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Ask HN: Why my highly rated apps have no downloads?
I have a couple of apps in Apple app store, Google Play and Amazon app store.
One thing in common with all of them is that niche bloggers (my apps are for little children) never rated me below 4/5, and I get high average scores on the stores.
Here are the scores when I counted last time to write a traction document for investors (this was around late december):
Christmas Snow Globe - 30 ratings - 4.96/5
Magical Music Box Lite - 58 ratings - 4.60/5
Magical Music Box - 38 ratings - 4.86/5
Matryoshka! - 92 ratings - 4.76/5
Nono in Amazonia Beta - 21 ratings - 4.80/5 (android only)
When I search similar apps on the stores, usually my apps are the highest rated ones of the list.
But I am not getting really interesting download amounts, except on launch on iOS (when they show on the "new" list, that is ordered by launch date), so I am wondering:
The apps have no downloads because my marketing is bad?
or
The apps have no downloads because they are TOO niche and strange?
Note that except for the paid version of "music box", all apps are free, and have no ads and no iap on them (actually, not even cross-promotion of my own apps, I am now considering this a mistake).
INFO: I don't do astroturfing in the ratings for most part (sometimes there are like 5 ratings at most that are from family and co-workers), because I am very scared that I might get banned from the store (both apple and google, but specially apple, are getting increasingly agressive in nuking astroturfing, in case of apple banning your entire company from the store).
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoI have no idea why. But I will say that after reading your app's descriptions on the google play store I still have no idea what they do. - You give me generic quotes from people I've never heard of and don't care about ("Highly recommended") - You then waffle on about nonsense ("The whole family is going to be charmed: beautiful melodies give magical life") - More nonsense ("Inspired by classical music boxes that have been around since the 19th century, the Magical Music Box is a natural descendant in the era of digital toys." - Then features, then songs, then "music boxes" WHAT DOES THE APP DO?! WHAT IS IT! JUST TELL ME! Talk like a normal person. Sorry, but when I go to a new app the first and most important thing I need to know is "what is this? What does it do?" and your description fails almost as badly as something can fail. You then write tons and tons of nonsense that nobody cares about. The screenshots AND YouTube videos likely got you every download you have had.
- orangethirty 14y agoI agree, the copy is bad. Describe what the app does first and foremost. Then include anything else. Apps are meant to be useful helpers. They cant be useful to me if I dont know what it does.
- Ologn 14y agoHow do you envision people finding your apps? Do you think a large number of people are starting up Google Play and searching for the word matryoshka? Or searching for words like nono or amazonia? I have two apps for kids on Google Play. The original pre-port name of the first one was Tux of Math Command, sometimes shortened to TuxMath. I renamed it Free Math Games for Kids. On a search for "math games" on Play, I come up #11. I do not have statistics, but I have a feeling a larger number of people search for "math games" every day then matryoshka, or nono, or the like. Incidentally, I pushed the math game in May 2012 and it has had 30000 downloads since then. Aside from mentioning this on the Tuxmath list, and some outside promotion in Spanish which caused maybe several hundred downloads, these downloads happened without promotion. Nono's Adventures in Amazonia is 29MB. It certainly might be best and necessary to have have it this size. Just be aware that a useful 800KB app is more likely to be downloaded than one which is more than two dozen megs. Not everyone has an LTE phone, especially in the third world. I am not saying it is too big, I am just saying be aware of how size affects downloads. Play lists the app size for a reason.
- speeder 14y agoNono's Amazonia size is indeed a nightmare... The day we tried to launch the first upload failed, because it was 60mb!