More broadly, you can think about two types of feedback for your app: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative feedback is what people will be saying about your app on websites, blogs, Twitter, App Store reviews, and other channels. This feedback may come directly to you, such as through email, or it may require you to be on the lookout for it, as with a blog review of your app.

Quantitative feedback is numerical in nature, consisting of analytics (you did install analytics as recommended in Chapter 7, right?) and data that Apple provides. By using qualitative and quantitative feedback in conjunction, you’ll have a very complete picture of how your app is performing.

Quantitative feedback

The quantitative side of feedback is numbers-based. You’ll be able to use information from Apple and your analytics provider to give you a broader, more data-driven perspective on how your app is doing.

Sales and trends

iTunes Connect is where you’ll find all of the Apple-provided data about your app. The first place you can visit is the Sales and Trends area, which is available from the iTunes Connect home page. By clicking that link, you can preview or download the daily or weekly reports for your app, which shows information related to what app was downloaded, the number of downloads (Units), the royalty price (i.e., your portion of revenue from sales), and the currency and country code associated with the download or purchase. A Monthly Free report will also consolidate all free downloads into a monthly report that corresponds with financial periods.

Note that the daily and weekly reports represent trends and should not be considered the financial accounting for the royalties Apple will pay you for your paid app(s). You can find that information in the Financial Reports (discussed momentarily). The reports in this area are purged regularly by Apple, with the daily reports being removed after seven days and the weekly reports after 13 weeks. So, you’ll want to download and archive these reports somewhat regularly.

I’m going to bias you pretty heavily when it comes to the Apple-provided data. You will save yourself some serious headaches and frustration if you use a third-party tool to help interpret this data. The main reason is that these “reports” are really not reports at all, but instead are more like raw data. If you are very handy with spreadsheets, you can manipulate this data in something such as Microsoft Excel or Apple’s Numbers to make better sense of it.

Very intuitive tools are available, however, that provide actual sales reporting and simplify the iTunes Connect data download process. And depending on what analytics platform you implemented in your app, you may be able to see both your sales and your analytics data in one location. The analytics providers can often also collect other diagnostic information such as crash reports, or even help check for piracy (again, depending on how you integrated them). I’ll highlight the options I recommend in the following list, identifying the key differences among them.

Note

Most cases of piracy occur in regions where an actual app sale would have never occurred in the first place. As a result, many developers don’t bother with piracy checks. If you do pursue them, your options include tools such as mtiks (http://www.mtiks.com/), plug-ins from analytics providers, or your own custom solutions.

AppViz (http://www.ideaswarm.com/products/appviz/)

AppViz is a paid Mac OS X application (offering a 30-day free trial) that was developed by Ideaswarm and will download your iTunes Connect application data and subsequently visualize it for you. Unlike what you receive in iTunes Connect, in AppViz you’ll be able to see data grouped by an app across all regions (which is particularly useful if you have several apps). AppViz can optionally pull in your iTunes reviews and ranking information, giving you a single dashboard to assess key feedback about your app.

appFigures (http://www.appfigures.com)

Compared to AppViz, the distinctions for appFigures (see Figure 9-2) are that it is web-based, offers automatic daily syncing with iTunes Connect, and thus can deliver daily email reports of how your app is doing. Since you are going to be busy with your app, the latter two features are particularly useful. With appFigures, you won’t have to worry about your reports being purged by Apple before you obtain a copy of them, since they will be downloaded each day for you. Ariel Michael, the co-founder of appFigures, is interviewed at the end of this chapter.

Heartbeat (http://www.heartbeatapp.com/)

Like appFigures, Heartbeat is web-based. One of the key differences is that depending on whether you choose to integrate Heartbeat into your app as your analytics provider, you can view both sales and analytics information in the Heartbeat dashboard.

TapMetrics’ TapMini (http://tapmetrics.com/tapmini)

TapMetrics is another analytics provider (and, like Heartbeat, is also mentioned in Chapter 7) that can give you a more comprehensive sales plus analytics display of your app’s performance. The TapMini tool (Mac OS X download) will automate your iTunes Connect download data and sync those reports with TapMetrics daily.

