Tuesday 31 March 2009

1.4 Submitted to the app store

Bit later than I was hoping and I've had to push a couple of features out to 1.5 - it's been a bit hectic the past few days.

In version 1.4

  • Green pencil notes are slightly darker so it's a bit easier to read
  • Choose the fonts used for the puzzle
  • Choose different background colours for the puzzle
  • Option to move the Hint button to the menu
  • Delete puzzle tags

I've updated the main menu screen with some new graphics:



There's also a new application icon which the guys at icondesign. Kevin put up with my random feedback and thoughts with a lot of patience. If you need an iPhone app icon designed then they are the people to go to!

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Monday 23 March 2009

Version 1.3 is live

Just received the email from Apple - Version 1.3 should be appearing in the app store shortly. Click here to see what's new.

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Sunday 22 March 2009

Sales stats update - One month on the app store

So, according to my records it's now exactly one month since Sudoku Grab went live on the app store and it's been quite an adventure.



As you can see from the above chart; in the past week sales have suddenly picked up. Until around the 16th I had pretty much resigned myself to getting maybe 20 sales a day and I was feeling fairly happy with that. The only slight disappointment was the lack of very many sales in the US - I did think that as it was the biggest market it would have the biggest sales - just goes to show what I know about selling software...

One of things I have learnt over the past month is how decoupled the app stores are in each country. You can have a big sales spike in one country and absolutely nothing everywhere else.

The chart below shows the sales by country. I'm only showing the top 10 countries - but as you can see it tails off pretty quickly the Netherlands only has 8 sales.



I'll take each of the interesting regions one at a time. First off Japan; this was the first country to get any significant sales. Now bear in mind, when I say significant I'm only talking about breaking double figures! We're not talking about heading out to buy a yacht or retiring early.



This big spike in sales came when ipodtouchlab in Japan posted a review of the app. I have to admit when I saw those sales figures come in from Japan I started to get quite excited. Sadly, as you can see from the chart, the app store is a fickle beast and the sales tailed off pretty quickly.

Fortunately the UK came to the rescue!



The first jump in sales in the UK on the 6th March came after an unexpected mention by the kind folk at b3ta in their most excellent newsletter. This is a great source for all things interesting on the internet. However, after the initial peak sales quickly decline to a more normal level. If you look at the statistics for the youtube video of the application you can see what an impact being mentioned on a popular site has.

336 http://www.b3ta.com/links/popular/
270 http://www.spaziocellulare.com/ispazio/2009/03/09/su...
251 http://www.b3ta.com/links/
212 http://www.mobileblog.it/
108 http://pda.pl/

You can also see an Italian site driving a lot traffic my way - just as the UK sales seemed to be disappearing the Italians picked up the baton with a mention on the spaziocellulare website

Sudoku Grab รจ una bellissima applicazione disponibile in AppStore




Once again we see how transitory the publicity is. A brief spike in sales and then a pretty rapid decline.

Back in the UK other things were happening. I was just taking a look at the app store checking where my app was in rankings, making sure it was still there (not that I have become obsessed at all). When what do I see? My icon on the front page in the "New and Noteworthy" section and also in the "What we're playing section".



I think if you look at the chart for UK sales you can probably guess when this occurred...

The first daily sales report was good - 42! I thought, that's pretty good. The day before I had noticed that Germany had done well, but I just put it down to some mention on a random blog. But, on checking I found that the app was also being featured in Germany! This is good I think. 42 sales in the UK, 25 sales in Germany - if this carries on I might actually recoup the cost of the mac book and the phone. Then the next day's figures came in... I think the charts speak for themselves.



Sadly, as I've already mentioned the app store is a fickle beast - once the app stops appearing on the front page I expect there to be a sharp decline in sales back down to the normal levels of one or two a day.

I think I should quickly mention the US sales. This is the largest app store market - and overall things have not been bad in the US. 1 or 2 sales a day, occasionally 4, nothing very exciting. So I'm trying a few strategies to try and improve exposure of the app. I've released a press release for version 1.3 using prMac. This did actually have an impact - 22 sales on the day the press release went out which has helped moved my app onto the first page of results for "Sudoku" (it was on the 4th page before!). I'll be monitoring the figures to see what happens over the coming days.

I've also tried some facebook ads - it's unclear what success they are having, but it's cheap.

As a bit of an experiment I've also tried to use Google AdWords - for iPhone apps this seems like a waste, basically people don't use Google to find apps for their phone, they use the app store.

Now for some conclusions:

  • If you're planning on quitting your job to make iPhone applications, take a look at the sales figures before the application was being featured in the what we're playing sections of the UK and Germany.

  • If you're doing it as a hobby then go for it. $1-$20 a day is not a bad return, I've really enjoyed getting emails from happy customers, talking with other developers, blogging random things about the app. It's a nice break from real work.

