The Summer edition of SyncNI lists the UK City of Culture 2010 app and PhotoBag app in it’s Top 10 local apps.

…and also features UK City of Culture 2010 app

It’s great to see our work getting positive feedback and certainly drives us to press on with our ideas!

Recently I posted about the success of our iPhone app Veg Garden (Veg Garden reaches Top 40 in Reference Category UK) over the Xmas and New Year period. Since then we have experienced the trial and tribulations of what is the App Store.

In the first week of January Veg Garden peaked at 39th in the UK Reference Category. Then came along one bad customer rating and review emphasising that the app lacked enough content for the price of it. Following that we found Veg Garden dropping each day in the rankings before eventually dropping out of the Top 100 in this category.

Seeing this trend and respecting our customer review we were busy working on an update which introduced more produce and growing tips for all our new and existing produce (This is one of many updates planned over the course of the coming weeks). So, after few days of hard work and a two-day turnaround from the Apple Approval Team we pushed out an update to the App Store on the 13th January.

Over the next few days, we saw the majority of our existing customers download the update which was encouraging to know that we didn’t have to many disgruntled customers who decided to part ways with Veg Garden. To coincide with this, the daily sales started to creep up as we entered back into the Top 100 for this category.

Then came along a couple of good reviews from new and existing customers with the average rating of the current version getting a 4 out of 5 stars. There has seen a surge in its ranking since then with the app now sitting at 29th as I write this.

How long will this last? Will it go higher? God knows! It is a learning experience and elements of good decisions, luck and timing all play a part.

So points to take away from this -

1. Customers Reviews and Ratings really do matter and it is something that potential customers won’t ignore.
2. Continually analyse your apps rankings and don’t ignore trends.
3. Be very reactive to negative feedback and address the issues as soon as possible by rolling out updates.
4. Call out to your customers and encourage them to give you feedback so you can steer the future of the app towards what the customers really want.

Over the holiday period their was notable increase in all App sales. This was down to 2 main reason -

1. A substantial increase in the sales of iPod Touches with iPhone sales increasing also but not at the same rate.
2. Generally people had much more free time to browse the App Store while relaxing on their holidays.

Seeing this trend we decided to experiment. Previously our product Veg Garden was in the Lifestyle Category (UK) which has ~7380 App’s at present. We did notice an increase in sales during the Xmas period but we had noted that the Reference Category (UK) was a lot less crowded (~4760 App’s) so the chances of being discovered by a customer were increased. Given we had nothing to lose we moved Veg Garden into the Reference Category.

Within the space of 24-hours Veg Garden reached 49 in the Top Paid for this Category. Furthermore it peaked to 39 and has remained in the Top 50 since then. Therefore the experiment proved to be a success as sales are up. Obviously discoverability is key here and it highlights the importance of choosing the correct category. This was just one technique that proved to be effective with an element of luck.

While mentioning Veg Garden, we plan to release an update very soon with more produce for the UK and Ireland. Furthermore, we have some exciting new functionality planned for this product and we also intend to sell the app in other countries.

To find out more about Veg Garden check out our product page or alternatively go directly to it in the App Store.

PhotoBag is now deep in development after prototyping concepts, agreeing the user interface and deciding on what goes in/out for the first version. Therefore my attention has shifted to putting together a plan for the marketing of the PhotoBag App (more on this to be posted soon) and deciding what is lined up for version 2.

You may be thinking I am getting ahead of myself in planning what to deliver for version 2 when version 1 is still in development; but with the Apple App Store getting more and more competitive as everyday goes by there is a greater need to plan in advance and have plenty of ideas in the product backlog. Let’s say PhotoBag did get a good response from the market then to maintain that momentum naturally a new version is a player in this.

I believe version 1 of a product is all about delivering the core of your idea and doing that well. You really can’t afford to invest a huge amount of time packing it with a lot of features as we are all running the risk of it being rejected by the Apple App Store. You also need to gauge it’s success, learn from that (we all make mistakes) and understand your customer base.

So getting onto version 2, one of the core areas of extensibility is to localise your product. If you need some convincing then by localising you have the benefit of -

• - expanding your customer base to beyond English speaking users
• - increasing the penetration of the product (Localised products tend to sell better)
• - Return on investment can be very good (the cost to localise a mobile application is relatively cheap)

There is a greater chance of your app getting featured on non-US App Stores giving that there is less competition. By being recognised on one of the non-US App Stores then it can potentially have a ripple effect and get your noticed in other markets. Mark J wrote a very interesting article "6 Months of iPhone App Sales Stats, Cause and Effect" in which he unveils by translating his app "Hit Tennis" into French proved to be a hit

Given that we have established the benefits of localising your product, deciding what languages to translate into is the next step. Two very important sources of information for this is appFigures and adMob (if you have advertising in your product). They offer very good reporting tools that tell you where your applications are being downloaded from and to judge the coverage in those areas.  Take for example the diagram below is a report generated for our first application Suntimes –

It is very clear from this that localising into Japanese, German and French could prove to be beneficial. Actually of the "All other Countries", Norway and Sweden came out top which I didn’t expect.

In fact there is another obvious benefit from this coverage report, based on the positive coverage of your app in these other countries then advertising your product in these areas could certainly lead to an increase in sales. These type of reports let you target your advertising in the hope of it being more effective.

One final note about Localisation of your products is to design and build your app with this in mind – retrofitting an existing application to support localisation is much harder than writing your application that way from the start!