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Publishing games in the Play Store / App store - Let's share what we learn

DavidBVal

4 Dimension Games
Patron
Developer
Joined
Aug 27, 2015
Messages
2,994
Location
Madrid
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Congrats DavidBVal on the Exiled Kingdoms release and much-deserved success. Sorry to hear that Google is screwing with the discovery algorithms.

Thanks man. The screwing is just like weather, can't really do much about it except being conservative in projections and work harder & faster. Luck always runs out eventually.
 

Guy de Incognito

Ensit Media
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2015
Messages
59
To put things in perspective for you, App Store has been giving me daily less than 10% of the total mobile downloads, and around 15% of the mobile sales. Now with the decrease on Android downloads, it becomes more relevant but still not comparable to Android. In my case discoverability on iOS is nonexistant, you're found only if someone looks for you or you get lucky with the "similar" games. Or, as I believe is often my case, because an iOS user sees your game on someone's Android and then looks it up. But who knows, that's just my case, very likely I got algorithm-lucky on Play Store somewhere in 2016 but it could have happened on App Store, or on neither.

Just to add my two cents to the pile here, I can confirm what DavidBVal is saying about Android vs iOS. My RPG on Android has 20k-30k downloads a month. That same game has 200-300 downloads a month on iOS. My other game has had anywhere from 2k-75k downloads a month on Android, but on iOS never had more than 500 in a month. Similar with my productivity app, anywhere from 4-25k downloads a month on Android, no more than 2k downloads on iOS. In all three cases the apps are better reviewed and have a lower crash rate on iOS (easier to test, no crap/broken/custom OS versions on iOS).
Revenue per user (both for ads and in app products) is higher on iOS but not so much to make up for the low download numbers.

If you already have a Mac and an iOS device for testing and are using an engine/framework that can deploy to iOS, then it's a no brainer. Otherwise don't bother.
 
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Guy de Incognito

Ensit Media
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2015
Messages
59
Thanks man. The screwing is just like weather, can't really do much about it except being conservative in projections and work harder & faster. Luck always runs out eventually.

Google Play is temperamental. I track not only my apps but quite a few others and sometimes downloads will drop to a trickle for months or longer and then explode with no rhyme or reason without any updates in the meantime. Sometimes it's frustrating, but I think that's exactly why Google Play is better than the App Store. It will act random at times but those random bursts help it recognize great apps by itself. On the App Store I think you need editorial reviews or promotion or something for an app to really take off.
 

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