iPhone Game Development - Chris Craft [151]
There is more value in creating video demos of your applications than just for including links to them in your application description. You should consider including videos, along with screen shots, on your application's Web site as well. The average Web site visitor has a very short attention span. If you are lucky she will see your application video and decide to watch at least one of the demo videos. And from there, she just might decide to purchase the app.
Consider posting your applications' demo videos to video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Google Video. These sites get a lot of traffic. It is possible to create a marketing video that becomes popular enough to go viral and gain widespread Internet fame. Don't forget that many social networking sites, including Facebook, allow you to post pictures as well as videos.
Maximum number of applications
Each page of applications on the iPhone can hold 16 applications, besides the 4 bottom dock icons. Before iPhone OS 3.0, you could have up to 9 pages of applications; with iPhone OS 3.0, you can have up to 11 pages of applications. That gives you 148 apps (9 x 16 + 4) for older operating systems, and 180 apps (11 x 16 + 4) for iPhone OS 3.0. Keep in mind there are almost 20 icons that Apple does not allow end users to remove from their device.
Before the iPhone OS 3.0, if users ran out of slots on their device to install applications, they could not install any new applications. This would prevent a world of applications from being installed (Figure 10.23). But on the iPhone OS 3.0, if there are no remaining application slots, the application can still be installed, but users must use the spotlight search feature to find the application first in order to launch it.
FIGURE 10.23
148 application icons from various iPhone apps
So it looks like most users probably have room left on their device for your application, which is a good thing. Now all that is left for you to do is convince them that they should fill that empty slot on their device with your application.
App Store application categories
You can publish your application in up to two App Store application categories (Figure 10.24). Just as in retail stores, you have to decide where to put your products. The choice of App Store category can greatly affect the number of downloads your app receives.
App Store application categories include the following:
Books
Business
Education
Entertainment
Finance
Games
Healthcare & Fitness
Lifestyle
Medical
Music
Navigation
News
Photography
Productivity
Reference
Social Networking
Sports
Travel
Utilities
Weather
Some categories such as Games or Entertainment have a huge number of applications. And while they're quite popular, it is almost impossible for the average user to browse these large categories. On the other hand, smaller categories such as Weather are easily browsed from the App Store application on the iPhone.
It is possible for your application to rank higher in one category than in another. For example, since there are so many more applications in the Games category than in the Weather category, it is harder for an application to be in the top 25 games than for it to be in the top 25 weather apps. Sales tend to increase exponentially as you move closer to the top of a category, but the more popular categories carry more rewards for being in the top 25 as well. Be mindful of this aspect of App Store marketing.
There is a limit to the number of applications the App Store will return to a user for any given category on the App Store. At most a user can browse 3,500 applications in one App Store category. At 25 applications per page, this works out to allowing users to see 140 pages' worth of apps. But realistically, how many users would be willing to browse through