Reviews on the iTunes store...

[John Dixon]

> Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2012 08:11:41 -0700
> From: ambassador at fourthworld.com
> To: use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Subject: Re: Reviews on the iTunes store...
> 
> John Dixon wrote:
> 
>  > I have some apps in the iTunes store... lately, well this weekend one 
> of them, 'TickerTape' started to get some reviews posted on its page...
>  > I was talking to a friend earlier today who lives in America ( I live
>  > in England, that funny little island north of mainland europe.) and
>  > he told me that he cannot see the reviews...
>  >
>  > Anyone know how this works ?... When I submitted the apps I set them
>  > to be sold in all the stores.. Does anyone know how to get the
>  > reviews seen in the different markets ?
> 
> Just be glad you've had any reviews at all.  That puts you in a highly 
> desirable minority, since it turns out that some 60% of apps in Apple's 
> app store have never been downloaded at all:
> 
> 
> App Store has growing population of never-downloaded "zombie apps"
> <http://www.tuaw.com/2012/08/06/app-store-growing-populated-with-never-downloaded-zombie-apps/>

Then it seems that I have had a little luck with the three apps that I have had in the iTunes store... there are three there at the moment all of which were written for different reasons. I never expected that any of the apps would make any money... perhaps they would sell a few units and that would be it...But since they were accepted by Apple I thought that I would try and promote them so that they would not join the '60%' and be complete failures, well, as far as sales were concerned anyway.

I emailed every magazine, newspaper, iphone app review site I could either think of or find, but did not get a reply from any of them.. I laugh... even with the promise of 'promo' codes...:-) Of the three apps I had actually thought that 'Skribble' would be the app that would sell better than the other two but this has not been the case...

Since the first app was put on the iTunes store in May... daily sales of all three have teetered between 0 and 6, I smile Thursday and Friday seem to be the best days... and there can and are days without any sales at all...

Tickertape 1.0

This little ditty was put together to see what could actually be done in liveCode as far as orientation of the screen was concerned. I wanted to be able to change what was being displayed on screen as the orientation of the device was changed rather than having to ‘touch’ or ‘swipe’ to get content to change... 
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tickertape/id529490215?ls=1&mt=8

Skribble 1.0

‘Skribble’ is an offshoot of something else that I have been working on, getting liveCode to recognize letters as they are written on the screen, but once I had colour working, I got sidetracked and ‘Skribble’ was the result. I had always wanted to call this little app 'Scribble', but unfortunately the name had already been taken... I laugh now, but it took me two weeks to come up with the idea of substituting the 'c' for a 'k' in the name...:-) 

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skribble/id532445290?mt=8

MoneyXchange 1.0
I put this together when runRev first introduced iOS mobile... It wouldn't run well at first as scrolling through the list of the currencies, 94 groups to scroll that consist of a flag image and two fields to a group, proved to be very jerky... the accelerated rendering, however sorted all the scrolling problems.. Then I had a problem with the name of the app... I had submitted it with the name of 'Filthy Lucre', but the name was rejected by Apple as they deemed such a name was likely to cause offence.. so, it has ended up with the very unimaginative name of 'moneyXchange'...:-(
 
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moneyxchange/id533308066?mt=8

Why am I telling you all this ?... Well, last Friday night I was drinking beer in my local pub when a friend walked in the door recently arrived back from London... he started to tell me that 'Your little stupid app that displays messages on the screen... I have seen them using it in the Olympic stadium'.... I smiled at him and took no further notice... This is I guess the punchline... Yesterday morning I had a look at my app sales in iTunes connect...  sales of 'Tickertape' have gone from 1 or 2 a day to the hundreds... in fact todays figures show sales of 558....

It just goes to show though, it is not advertising that has helped me here, it can only have been 'word of mouth' of people in and around London, as I do note that all the sales over the past couple of days have been in the UK... funny old world.

Dixie