My team has a game that's doing well on the quality side (~100 reviews and 4.74 average rating), but the marketing is pretty tough. We've got a near-perfect substitute for a massively popular game that's missing from Android - if we could only put it in front of the casual gamers who only look at the featured and top ranked list, I'm sure it would be a bigger hit than most of the games currently featured. I'm hopeful that the great feedback and very good sales relative to our position that we receive will eventually catch someone at Google's notice, but until then we'll just keep making the game better.
On a down note, the recent rating reorganization seems to make it tougher for newer apps in our position to move up the list - a lot of poorly rated and abandoned junk from early in the Android platform's life is above us again now that the ranking algorithm seems to value raw sales above all else.
Still, things are worlds better than they were 6 months ago. We'll continue to bet on Android for the future.
We are on the same page. Our second app was a puzzle game that (we feel) is WAY better than some of the games they have featured right now. It's entertaining, endlessly playable, and has multiple levels of difficulty. It's a new puzzle game that nobody has really played before, but we're losing to games of much lower quality.
Plus, our downloads are very low, but I blame this on the fact that there's a single "Brain & Puzzle Game" category for EVERYTHING!
I could scroll for an hour and probably never see my game.
The "Just In" category was all that I had, now, I don't even see a way to get noticed at all after getting pushed out of there (which I did by someone who posted about 50 different crossword puzzle apps in one day)
Very frustrating, but I too am sticking with Android for the long haul.
I was thinking about trying to advertise with AdMob maybe - so our paid game shows up at the top of some other free games.
> after getting pushed out of there (which I did by someone who posted about 50 different crossword puzzle apps in one day)
This is a real problem on the Android market; I experienced that myself. In almost all categories there are people pushing 10 or 20 (mostly poor) apps in one day, driving all others out of the first pages... Maybe a submission timeout would help.
This is problem is avoided pretty well by Apple's approach, although I prefer the open market of Android.
There is a lot of support for niche features (3D, etc) pushed into the base reader because it provides a significant business advantage to Adobe.
For example, they stand to benefit tremendously if a government agency decides to go with PDF as their document review format over Autodesk's DWF. The fact that the average consumer already has everything they need to use these solutions is a big bullet point in their favor.
They don't stand to lose much if some picky internet folk (not criticizing - I'm one too) decide to use a free alternative because Acrobat's too heavy.
I second this - I've never really found Steve Martin funny, but I thought his book was very interesting and different from most biographies in that it was about success achieved not through prodigious talent but just years and years of grinding it out and slowly improving.
I've seen other players that do more, but nothing I really need and they lack the iPod's killer feature: ubiquity. Seriously, it's great that any time I want to use my iPod with any high end electronic I can plug it in and the device's manufacturer has already provided an interface. My Xbox360, TV, stereo and car all came ready to work with the iPod - how many other players can say that?
I could be wrong, but I don't think you've done many Yahoo fantasy drafts if you think people are really OK with the draft interface. The reason I've continued to use the site over the years is more that the rest of the interface isn't that bad and that the alternatives are worse.
Yeah, this seems to be the only question. The interface is wonderful and it's instantly useful to me, but I can't imagine this will be allowed to stand as is.
Though I would have said the same thing about YouTube...
Hey guys - This is Sachin chiming in from the Anywhere.FM team. So we are a legit service. There are several digital music locker services that allow you to upload your music and play it anywhere. This model has been followed by all these companies and is allowed because you are playing your own music online. In terms of the sharing and Friend Radio features, we are actually paying radio station licensing fees to the music industry.
How do the new internet radio fees effect you guys? If they nail you by claiming each person listening is listening to a unique radio station, the fees could become insane.
Not only that but a vast majority of people use pirated mp3's. If you guys explode in popularity the RIAA will absolutely come after you regardless of how great your service is. How are you going to deal with that?
It is not really a valid argument to claim that everything is legit because other companies are doing it.
I love the site and look forward to trying it out when I get home. Your UI is beautiful.
Well, how is your model different from my.mp3.com? As you might recall, they did a website where you could upload your own music and play it from any Internet computer, but were sued and eventually settled for $200m.
MP3.com stored all the music online. You gained access to a CD MP3.com had ripped by proving you owned the CD. There was no uploading involved.
The question is whether Anywhere.fm has a responsibility to police their network for illegal MP3s. It's logistically impossible to do so, but that doesn't mean the courts won't come down hard on them if they are successful.
On a down note, the recent rating reorganization seems to make it tougher for newer apps in our position to move up the list - a lot of poorly rated and abandoned junk from early in the Android platform's life is above us again now that the ranking algorithm seems to value raw sales above all else.
Still, things are worlds better than they were 6 months ago. We'll continue to bet on Android for the future.