Figure 9-2. appFigures chart; charts such as this one are not present in iTunes Connect

Analytics

Data about downloads and sales only gives you a bird’s-eye perspective about the fact that customers are downloading your app. What it doesn’t help you understand is how many customers are actually using your app over time and what specifically they are doing in it. As you know from Chapter 7, that’s the reason analytics exist.

In general, the analytics you’ll want to pay attention to include the number of sessions for your app (where “session” represents one application open by a customer), sessions per month (also called “frequency of use” by platforms such as Flurry), average session length, number of active users, and number of new users (versus those who might have redownloaded your app). See Figure 9-3.

Figure 9-3. Analytics from Flurry showing the number of sessions

You may also be tracking a number of events in your app. Because the actions that are important for an app can vary widely, events are extremely important. So, if you didn’t initially add any events to track in your app (e.g., identifying when a customer uses a particular feature or completes a certain task), you should consider adding one or more to give you additional insight. Peter Farago, VP of marketing at Flurry, discusses what you should be learning from analytics and events at the end of this chapter.

Crash logs

Crash logs were mentioned in Chapter 6, as part of beta testing. At this point in your app’s existence, they serve as the most technical quantitative feedback you can receive. You can use the same methods described in that chapter to have your customers send you any crash logs generated by your app (see Figure 9-4); hopefully there are few, if any. Once your app is in the App Store, though, Apple provides a way to view the logs that were submitted by your customers through iTunes, which occurs in the background when they sync their devices (unless they previously opted out of this function). You can view these logs in iTunes Connect within the Version Information screen for a particular application by clicking Crash Reports.

Figure 9-4. The Crash Reports link in iTunes Connect

Figure 9-5. MacDevCrashReporter in Icebird

A much more aggressive (and fairly uncommon) way to deal with crash logs is to intercept the events causing the application to crash when they occur, and then prompting a customer to send the reports directly to you when the app is reopened. To explore integrating this type of option, take a look at Plausible CrashReporter (http://code.google.com/p/plcrashreporter/) and MacDevCrashReporter (http://macdevcrashreports.com/). See Figure 9-5 for an example of the latter.

Financial reports

The third-party sales tools mentioned earlier can help you understand the actual payments you should receive from your paid apps. Because Apple has some unique accounting principles that affect when you can receive payments, it’s worth detailing them for you.

To start, select the Financial Reports link from the iTunes Connect home page. When you first visit this area, you will likely not see any reports. Apple only provides financial reports once a month, based on its fiscal calendar. When they’re available, you’ll find seven reports representing the United States (and Latin America), Canada, Europe, United Kingdom, Japan, Australia (and New Zealand), and “Rest of World.” Apple will only provide you a payment when your app sales in any given region are greater than $150. In such cases, you will also see a Payment Advise file for that region, indicating the payment that was made. When the $150 threshold is not met, Apple will withhold payment, rolling it over until the sales are greater than $150 for that particular region in a given fiscal month.

You should also note that payments are typically made three to four weeks after the close of a fiscal month. So, depending on when your app is purchased, it’s possible you might not receive your first check for at least two months. Apple’s most current fiscal calendar is available from the Sales and Trends area of iTunes Connect via the Fiscal Calendar link (see Figure 9-6).

Figure 9-6. The Fiscal Calendar and User Guide, where you can learn more about Apple’s reporting

You’ve probably noticed that the qualitative insight supports the quantitative data and vice versa. It’s unlikely, for instance, that you had tens of thousands of downloads when your app launched, only to receive all negative reviews. You will, however, sometimes find anomalies or aberrations between the two, and when you do, you should hone in on why that’s the case.

To help make that happen, you need to have the same customer-focused mindset you had from the outset of this process and throughout your app’s existence. You may have a strong vision and instinct about what should happen with your ongoing app development, but keep listening to and learning from your customers. That’s particularly true of your most strident critics, who might tweet some frustration about your app or write a scathing review about it. Now, you should recognize that your app will never please all customers, and sometimes, no matter what you do, you won’t win over critics. But for each critic who is turned from a foe to a fan, your app will become that much better and less susceptible to these sorts of critiques.