  • If you do hit the app store lottery and your app is featured or you get high up in the charts then you can make a nice bit of money - I don't think I'm going to be a millionaire though...

  • If you are willing to commit money to a sustained and focussed advertising campaign then you might also be successful. The main problem is that unless you can get enough sales over a long enough period to get your app into the first pages of the app store no one will know you exist.

  • Make sure you have a novel idea. I was kind of stuck doing a sudoku app as it's a good thing to apply image processing to, but there are something like 50 other sudoku apps out there - being noticed is hard.


Thanks for reading.

Sudoku Grab is on the app store for just $0.99 go and buy it now!. If you don't I'll have nothing to write about... Or don't buy it and I'll write another article about how my sales are really bad.

In the next week or so I'm hoping that my friend Magnus will write about his experience on the app store with his FICS app "Magnus' Super Online Chess" which is also available on the app store here.

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Thursday 19 March 2009

What's planned for version 1.5

These two things didn't make it for version 1.4 so they'll now be in version 1.7


  • Quick pic and solve option - One of the reviews asks for a quick pic and solve option - I think that would be cool, if I have time I'll implement it, it may get pushed to version 1.7



I'm going to start looking at internationalizing the app. Italian, French and German are the initial target languages. Not sure how long this will take.

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Monday 16 March 2009

Famous!

In the UK and German anyway. I thought I'd capture this moment for posterity - and also because it might not last very long...



I really need to work on that icon!

Just checked the UK app store - Sudoku Grab is number 72 in the top paid applications! Unbelievable.

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Friday 13 March 2009

Version 1.3

This version is now live on the store. The instructions for using the app are still the same.

New to this version:
Undo button.
The reset button has been moved behind the menu.

Some errors in the text have been corrected (It now says "Current Game" instead of "Current Came" - I think my eyesight must be going.)

I've also made the email to a friend look a bit nicer:

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Thursday 12 March 2009

Version 1.2 is live!

I've received the email from Apple. Version 1.2 is now ready for sale.

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Wednesday 11 March 2009

Sunday 8 March 2009

Update to the sales stats

I've updated the sales stats to include the past week.

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Saturday 7 March 2009

Version 1.2 submitted to app store!

It was supposed to be version 1.1 but there's been a bit of screw up on the version number front - so we're going straight to version 1.2

In this exciting new version you'll find the following features:

  • Email a friend - you can now send puzzles to your friends using email!
  • Label captured puzzles - you can now tag puzzles with difficulty and any random text you want.
  • Solve button moved behind a menu - everyone's complained about hitting the solve button by accident. This version fixes that.
  • Automatic pencil fill-in - want to get going on a puzzle quickly? Fill in all the pencil notes automatically.
  • Toggle numbers - ready to really go for it? Hold down a number for more than a second and it toggles on, you can now fill in all the squares for that number just by touching them.

There's been lots of emails with suggestions for more improvements. Keep them coming! It's great to know that people are actually using the software. I'll update the roadmap to include them all tomorrow.

I'm off to the sofa now with some lemsip.

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Getting Started

Click here to get to the instructions

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Friday 6 March 2009

Oh dear god

I'm in the b3ta newsletter! Hello b3tans!

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Tuesday 3 March 2009

What's coming up in version 1.2 (was going to be 1.1)?

Here's a preview of what I'm working on for version 1.1 - NOTE this is now version 1.2 (slight screw up on the version numbering so we've had to jump ahead). If you have any comments then that would be great. I'm hoping to submit the next version this weekend - assuming I get some spare time.


Toggle numbers - if you hold your finger on a number for more than a second the number is toggled (a small checkmark appears on it to indicate this). You can now populate boxes with that number just by touching them. To clear the toggle just touch the number pad again.


Solve button menu - when you hit the solve button a menu now slides out giving you the option of solving the puzzle, or automatically filling in all the pencil numbers for the puzzle (this is really cool).


Captured puzzle info - When you capture a puzzle you can now mark the difficulty and also add user defined tags.


Puzzle Book - This screen will let you filter your grabbed puzzles by their tags.


List of puzzles - shows you the list of puzzles that match the tags your specified. You can scroll through this quickly to find puzzles that you want to play. You can also delete puzzles and edit the information about the puzzles.

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Monday 2 March 2009

1.01 is live

I've had the email telling me that version 1.01 is ready for sale. It should be in the App Store soon.

This fixes a couple of bugs that slipped through in the first release.

I've also optimized the puzzle location and number recognition to it should be a lot faster.

New features - obviously wrongly recognized numbers (that break the rules of a valid sudoku puzzle) now get marked in red.

I've been working on version 1.1 I'll post some interim screen shots tomorrow night.

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