Our iOS apps industry is so old that I have trouble remembering when it all started – so I made this handy timeline / calendar. Feel free to download an editable copy & insert your own apps release dates etc as you look fondly back to distant 2007. The numbers under the year are estimates of all [...]
FAM Score – Evaluating Ideas for Game Projects
November 28, 2011 By 2 Comments
We have a hundred ideas for games but we’re only two full time people here at Focused Apps. So how do we choose what to work on next? What ideas do we spend time prototyping, and which projects do we push forward to market? We developed our own ‘points out of ten’ scoring system called [...]
Designing and Marketing Hit Games
January 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment
How do you make a hit game? Here’s an essay by Tony Downey that comes as close to a recipe for success as I’ve ever seen: Indie Games: Designing to Succeed. READ IT. Following his advice is going to be very hard work, but making your game without following most of this advice will be [...]
iPhone Development Books 4: Marketing & Business
December 4, 2010 By 2 Comments
If you’re making iPhone apps to try to make money, then marketing is key or only your friends will ever download your app. When most people hear the word ‘marketing’ they think of telling people about a product after its been built, but I see marketing as much more than that, and in fact I [...]
Increase iPhone App Downloads by A/B Testing App Names
April 21, 2010 By 14 Comments
I’m about to outline the single most powerful thing you can do to improve sales/downloads of your iPhone app. I know this is a bold claim, but read on and I will justify it. I first presented this at 360iDev San Jose 2010. Apple made us an amazing market for our software and threw in [...]
Tweeting from an Ad on the iPhone Using URL Schemes
January 18, 2010 By 4 Comments
Lately I’ve been experimenting with promoting out app ‘Friend Focus (for Facebook)‘ by ‘turning out the vote’ – ie getting our existing users to help us promote Focus. Once I’ve found a formula that works well we’ll implement the scheme in app and figure out a way to reward users for helping us, but for [...]
6 Months of iPhone App Sales Stats, Cause and Effect.
May 19, 2009 By 38 Comments
Hit Tennis has been out for six months now, and here I share sales figures for those six months. Recently sales have been in decline, but I managed to boost sales over the last month with a variety of marketing tactics: price drop to 99c, release date trick, translation into French, hitting the top 100 paid games…
Understanding App Store Top 100s
May 12, 2009 By 7 Comments
Understanding the unique ways the app store works is critical in deciding app store marketing tactics and understanding the spikes and drops in app sales figures. This article explores how the top 100 lists in the app store work, and a future posting will look at how this applies to real sales data.
Sales Stats Tools for iPhone Apps
April 17, 2009 By 26 Comments
AppViz charts all your app store sales reports for you, and for a huge time saving it logs in to iTunes Connect for you and downloads them automatically. An added bonus (assuming you can stomach reading them) is that AppViz will download all your app reviews too! AppViz charts new downloads, upgrade downloads, all downloads, [...]
Screen Capture Tools for iPhone Apps
April 16, 2009 By 4 Comments
PhoneFinger and SimFinger are handy tools for making demos of iPhone apps using the simulator with screen capture software…
Apple’s TV Ad Causes Hit Tennis Sales Spike?
February 22, 2009 By 2 Comments
On Feb 17th I had a 5x sales spike in my iPhone game Hit Tennis. Cool – a little extra income, but what caused the spike? I looked at Google Analytics and over the next couple of days I Googled and Yahooed looking for a new review or something, but nothing. The only clue I [...]
Christmas Day 4x sales boost for iPhone Games – Hit Tennis numbers
December 28, 2008 By 2 Comments
iTunes Connect just opened its doors after the Christmas break, allowing iPhone developers (me!) to log in and check our sales stats for Christmas. I’m very pleased to discover that Apple managed to get some extra pressies under the tree for me this year in the form of 4x sales increase for Christmas! Check out [...]
First 24 hrs Going Well for Hit Tennis
November 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment
In the first 24hrs, Hit Tennis has over 20,000 free downloads. I think its in the top 50 for free games, and I got some good press at Pocket Gamer in the UK. Today bugfixes.
Hit Tennis game for iPhone iPod touch
November 23, 2008 By 2 Comments
I just released Hit Tennis for the iPhone and iPod touch, its available now on the app store!
iPhone App Store Price and Category Analysis
October 16, 2008 By 1 Comment
The iPhone app store is bursting with apps and I wanted to put some numbers to it. (I should have just looked here: http://projectx.mobclix.com/appstore/ :-). A little copy, paste, and Excel later I have a spread sheet with 5,293 apps from Oct 16th 2008 in the US app store. 99c is the most popular price [...]
iPhone vs ZX Spectrum vs Nintendo DS by ngmoco’s Neil Young
September 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment
From iPhoneDevCamp2, Neil Youngs excellent presentation about iPhone compared to ZX Spectrum and Nintendo DS. I started on the beloved ZX Spectrum, and I’m now focusing on iPhone, so I took this very personally while sitting in the audience. Neil Young > iPhone is greater than… from Dom Sagolla on Vimeo.