I recommend that you facilitate discussions with some of your customers at least on a monthly basis once your app is in the App Store. These discussions should be prompted by you and could focus on how your customers are using your app, what they like and dislike about it, and what’s missing in it, and inquiring about what new apps they are using (whether competitive, complementary, or just interesting). These conversations don’t necessarily need to be as formal as what you did during the customer interviews. Your purpose with them is to ensure that you continue to have opportunities to listen to and learn from customers so that you can keep delivering on the promise of your application.

App Store listing changes

Altering the App Store listing for your app can have a positive impact on the interest in your app by highlighting press reviews (see Figure 9-7), awards, or new and upcoming features. You can change a number of items in the App Store without submitting an actual app update (i.e., a new binary) to Apple. The allowable changes include editing the App Store description, URLs (application and support), contact email address, application icon and screenshots, and price. Changing these elements may seem trivial, but they can have a big effect individually and even more so when combined. You can edit these items by selecting Manage Your Applications from the home page of iTunes Connect, choosing the desired app, and then clicking the Edit Information button.

Figure 9-7. The Endloop team’s method of highlighting press about iMockups in its App Store listing

As touched on in Chapter 8, some of the more useful changes you can make include incorporating quotes from customers and reviewers in your App Store description, including “What’s Coming” in the App Store description to highlight the features you are working on, or testing different pricing points, whether as a promotion or to find what spurs the most demand. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the screen, and the changes will usually appear within several hours on the App Store.

For the most part, submitting updates for your app is the best way to keep your customers engaged. These updates may respond to customer feature requests and criticisms, fix bugs, or simply execute on your vision and roadmap for your app. In all cases, these updates will show that you are actively maintaining the app and are committed to improving it. Of course, you’ll need to identify what goes into an update, test and get feedback on an update, and subsequently submit the update to Apple. Much of that will flow from what you’ve done to this point in the development of your app, but I’ll outline some update-specific information now.

What’s coming

It is important to share what you are working on with your app in all of the usual channels. This includes not only editing your App Store description, as mentioned earlier, but also sharing this progress on Twitter, your blog, your website, your email newsletter, and similar outlets.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the same strategies you’ve used throughout the marketing and development process will continue to be useful. This can include teaser previews of new screens or features, reaching out to review sites when you are about to launch a major update, or distributing promo codes.

Considering the two extremes of either engaging with customers too much or being completely absent, you are better off with the first over the second. Apps that go months without any updates and no communication from developers are usually considered abandoned. Existing customers will let prospective customers know of that perception and scare off downloads by discussing your lack of interaction and updates in their reviews. Don’t let that happen.

Cultured Code’s “Arrivals”

If you really want to be aggressive in informing your customers about what you are working on, take a look at Cultured Code’s “Arrivals” (http://culturedcode.com/status/; see Figure 9-10). Maker of the popular task management software Things (available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac), Cultured Code created a highly visible (and visual) status page of the features that are soon “arriving” across its different apps.

Figure 9-10. Cultured Code’s “Arrivals”

Determining the health of an app can vary drastically from app to app, but there are some broader warning signals that indicate your app is on a path to its demise. Although this list is not exhaustive, it should help you to recognize patterns that indicate your app is headed for trouble within its first two weeks of launching.

As you look through my recommendations about early warning signals, keep in mind that one of these indicators alone doesn’t mean it’s time to shut down your app. In fact, catching these problems early enough may allow you to quickly recover or even discover an improved or new vision for your app.

If your app has been out for a couple of months or more, however, and you’ve tried some of the post-launch promotional techniques in Chapter 8 (see the Additional Promotion section in that chapter), yet you feel like the early warning signals are now permanent attributes of your app, you are going to need to take a closer look at what you are doing. You know the opportunity cost for continuing to maintain this app. So, if you find that your app has no hints of life, is not achieving any of your goals, and is costing you considerably more time, money, and effort than it’s worth, you should consider severing ties with it or at least putting it on the back burner while you explore other opportunities.

This advice shouldn’t come as a surprise. In Chapter 1, I made it clear that pursuing an app is risky, especially under the wrong motivations, and that even following all of the principles I outlined for you wouldn’t guarantee a favorable outcome on the App Store, but would only improve your chances for that to occur.

