Archive for the ‘app store’ tag
Changing the App Store Availability Date For Fun & Profit
In case you haven’t heard, Gratuitous 1.2 was approved and is now available in the App Store. Go grab it!
Right now, if you take a look at the Finance category of the App Store, you’ll see Gratuitous front and center. If all goes well, we should remain on the Finance category home page for the next few days. Perhaps due to this increased visibility, we had a significant increase in sales during our first day on the home page. We understand that correlation is not causation, but we’re still hopeful this significant uptick in sales continues.
8/13/2009 update: Uptick continues! Day 2 sales were 18% higher than day 1.
How’d we pull this one off?
It’s a simple trick involving manipulation of your application’s availability date in iTunes Connect. When set to the current date, your app will appear in your respective category sorted to the front of the list as by default, iTunes displays apps by release date.
The availability date is intended for developers who want a deterministic release date for their application in order to coordinate press and advertising around a known date. This is common in the video game, music, and film industries where companies coordinate a media blitz around a specific date. However, with the uncertainty of the App Store review process, developers do not know when their app will be approved. Thus, companies can use the availability date to set a future date (after their app has been approved) so they can then coordinate press around this known release date.
However, most iPhone developers don’t coordinate media around applications, instead allowing the application to be made available immediately after it is approved by Apple. Here’s how to set the availability date to maximize the exposure of your app each time you release an update. These steps must be taken on the day your app is approved by Apple.
- iTunes Connect > Manage Your Applications
- Click Edit Information under your respective app
- Click the Pricing tab
- Set the Availability Date field to today’s date. If this is set to a future date, your app will be pulled from the App Store and won’t be made available until this date.
- Click Save Changes
This change will take a few minutes to propagate throughout the various App Store servers, after which your app will be shown on front page of its respective category. Depending on the frequency of app releases in your category, your app could be on the front page for anywhere from less than a day to several days. Being in the relatively quiet Finance category, Gratuitous should remain on the front page for around 5 days.
You might ask yourself why you shouldn’t just constantly adjust the availability date so that your app is permanently displayed on the category home page. Well, Apple has this scenario covered by using either the lesser of the date your app was approved or the availability date set in iTunes Connect. For example:
8/10/2009 – App or update approved by Apple
8/11/2009 – Availability date in iTunes Connect
In this case, Apple will use 8/10/2009 (the lesser date) for your application in the App Store. This is why you should set the availability date to the same date your app was approved. Additionally, setting the availability date past the approval date will simply cause Apple to withhold your app from the App Store until the availability date, after which your app will be listed with the earlier approval date.
Know of any other tips for fellow iPhone developers? Leave a comment below!
Choose your App Store Keywords & Application Name Carefully
After submitting the 1.2 enhancement to Gratuitous, we noticed some changes in iTunes Connect around the meta data you specify for your app and thought we’d share for the benefit of other iPhone developers.
Yesterday, TUAW ran a story about how Apple has recently allowed developers to add keywords to their application to help the search algorithm within the App Store. The keywords, specified in iTunes Connect for each version of your application, are a comma delimited list of keywords in which the total length of this string cannot exceed 100 characters (note: after this article was published Apple reduced the limit from 255 to 100). We haven’t been too impressed by the search algorithm within the App Store so it is encouraging to know that Apple is trying to improve the relevancy of the search results.
App Store Keywords for Gratuitous
On the left you can see the keywords we used for Gratuitous. Should the keywords be organized by most relevant/important to least? Are the relevancy of your keywords diluted with the more keywords you apply? Unfortunately, we don’t know. Other than a small blurb in iTunes Connect announcing the change, there is no additional information on this new field.
After finishing the submission for the upcoming Gratuitous 1.2, we noticed something interesting. The new keywords field above was dithered and couldn’t be edited. Looking further, the application name was also now dithered and couldn’t be edited.
Previously, you were able to update your application name display within the App Store at any time. We took advantage of this when Gratuitous was initially released when we realized it wasn’t being returned for the search term tip calculator. Updating the display name within the App Store to “Tip Calculator – Gratuitous” had an immediate positive effect to our search result ranking.
Last week, we changed our application name within the App Store back to simply “Gratuitous”. We were curious if this would affect our search result ranking and frankly, it is the name we’d really like use. Prepending the name “Tip Calculator” just doesn’t look good to us. However, changing the name back to “Gratuitous” had an immediate negative effect on our search result ranking (so much so that Gratuitous isn’t returned in the first 150 results for the search term tip calculator). Now that the application name can only be set once per version, we’re forced to wait until the 1.2 update is approved before our name reverts back to “Tip Calculator – Gratuitous”.
Thankfully, we already had 1.2 in the pipeline when these changes occurred. Some developers have initially set the keywords field wrong (like not comma delimiting the terms) or want to modify it only to realize they will need to release a new version of the application in order to do so. Releasing a new version of your application just to modify these two fields is a high burden for developers and introduces noise (in the form of a new app version) to your consumers.
In a perfect world, your application name should be set just once and set to your actual application name, not something to improve the search juju. Additionally, keywords wouldn’t be necessary and the App Store search algorithm would return relevant results regardless of special terms developers set to try and improve their ranking. Unfortunately, this isn’t the App Store we currently live in so remember to choose your keywords and application name carefully.
Update: 8/1/2009: Apple just updated the developer program portal news with information on keywords and app names that matches what we found and reported earlier in this blog post.
