As promised in my first post I wanted to keep you, my dear non-existent readers, updated on the progress I made with my wallpaper. The good news is that the app was accepted both in the Amazon and SlideMe appstore. In both stores the app shows up in the search results as I would expect it, for example if I search for “Planet Wallpaper” on Amazon it is ranking on the 12th place which is even better than I would have expected. For the SlideMe store it is even the 4th place, which is awesome given that is has no downloads or reviews. So everything good in wallpaper land? Not exactly. Although the app has much better visibility on the Amazon app store in comparison to google play, it still has no downloads. Apparently I overestimated the number of users that are actively looking for free live wallpapers. When browsing the play store I got the impression that even a little less sophisticated wallpapers can get some attention, so it baffles my why I don’t get a single download on Amazon. Am I too late for the wallpaper craze? Are planets an too obscure topic? Are the graphics too bad? Am I missing something? Heavy head-scratching ensues. When arriving at the SlideMe app store on the other hand, the app got its first downloads immediately and has raked in 85 downloads so far. 85? What am I doing here writing this, I should login into my AdMob account and grab that free, beautiful internet ad money my first users have bestowed upon me. After browsing the AdMob statistics, I had to call Porsche to cancel my preorder: Due to the AdMob terms of service I am not allowed to give exact statisitical numbers here, but I can tell you that the new downloads from the SlideMe app store had almost no impact on the AdMob impressions. Searching this topic I found a valid explanation for this: Apparently a lot of users use SlideMe to download .apk files directly to their PC to use them on devices without internet access. Bummer. As I explained in my first post, I don’t expect the wallpaper to be an actual source of income for me, but I hoped to get at least enough users to see meaningful reports in AdMob which is still not the case at the moment. Lessons learned:
- Alternative markets can give you better visibility and maybe even more downloads
- Just because your app is on an app store it will not automatically rake in downloads
- App downloads don’t necessarily relate to Ad impressions
- People with internet on their devices don’t like space-themed wallpaper
- People without internet do
I know that there are even more alternative markets for Android apps, I think I’m gonna try some more…I will keep you updated of course. On the social media side there is not much new besides the fact that I really started to enjoy twitter over the last days and I even gained one or two followers by making my first posts. People post interesting links too, I could read the #gamedev hashtag all day….I must take care so it doesn’t distract me too much from work. So much for the update for now. I got some ideas for some “real” blog posts in the back of my head, I’ll try to type them into the wordpress editor window once I find the time. Time, time precious time….