Mobile Evolution - Thoughts, insight, and experiences related to the mobile software industry

My brother is always calling me with app ideas. One day, way back in late 2003, he suggested writing a calculator that took recipe ingredient amounts and adjusted them by changing the serving size. My husband, our developer, is an avid cook, so the idea intrigued him. He wasn't satisfied with just a multiplier, so he started creating a complicated algorithm for the Palm PDA that would also factor down the result into the simplest amount of steps. So, if you size up a recipe calling for 1-1/2 teaspoon from 4 servings to 14 servings, the little app would tell you “1 Tablespoon and 2-1/4 teaspoons”. He wasn't satisfied with just that, so he displayed the result also converted into metric. Thus Serving Sizer was born and released in February 2004, at the inexpensive price of $9.95. We've since 'ported the app to iOS, both for iPhone and iPad, learning many lessons along the way. Being able to react quickly to market realizations, potential for features, and more, has helped us along the way. This post will cover some of those lessons learned on the road to making Serving Sizer a successful app.

The AppStore to some, seems like a new phenomenon, but Electronic Sales Distributors (ESD's) have been around a long time. Selling software has evolved tremendously over the years and has helped make sales easier to complete. In the case of the AppStore, distribution has pretty much been taken out of the equation in how it can negatively affect sales. We've been writing mobile software since 1999, and writing it as Creative Algorithms since 2003. This post will explain how distribution and sales have evolved over the past decade, through our personal experiences.

Designing an iPhone UI for a productivity app can take many directions and each time you make a choice, someone will not like it, yet others may think it's brilliant. (Of course, you hope the latter are the ones leaving reviews.) Today the landscape in the app store affects how you design your UI—you need to stand out to get noticed. However, the other edge of the sword is that if you go totally radical, people won't have that comfort feeling of familiarity of a iOS app. So the key is to get a balance of familiar, with a dose of 'zazz. Of course, it helps to have some luck of being in the right place at the right time, so someone with influence also sees your app, but this post is going to tackle areas WITHIN your control—the design of the User Interface (UI).

What's in an icon? App icons are one of the first things a potential customer sees. A good icon will catch an eye, stand out from the rest. It will make your customer take notice, will entice them to click for more info. Your app's icon is one of the most important graphics for your app and can make a big difference in attracting more customers.

When developing many apps, you might also want to opt for branding, either for your company, or for a series of related apps. A key element of branding is to determine a design element that you want to use throughout each icon. This element could be a style, an border, or something more specific. This post will walk through examples of how we've tackled branding for our apps, including our Trip Boss suite, and briefly discuss the difference an icon can make in sales.

Here's another tip for newbie iPhone developers, concerning how setting the release date for a new app works.

Setting release dates properly has been a frustrating process for me. The release date can greatly affect where your app appears in the New Releases list on the AppStore, which is the only guaranteed list exposure your app will get. However, if you do not set the release date properly, you will lose that opportunity as well.

Serving Sizer Pro Recipe Cards for iPad--your recipes, organized for cooking, update is now live in the iPad AppStore.


We've added several new features:

Trip Boss travel manager, Expense & Budget edition, will be on sale on the AppStore on November 10th, 2010. To see a preview, please visit our website.

A few days ago I had a discussion on twitter with a few developer friends about links to the review section on the AppStores from within apps. Since people are prompted to "review on delete," the number of reviews can be slanted towards one-star, especially for 99c "throwaway" apps. No mechanism currently exists to prompt users who use and find value with their apps to rate and write reviews. So, many developers have added "Review this app" links inside their apps.

Here's another tip for newbie iPhone developers, concerning how promo codes work.

You get 50 promo codes per update, i.e. each time you submit a new binary. When you request promo codes, they expire in 4 weeks. So, don't request promo codes until you need them; you are allowed to request them one at a time, if necessary. Unrequested promo codes do not expire.

When you are new to a platform, sometimes things take some time to learn. I find out a lot of things via Twitter (I follow a lot of iPhone and other mobile devs), plus by reading developer blogs and following recommended links. Today I learned something very valuable and rather than "tweet" about it, I decided to start adding short "tips" to our blog, so there's an easier way to find and record them for future reference.

So without further ado, today's tip covers reviews: