device. It increases the amount of memory on the phone required to install the application. We expect to deprecate copy protection soon.
If you have a paid application, we recommend that you implement the Android Market licensing service. For free application, we recommend implementing your own copy protection scheme.
Ok, the question is, if I upload it as an app, will I have a site to give to Jumptap?
Hmmm. I just had a good idea. What if I charge by 100 words? Like, you pay a buck for 100 words? That way, you get the free app, with the first 100 words. Then, you get the paid app for 99 cents for 200 words, and so on.
It's so annoying that you have to have separate free and paid versions on Google's app marketplace. But, the free app could be without the SRS. The problem is when they download the paid app, it will have to use a separate database, and they lose the SRS. Plus, it's a bit of a different demo. If I could give SRS with the free version it would be a good user test of how it works.
Hmmm..
Anyway, let's take a look at the Google Marketplace on the web. I've seen the Marketplace app before. But the web page will give an idea of what they're up to. I saw they recently revamped it.
Here's what's in the web page:
https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/?pli=1
First, a link to a video:
Video: Google Apps Marketplace - 1 year of integrated apps Youtube video
Underneath that, a box called "Featured Apps", which is like a slide viewer, and features 5 apps in total, with at least one free one.
Then, there's a section entitled "Try popular & notable apps", which list five apps, with fairly large icons and descriptive text. Underneath that, a section labeled "Success stories from customers like you".
On the left side, similar to Amazon's marketplace, is a list of categories:
Products
Accounting & Finance
Admin Tools
Calendar & Scheduling
Customer Management
Document Management
EDU
Productivity
Project Management
Sales & Marketing
Security & Compliance
Workflow
Professional Services
Archiving & Discovery Implementation
Custom Application Development
EDU Specialists
Google Analytics
Medium-Large Business Implementation
Small Business Implementation
Support & Managed Services
Training & Change Management
Enterprise Search
Products
Content Connectors
OneBox Modules
Search Extensions
Professional Services
GSA Deployment
Google Mini Deployment
Custom Development
Training
GeoSpatial Solutions
And on the right side, "Top Installed this week", with the number of reviews, then "Top Installed", presumably overall, then a "recently added" section.
Again, this is the web page. The marketplace app looks completely different, at least the version I have on my phone. It has a few icons, but I mostly just search on keywords with it, then drill down and check the reviews.
I just noticed while browsing another android app market called "Android Market" at https://market.android.com/. It has a similar slideshow to Google's of featured apps, which looks to feature about 5 apps or so. Underneath that are tabs for "top charts", including "top paid", "top free" (Google Maps, Facebook, Pandora, Angry Birds, YouTube), Top Grossing (looks like all games), Top new paid, and top new free. In the center, under a "Featured" tab. There's one that catches my eye, called "Perfect ear" (I play guitar, well, "play" is a bit of a stretch, but anyway). It has 200+ reviews, not bad, and goes for $1.99. So, he made at least $400 on it. If 1/10 of the users reviewed it, that's 4k. I wonder what the typical purchase/review is?
So, the numbers are pretty good on this site. The thing that kind of concerns me is keeping all these sites with up-to-date versions and fixes. Also, specific code for the various marketplaces. It's a lot to contend with.
Where else are Android apps available?
Here's another one, appolicious, at http://www.androidapps.com/. It also has IOS tab. It looks really pro.
Here's another one:
http://www.androidzoom.com/
And then into review sites. Ok. That's an overview. I'm still trying to work out the best release strategy. More to come/
No comments:
Post a Comment