Overpass Experiences
Sorry for the very long delay in posts. I’ve been doing most of my posting at www.overpass.co.uk.
But I saw this video today. It is very good and it’s nice to see my home in such beautiful pictures.
WELCOME HOME TIMELAPSE from Michael Shainblum on Vimeo.
On Saturday, we released our newest app on Android. It’s called TimeGoal. It is a home screen countdown widget which allows you to count down days to an event (70 Days to Christmas) or from an event (10 Days since my diet started).
There are other “Days Left” widgets on the market, but this one has a few unique features:
1. You can use your own images (from the camera or the gallery) as the background for your countdown. So, if you have 5 days before you see a relative, you could use of photo of them to remind you. You can rotate and crop the images you use.
2. There are a few pre-made background images you could use. These are festive (like Christmas Tree, a Jack-o’-lantern) and meaningful. We will add more soon.
3. You can add as many widgets to your desktop as you want.
TimeGoal in on the Google Play Store here. It is free (add supported), but we will bring in either a pro version, or more functionality via in app purchases soon.
Ear Spy has been doing fantastically well. Every day for the first month, the amount of daily installs was growing exponentially. Eventually, we were getting over 1,000 installs a day for the free app.
Google Play has some really good statistics pages with charts and graphs about how well your app is doing, where it’s being downloaded, which types of phone are they using, etc. But there is no way (that I can see) to tell how people are finding your app. So, I couldn’t tell how they were finding it—but more and more people were downloading it every day.
After 30 days, the app was no longer considered “new” and dropped from the “Top New Free” apps list. Then the daily downloads went from 1000+ to about 350 a day.
Still, I’m pleased with this number. I couldn’t believe it when I found out 300 people a day were installing it almost a month ago. But I kind of got used to the 1000 installs.
This is a learning experience. So, the lesson I learned here is . . . make the most of the first 30 days! Don’t be complacent. Push the pro versions and try to convert as many free users to paying users in that first month.
Other interesting things from the stats:
1. USA is the biggest downloader of the app (over 50% every day). Egypt is always second and India is always third.
2. There are a small amount of crashes compared to the amount of downloads (Google will give you a crash report). But those few people who it crashes on are more likely to give you a one star rating. I would too.
3. Some phones have problems, but there are hundreds (if not thousands) to test. So, we try to make it as flexible as possible and remove the phones we know are crashing.
4. Some people will give you a one star rating even if the phone works most of the time. One person says “It works on one phone, but not the other” and gave me a one star. I would think I’d get at least a three. But I would be annoyed too.
5 . Only a tiny amount of people leave ratings. Ear Spy has 76 ratings but has been installed by 17,656 people.
Well, we are implementing some very cool new features for Ear Spy Pro very soon. We also released Ear Assist, which is a less-creepy version of Ear Spy to assist people who just want to hear better.
This iPhone version is days away. It will be interesting to see how that compares.
Still having a blast with this.
