How do you promote your app?

tretherio · 3 months

I post a link to my app in comments to questions about promoting apps on reddit. This doesn't work very well though. Also, I don't think people like it.

okiyama · 3 months

Word of mouth kicks the shit out of any other sort of advertising technique and the only way to do that effectively is to make a very good app. Your best bet really is to just make very clean, well designed apps and update frequently. Whenever you update it gets put in to the "new" feed of apps, which can help a lot.

Esteluk · 3 months

1) Good design - designing your apps well is crucial. Don't use a plain background, avoid the system Title bar like the plague, use custom (quality) drawables for standard widgets that work well with the rest of your theme.

2) If you want Google's promotion, think about what they like. Both Apple and Google want to project an image of their aspirations for the platform when they're choosing "New and noteworthy" or "Staff Picks" apps (I'm unsure whether they have any editorial input on "Trending"). Apps which fall in line with these expectations and aspirations are far more likely to be selected for featuring. In particular at the moment, make good use of the APIs introduced in API12 and later, particularly Fragments, Action Bar and dynamic notifications. Every time Google talk about the Market, they make it really clear that they'd love to see quality, well designed apps that conform to their latest design guidelines. But there aren't any! Make them.

3) Make seasonal apps. It's probably too late for Valentines day, but have a nice chart of upcoming holidays and events. Gear app towards these, releasing them perhaps two or three weeks before the event.

4) Track your analytics and adjust apps accordingly. Better apps => more downloads.

5) Upsell a related paid app from a free app.

Relevant, quality apps will outsell over-promoted crapware almost every time.

mt69298 · 3 months

I "spam" reddit, spread the word on different android forums and such

herimitho · 3 months

I'm no expert, in fact, I'm so far from an expert as one can possibly get. But I just recently had a initial release of a little "teaching my self the platform while having fun" app. I have done nearly zero marketing (except posting a input-thread on a microscopic sub-reddit (<1000 subs) way before it was released. But I find my self having about 20-30 new net installs per day.

The only specific thing I've done is adding a few word to the description that might help people search it up better. For example if you search for "Lineage 2" on Market my app is the second to hit. If you look at my description I haven't blatantly added words either, I just listed a few games my app work well with.

Anyway, as I said, I'm very, very new to this, and probably don't have a lot to contribute with yet. :)

gonemad16 · 3 months

i post on here a lot. My app is a music player and probably 2-3 times a week someone asks what is the best or a good music player.... so it makes it quite easy to post links to my app without being annoying.. since im technically answering their question

I would not bother with an add campaign.. just find people looking for an app that does what yours does.. and post it

Kudmipz · 3 months

Search result ranking (in the Market) is incredibly important. I released an app with almost no promotion, but because it was ranked highly in a fairly decent search term it grew like crazy. The app in question was a free manga reader, and within two days of posting it was the 3rd result for "manga" and had around 20k downloads after a month.

Obviously the term you target depends on your app... If it's very niche you won't really be able to target a broad term. But once you find the term you need, you can influence your ranking easily.

The Market search engine is pretty simplistic. Without any statistical data on your app, it relies heavily on your name and description. I wrote a huge description detailing every feature of the app, making sure to use the term "manga" frequently. I did not, however, use keyword lists or stuff it unnecessarily, Google will ban you for that. Use your keywords naturally in your description, make it long and detailed, and be sure to include the most important keyword in your app's title, even if it isn't part of the "brand". For a Twitter app named Peep, for example, the app title in the Market should be "Peep - Twitter client" or something like that.

Do NOT use advertising, in my opinion. It does not give any decent returns unless you have a pretty big budget and are willing to experiment (while spending credits) over a long period of time. If you don't, you will find that you'll burn through your fifty dollar ad credit in a week with no noticable gains.

I wish I had more help to offer regarding promotion but really all I did was optimize for Market search results... For a somewhat popular search term like "manga", the results were crazy. My app peaked at 800,000 downloads over five months, until Google removed it (I assume for copyright reasons, though they leave other manga readers untouched so who knows). Pretty good for essentially my first Android app with no prior userbase and no advertising or external promotion.

grundee · 3 months

I ran a reddit ad and a google adwords campaign for my game's demo

(Shameless Plug).

I got about 60 clicks through adwords, and 133 through the reddit ad (I spent $20 on the reddit ad and $30 on the adwords).

I had a click through rate of < 1%.

I don't really feel that it was worth it, but YMMV. I have about 200 active users of the demo, and the full version (for $1) made about $10. Not enough to cover advertising and art costs, but still got me out of the 10-100 range, and I net about 15 new people using the demo every day now.

Admittedly, my marketing campaign was more to gain experience using those tools rather than as a serious marketing campaign, so you may fare better.

aamo · 3 months

Is there a subreddit or a reoccurring thread for Redditors to post apps that they've made?

bluntdroid · 3 months

Mike, your app's suck so your promotion won’t work.

You first need to find a subject that a large demographic of the android market are likely to get behind... Flying spaghetti monster? No.. Tits!? Yes.

The tit market seems over saturated at first glance but only when you're underestimating the thirst 700k activations per day can provide for tit related apps.

Now take 'tits' and think up a catchy name that will attract attention of the android herd.. like eh Tit's of thunder!

What should this app do? Show you assorted pictures of, covered, tits and you press the screen to make it thunder! Sorted?! sorted. All this app needs is some advanced user interaction and we are on the road.

The longer the user presses the screen the more it thunders. You submit the users thunder rating to a central server and allow all users to organise pics by the most thunderous set.

Go here to learn how to design an attractive interface.

Go here to create your icon. Keep it simple and make it not suck i.e. a picture of a set of tits, gloss it over for some final polish.

Take your icon and build your promotional graphics around this, make it simple but attractive. TITS of Thunder! with a set of, covered, tits against a nicely colored and bordered background.

Add some adverts and you’re away. Create a simple app you can add non intrusive advertising to (below pic of tits?) to succeed on the market. Android users don’t care about advertising and they rarely want to buy an app, especially shitty ones.

Release updates on an 8 day schedule, the 'just in' list is still active on devices < 2.2.

The major part of the android market that generates ad revenue is the American audience. Most American's are closer to idocracy than you would think, keep it simple, unintelligent and relevant to their wants.

Just look at the success and methods of Jeff Dunnham, larry the cable guy, Sarah Palin etc if you need proof of how to become popular with an American audience.

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