A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

I wish Apple&#x2F;Google&#x2F;MS would realise that they could stop operating an App Store and start running an App Mall instead.<p>Inside their Mall, different third party stores could focus on different niches and demographics with totally different criteria for including and rating apps with different UX to browse and discover products. Some could use expert reviews, some user reviews, others taste based recommedations. Its crazy to think there could ever be a &quot;one size fits all&quot; store for all types of people and all types of activity that digital devices are used for. Maybe an IGN store, a LifeHacker store, a ThinkGeek store, a Fortune store etc.<p>Apple&#x2F;Google&#x2F;MS could spend their time on the simpler effort of curating and promoting good <i>stores</i> instead of good apps and offer them a typical referral fee on each purchase. I think everyone would benefit - better shopping experience for users, better niche surfacing for developers, new revenue source for tech reviewers, simpler curation job for the platforms.

I&#x27;m not sure I agree entirely on the press thing - although my experiences are from owning a mobile game company, not a mobile app company. For games, online press is great to start to be recognized within the community of peer groups&#x2F;companies, but has never moved the needle for us, user-wise.<p>We haven&#x27;t been featured either, but that&#x27;s made things harder on us. Getting featured is still huge for visibility. We&#x27;re pressing for it pretty hard when we release our next game. It&#x27;s 90% likely we won&#x27;t get one, but its a huge win if you can pull it off. (It does increase the already silly graph of first-week downloads vs. the-rest-of-time-ever downloads, but it definitely makes sure that second part averages a bit higher.)

IMHO most of the success was due to being featured. Being featured was mainly due to having contacts at Apple and Google. Having contacts is out of reach for most developers. There are only so many developers Apple and Google can have a relationship with and there are only so many apps that can be featured.

Jesus. The road to success, judging from the article, boils down to this. &quot;Know somebody who works for Apple App&#x27;s Store who can help get your app featured on launch day.&quot;

Those animated gifs throughout the article were awful. But as for the substance, does it really take knowing people on the inside to have a successful app these days? That seems surprising.

There is a lot of good experience presented in that article. But there is one place where they screwed up: It&#x27;s easy to make apps for Android that scale up to tablet-sized screens. Failing to do that isn&#x27;t Google&#x27;s fault, and whinging about Google&#x27;s preference to feature apps that run on tablets is unhelpful. Especially so since they previous, correctly, decided to build an Android design from scratch. If you do that right, it will run on tablets. Based on the tablet issue, their idea of building specifically for Android is still infected by a lot of iOS-itis.

We had good success at my last job at a big brand travel company, because our Apple rep really liked us. But me as an individual has no chance. I don&#x27;t think Apple really cares about you as a developer as long as there are enough to make iPhone sales happen. It&#x27;s sad though, I wish I could build an app discovery app which would be a lot of fun to do, but it&#x27;s stupidly verboten.

If it was up to me Apple would shut down the Mac app store and give the audience back to the indie developers.<p>They kind of already completely gave up on it because of the iOS appstore is much more popular and it&#x27;s not really adding anything good to the consumer.

Apps are now discovered outside of the stores.

Apple cares about your app if it displays unique features of their platform. So build a new Apple Watch app, use extremely nice design, integrate with HomeKit. Otherwise, they don&#x27;t care

I&#x27;m wondering if there is any marketing&#x2F;sales strategy crossover from other domains which also have limited product placement opportunities - like supermarkets?