You also should recall that being successful on the App Store is often about a portfolio of apps and not a single app. One particular app may be what you become known for, but that’s often not the first or even second app. Ultimately even a “failed” app is part of a larger mobile strategy because it will provide you with intangible experience, as well as tangible creative and code assets. By making a hard but prudent decision to stop subsequent development of an app that shows no life earlier in its existence, you’ll be positioning yourself to more quickly find the right opportunity. Only this time, you’ll be much more experienced and prepared for the challenges of the App Store.

Even if your app is doing well or is a critical part of a longer-term strategy (e.g., it’s a companion to an existing product or service), it will likely experience some of these warning signals throughout its existence. All apps have ebbs and flows, often resulting from updates you release, reviews you receive, changes in the App Store, new operating systems and devices released by Apple, and many other factors that will likely be out of your control. That’s why it is so important to stay disciplined and follow through on what is under your control—discovering ways to innovate in the App Store, working with customers to validate ideas, rigorously testing your app and its updates before they go into the App Store, and continuing to marry your marketing and development cycles together.

Essentially, you should make sure that each app update follows the principles described in this book on a smaller scale. By being methodical and staying customer-focused, you will constantly be increasing your chances of being competitive in Apple’s always-growing and ever-changing App Store.

Company: Flurry

Position: VP, marketing

Background: At Flurry, a leading mobile application analytics provider for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms, Peter is in charge of corporate and product marketing. In the past, Peter led product marketing at Electronic Arts, where he managed The Sims franchise, the #1 PC game of all time.

Link: http://www.flurry.com/

Ken: What are the biggest misperceptions developers have about analytics? In general, do they understand the value of them or just see installing them into their apps as a chore?

Peter: Analytics is something our developers choose to add to their applications, so we believe they see value in them. We think they understand the value of learning how consumers interact with their applications. Beyond this, we believe developers can also learn things like where to best place ads, how effective cross-selling is working, or understand click-through conversion rates on offers placed within the application.

Ken: The apps in the App Store range quite a bit, from games to utilities. At a more fundamental level, though, what types of metrics (analytics or otherwise) are important for all developers to pay attention to and track when an app goes into the App Store?

Peter: Engagement and loyalty metrics are important to understand beyond simply the number of times an application is downloaded. These include metrics like frequency of use, length of use session, and retention of users over time. Working to increase these metrics, depending on the application, typically means that developers are focused on increasing customers’ satisfaction. Also of interest is the geographic distribution of users, what operating system and device version they are using, and whether they are connecting through WiFi or carrier networks.

Ken: Are there any baselines for assessing the health of an app? For example, if an app is opened three times per week, is that good or bad? How can developers best compare their apps’ analytics to similar or popular apps?

Peter: This primarily depends on the category of application (e.g., games versus utilities). Flurry has considered but not yet released the ability for a developer to benchmark his application performance within relevant categories. Flurry released some data on this at http://blog.flurry.com/bid/26376/Mobile-Apps-Models-Money-and-Loyalty.

Ken: Those who are not familiar with analytics probably have never heard the word “event” before. What are events and why do developers create them? How does tracking events influence the evolution of an app?

Peter: Events (called “goals” in Google Analytics) are created to count the number of times a consumer completes a specific action or task within an application. For example, a developer who makes a game may want to see which game mode users play most often, which power-ups are selected most frequently, or what percent of users completes the entire game. For books, perhaps the developer would like to know how many sessions it takes to read a book, or which chapter the user is currently reading.

Ken: How can developers use analytics to decide if an app is no longer worth investing in? What sort of changes in metrics might indicate that the app has stabilized or previously reached its peak? Are there early warning signals that can help prevent that from happening?

Peter: It depends on the app, but for apps that seek to hold the attention of a large audience (e.g., news) the developer can look at “active users,” which shows the total number of users that have downloaded an application versus how many have used it recently. If this number continues to decline, indicating churn even after making a few updates, that can indicate a problem. Or perhaps the application operates on a free-to-paid micro-transaction model (e.g., In App Purchases). In this case, the developer would want to track both the active users as well as the percent of those who purchase goods. If this number is declining, then it might be time to either refresh the current app or build another one.

