Apple Appstore Now and Then
What to expect from being present in the Apple AppStore today, that is what I am trying to find out after a longer abstinence by starting a test balloon 🎈
Standard disclaimer: These are just my impressions while trying out the app store after some time. Are yours different? Let me know in the comments!
I did not follow the app store business for some time now, I think I removed my last app around 2015. It was an app that let you find local fashion in stores, but I could not really convince enough stores to join, and without stores and products it was not really interesting for users (🐓🥚) so I gave up at some point.
Now, after creating a newsreader web app, most feedback was like - is there an app?
So I checked all the different ways to create apps, from native apps, react native, flutter to turbolinks for iOS. And I thought why not create a small native app to get a toe back in the water.
As a guitar player I was looking for a decent tuner for some time, after the one I was using the last years was somehow discontiuned and disappeared when I switched phones. And what can I say, I was somehow shocked how much apps are on the app store that do nothing else as rip users off with subscriptions. I checked out a lot of apps, all free until I actually tried to use them. I ended up buying an app for about 4€ that worked okayish and looked like developed for iOS 3.1.
But what I see as more problematic is the scam that is going on in the app store. The first hit when you search “guitar tuner” is an app that uses a dark pattern of showing you three skip buttons, and the fourth button styled the same as the skip buttons starts a subscription for 8.50€ per week!(!!) I would think I am not easily tricked, but I had tapped the button, and only the fingerprint check prevented me from subscribing. Like I said, that is the top app in the app store, and tons of ratings say that it is a rip off.
After a little digging I found out that this is a known problem in the store since some time now. Don’t know if these companies start these moves after the review process or how this happens. But it seems to also trick the algorithms, because of course these scam apps make the most money and are then recommended by Apple again. Without much searching I was recommended a document scanner app where the negative reviews all told how they were tricked in subscribing.
There are some positive things to mention though. Apple made privacy a selling point and that is now introduced to the app store. You can see for every app what data they are using. Big thumbs up!
Also there is a small business program that has just started. That should cut the app store provision in half for most indie developers.
Also your apps are now simultanously desktop apps for M1 macs, not sure how good it works though.
So I started to develop the guitar tuner that I was looking for. Of course it turned out harder than I thought it would, not the iOS stuff but the tuning algorithm. So after reading research papers and much trial and error I was ok with the results and decided to publish it as an app.
Publishing the app takes time
I wanted to fill everything out as good as possible. The problem is you have to make screen shots and recordings for at least four devices. If you own these four devices it is relatively simple - just start QuickTime, pick new recording from the menu and choose the phone as camera and audio. Then just record your devices four times and make screenshots for all of them.
Chances are that you do not own at least some of the devices, so what to do? There is a solution to this - you can record the simulator! But the catch is you cannot record the audio. Also I needed to switch to h264 codec to get a frame rate greater than one..
xcrun simctl io booted recordVideo --codec h264 appvideo.mp4
So what I ended up doing was record some guitar notes, played that through a speaker, put a mic in front of the speaker that I could use as audio input for the simulator, and recorded the device screen while doing so. Then in iMovie there is actually a menu entry to create an app preview! I imported the recorded screen and the audio and exported it as app preview. When I had all device resolutions two days had passed figuring everything out. It was like completing a puzzle when every device in the iTunes-Connect form was filled out.
The app review is pretty fast, maybe about 8 hours max.
What to expect
I do not expect much but I was also curious to know if the app store is a business opportunity for indie developers.
On the first day I had about 50 free downloads, which was more than I had expected. After two days the installs started to decline to about half, but the app was also not available for some time as there was a problem with my account, which I found out by chance. So I will keep an eye on it.
There is virtually no app that costs money in this category, so probably if I take 1€ to get at least the appstore fee back, no one will download it at all. But I will update the article accordingly if I know more.
I think there is a missing functionality in the appstore to provide a trial period. This would be an awesome feature and it would maybe also make the preview videos obsolete, because you could just check yourself. But that is just my opinion.
Update 05/18/22
It has been quite a while since I published the app and I wanted to give a first conclusion. As expected, even taking one dollar for the app does not really work, at least as long as the app has not many ratings. So I decided to make the app free to get ratings first. I also included a Paypal link, which some actually used, I even got some really generous donations (Thank you very much!). I got awesome ratings and had really nice contacts from all over the world who helped making the algorithm work better in their circumstances. So it was a lot of fun and because of that it was worth doing, but from a business perspective I think it is tough even getting your app store fee back by just selling your app. In Germany the app is in the top 5 for guitar tuners and has a close to 5 star rating, but out of 1000 downloads maybe one rates the app, maybe out of 20.000 one donates money.
Next thing I tried was translating the app to other languages, but downloads in other countries than USA and Germany are growing pretty slowly, Mexico being third. Not sure why other countries like UK and France perform that badly even having the content translated…
An idea I already started is a theme shop, where you can buy custom designs to make the app more individual with an in app purchase. Playing around with OpenGL shaders at the moment, maybe that could also be an option for a guitar tuner more on the crazy side. So maybe I will try that next ☺️