quanganhdo's archive

I have been scheduling to write this down for a couple of weeks, but haven't got a chance to get started. That is, until today - the day Time Waster was approved (more on that later, I promise).

Without further ado, let's dive into the first part of the story:

Part 1: The idea & The execution

The idea of Time Waster the iPhone app came to my mind long ago, but it was much different from the real, physical app that shipped today. It was supposed to be a StumbleUpon client for iPhone, providing the same feature set as the desktop toolbar. This, however, proved to be an unfeasible task since StumbleUpon offered no API whatsoever. Zero. Nil. Nada. Relying on a non-existence API didn't seem to be a great idea for a commercial app, so I abandoned that and moved on with my life.

Then came the time I revisited the idea. That was when I discovered the joy of browsing Ember and got inspired by tons of gorgeous software products & websites talented designers produced. An app to give you inspirational screenshot (and waste your precious time) every time you shake the device - that sounded good to me. Then other functionalities made their ways into my mind naturally: Why not include interesting images from Flickr? How about FML stories (potentially NSFW - you have been warned)? And famous quotes from QuoteDB? And on and on and on.

I spent a noon working on a mockup. Thanks to Balsamiq Mockups, I got a pretty clear idea how my app should look like:

Fast forward 5 days later, Time Waster was ready to be beta tested. Got it installed and worked flawlessly on my 1st-gen iPod Touch, my friend's 2nd-gen iPod Touch and another friend's iPhone 3G for a couple of days, I decided to submit it to THE App Store.

Part 2: The wait & The Murphy's law*

Waiting for someone at Apple to drop by and review my app was a long and boring time, so I tried to make that period useful by working on the promotion side of the app. A simple static website along with a short screencast recorded in ScreenFlow were uploaded and available at http://timewaster.quanganhdo.com (as some of you might already be aware of).

12 days later.

Someone in the review team at the almighty Apple finally had a look at Time Waster and approved it. Its status changed from In review to Ready for sale. Having no time to be excited, that was when things started to appear bad for me.

The very first problem was with Time Waster's release date. It was set to October 23rd, the day I submitted it to the App Store. 2 weeks before the current date means 2 weeks behind free public exposure of the Recently released list, which in turn means little to no sale from casual App Store browsers. A quick search revealed that I was not alone in this matter - Read all about it here. Wished I had learnt about that before.

[...] each day’s apps are listed alphabetically. So every time a new app or two show up in the most recent list, they appear after all of the apps that start with a letter earlier in the alphabet for that day. An app named Zen Tennis will probably never see the top of the list. [...] Clearly the most-recent list is already just a random collection of apps released over the past few days, but it gets worse.

But the end result is, if a developer sets an app’s availability date in iTunes Connect to some time after when the app is eventually approved, it will not show up until that availability date. The app will eventually show up well down the most recent list with a release date of when Apple approved it.

On the other hand, if a developer sets the availability date in iTunes Connect to some time before the approval date, it will show up as soon as it is approved. But it will show up with the set availability date, some time before approval. It will show up well down the most recent list.

That left me with no choice but finding other ways to attract users, one of which is to get it reviewed on a high profile blog. Then another source of frustration poured in: I got an absolutely annoying red warning in iTunes Connect, which says "We're having trouble generating the codes." every time I tried to generate new promotional codes. Refreshing the page 10 times didn't help, using a proxy to connect to the site didn't, either. For someone had been in the waiting line for a long time, it wasn't a nice experience at all.

That's it. That's my story (to date) of selling an iPhone app on the App Store for the first time. It might or might not be successful - I couldn't guess. No App Store rejection was a good start, but a confusing release date and a broken system in a sensitive time weren't. Hopefully things would go well soon.

For those interested in Time Waster, be sure to visit my dedicated site for it: http://timewaster.quanganhdo.com

Or, try this iTunes link if you want to shell out $0.99 right now: itms://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=337256022&mt=8&s=143441.

*The Murphy's law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. More on that.