Company: Lumos Labs

Position: Director of Mobile Products

Background: Romain David is a mobile professional with more than 10 years of experience. He currently serves as Director of Mobile Products at Lumos Labs, Inc., the creator of Lumosity.com, a leader in online cognitive training.

Link: http://www.lumosity.com/

Ken: The Lumosity product has been around for several years now. What were the initial plans to port that experience to a mobile platform, and specifically to the iPhone?

Romain: Less than three months after the iPhone platform was launched, the number of devices, monetization capabilities, and incredible user experience made it obvious that the iPhone would become our initial targeted mobile platform. We first collected input from our users visiting our site on their iPhone and iPod touch. This gave us a sense of what our users expected to see on the device, and what cognitive area they were most excited to train on the go.

We decided to start by porting one existing game available on Lumosity.com based on different criteria including user experience, session length, and popularity. We introduced Speed Brain in November 2008 as a paid application. iPhone users were able to play this game and improve their speed processing. Due to encouraging early results, we decided to invest more resources on the platform and developed more standalone brain games, before launching Brain Trainer, a complete portable brain training program.

Ken: Because you had an existing product, what were the biggest challenges you faced in this process? Where did you make compromises? What aspects of the iPhone, if any, helped improve your product?

Romain: It is very challenging for companies to be successful on more than one platform. You usually see winners on the Web not doing so well on mobile, and vice versa. Being successful on one platform requires a different skill set and a different culture. We understood that mobile was going to be a key component of our business moving forward, and the challenge was to overcome these limitations while offering a consistent experience to our users, whether they want to train their brain on their computer or on their mobile device.

It is very tempting to port all your assets from one platform to another. Our approach, however, is to develop products that take the most advantage of the platform’s unique capabilities, interface, and monetization opportunities. One of the compromises we had to make was to not port very successful games on Lumosity.com, since they were not going to provide a good enough experience on the iPhone.

Ken: Once you launched into the App Store, describe your approach for improving existing apps and launching new ones. What part does analytics play in influencing your decisions? What other factors inform the development process and updates that get pushed to Apple? How do you determine what does or does not go into an update?

Romain: Many of our decisions come from what we learn from our users. The iPhone is no exception, and analytics has played a key role in our decision-making process. In our iPhone apps, we survey our users, so we can prioritize our features accordingly. For example, many of our iPhone users have told us they wanted more scientific information and an explanation about the Brain Performance Index (BPI) we use to measure their cognitive performance and progress. We took this feedback into account and provided a lot more information in our latest app update.

Ken: Without sharing anything proprietary, what are some of the ways that you measure the success of your iPhone apps? Are there other ways to monitor them besides looking at the number of downloads or revenue generated?

Romain: When Brain Trainer became a Top 25 app, we demonstrated that our brain training program could be appealing to a wide range of iPhone and iPod touch users. Beyond the number of downloads and premium users, the number of daily active users combined with the session length gives us a good idea of how engaging our application is. Engagement is a very important measure, since brain training is most valuable if practiced on a daily basis.

Ken: As a customer of your products, I know that you launched many individual paid apps over a period of time and that recently you launched a new free app that supports In App Purchases. Was this approach part of your original plan or something that evolved based on customer feedback and changes in App Store policies?

Romain: Even before we launched Speed Brain—our first application—we knew that at some point we were going to launch an app that will provide a complete brain training experience, similar to what we offer on Lumosity.com. When Apple introduced In App Purchase and made it available for free applications, it became obvious that we should adopt this model. We were finally able to provide a similar approach to our website. In addition, our iPhone and iPod touch users have always mentioned they wanted more games, so adopting this approach was the best way to meet their demand.

Company: Fileitup Media

Position: Co-founder

Background: Ariel Michael is the co-founder of appFigures, a product of Fileitup Media. appFigures is a reporting platform for iPhone and iPad developers that brings together App Store sales data, worldwide reviews, and hourly rank updates into a single, intuitive, and informative reporting solution.

Links: http://www.appfigures.com; http://www.fileitup.com/

Ken: Most developers launch their apps to a global audience because that’s the default setting. Is that a good approach? How does that complicate the reporting process in iTunes Connect?

Ariel: While iTunes Connect reports are not pretty to the naked eye, they do in fact contain data that’s easy to interpret programmatically. Although the U.S. is by far the largest market for apps, it’s extremely beneficial for developers to release worldwide.

Ken: What are the biggest misperceptions and frustrations developers have about reporting? How does appFigures address some of those issues?

Ariel: Most developers expect Apple to provide reports directly. The reality of the situation is that they don’t provide reports at all; just tab-separated text files that get purged after seven days.

That’s exactly why appFigures was developed! appFigures was born out of the need to have meaningful reports that can easily be viewed and used to enable us as developers to maker better decisions instead of spending time doing spreadsheet analysis.

Today, appFigures helps developers by automating the entire process of downloading and interpreting sales reports, turning them into meaningful charts and tables. We also extend these reports by tracking ranks and reviews from all App Stores.

Ken: The apps in the App Store range quite a bit, from games to utilities. At a more fundamental level, though, what are the types of metrics (downloads, sales, or otherwise) that are important for all developers to pay attention to and track when an app goes into the App Store?

Ariel: There are several key places developers can look at to better understand their place in the App Store:

Ken: Can you provide a simple description of the way Apple pays out revenue? Assume, for example, that an app launched globally today and made $5,000 across all App Stores in its first month. When would the developer see the first check? How long could it take to see some of those checks?

Ariel: Getting paid by Apple is not as simple as that. There are actually a few things about getting paid that many new developers are unaware of:

Ken: Are there any baselines for assessing the health of an app? For example, if an app is making $10 per day, is that good or bad? How can developers best compare their apps’ download and sales numbers to similar or popular apps?

Ariel: Because apps vary ever so much on the App Store, it’s hard to compare one app to the other. At a very basic level, developers should set goals for their apps and use trend analysis to see if those goals can be achieved with current capabilities. If not, the developer should make a decision whether to stop development or invest more resources.

Making $10 a day is certainly not enough to keep a developer, indie or studio, alive. At such a point, the developer should examine why the app is selling so few copies and whether to end development and move on to bigger and better apps, or to invest more in advertising and PR. This depends on the quality and scope of the app.

Because financial data is kept privately by most developers, there is no way to compare an app’s financial performance. Many developers, however, use ranks as an indication of performance when comparing their app to a competitor’s.

Ken: What guidance would you provide to developers about pricing and the “race to the bottom” of the App Store? How can they find the “sweet spot” for their app to maximize returns, that is, the price that yields the most revenue and not necessarily the most downloads?

Ariel: The “race to the bottom” is very tempting, but should not be the first choice for a new app. If there is one thing to learn about the App Store it is that one price does not fit all. That’s even more so on the iPad App Store.

Finding the sweet spot will depend on the app and the competition. The best approach is educated trial and error. Try different price points and see how the App Store reacts. The best time for a price change is with the release of an update.

The freemium model has become a great sweet spot for many developers, ever since it was made possible by Apple in mid-2009. The freemium model has great potential in my opinion because it sucks in users who would otherwise not be interested in paying and increases the potential to get those users to pay via In App Purchases. The model does have its cons, and so developers should not consider it for all apps.

With the recent release of the iPad, many developers have enjoyed the ability to charge a much higher price for the same app when on the iPad. This is a trend I believe will continue because of the iPad’s increased capabilities and larger screen. These capabilities will allow developers to target larger industries such as retail, hospitality, and entertainment, which would open up the market to a wider audience that’s used to spending large amounts for applications.

Ken: How can developers use reporting to decide if an app is no longer worth investing in? What sort of changes in metrics might indicate that the app has stabilized or previously reached its peak? Are there early warning signals that can help prevent that from happening?

Ariel: When looking at reports, developers should always look for trends and try to analyze them. Trend analysis will give developers an indication of whether the app is still in motion or if new efforts are needed to bring an app to life, and also allow developers to react fast.

There are many trends to watch for, but most would depend on the type of app, market conditions, and the competition. Here are some more common trends that are easy to spot:

Developers should also read reviews. I’ve mentioned it before, but stress its importance once again. Reviews can tell you if your app is healthy. Not having reviews means it probably isn’t.