Thanks ! According to my wife who is english to french translator - which helps me a lot to check my writing - my english is not so good ;-) But I believe it is enough to explain clearly what I want to say
If you put all EU markets together I think you've got something as big as the US (although one would need some figures to prove that). Now the issue is that you need to market in each country and in a different language. In addition, it is very complex to localize an if you do a literacy app - language, culture, way of learning, testing with teacher, etc... I don't know the size of the Russia market but I think it is the 10th if I remember well just after France (also to check on reports like Distimo's)
Nice feedback on Android market (yes the issue is that I sold mostly on tablet). I don't agree about cloning - what is difficult is to have a good/large user base and being featured. Cloning will not help you a lot for that. Gaming the app store (at least the ios app store) is not easy at all (or very expensive and not applicable for this kind of app). I don't think the trick you describe would work.
for what it's worth, i wanted to buy your crosswords on android, but your version there is incredibly dumbed down. I finally got an old ipad a few months ago so finally bought it there.
kid's game market (not "purely" educational) is more competitive, and you have to fight with big players like toca boca/disney/nickelodeon. So you have to innovate even more. I've seen great apps disapearing from the charts in 2 weeks. Did you try free with not consumable IAP ? Did you try to work on your keywords ?
I have my top two games Wood Puzzler and Exotic Pet Puzzler in the education category, they are geared towards learning the alphabet and have lots of extras. I recently tried keyword stuffing the title as I've seen others doing, but it hasn't had any affect. Both those games have paid and free-with-IAP, which works well. My most recent game below, we've done tons of free/paid marketing and cannot penetrate at all, maybe 1-3 sales per day. Thanks again.
Thanks ! Yes it's not a secret that the best way to market app is word of mouth but the issue is really to get a large user base so that it works. Happy to read that you play with your kids with my apps - I'm always thinking about that when I do an app because it is very important for me.
Would you say that the most important reason of your success is you penetrated a relatively new market with a good product early, and it was easier to gain traction and build a large user base that you can now cross-promote your other apps?
Merci d'avoir partager l'histoire de ton succès. C'est toujours inspirant et surtout éducatif ;)
yes it is still an open question for me. There are many big brands that don't do this - why ? I think everybody is experimenting in kids'app world - it's not clear as in games where (consumable) IAP are very profitable.
I think it's mostly because it's harder to market two apps than one. From my experience (I'm also developing educational apps for kids), what makes an indie iOS app a success is more and more determined by Apple's decision to feature it, and going up in rankings. With two apps, it'll be twice harder to get in the top 10, and you'll have to choose between one of them to be featured.
And from what I've seen, the paid-IAP users' reviews get lost in the free reviews. You split your high-quality reviews (from people who like it well enough to pay) into two pools, and then poison one of them. Worse yet, since people tend to try free versions first, you're funneling a lot of people into the poisoned review pool.
Our Maths stuff has not been featured (not counting What's Hot, which is algorithmic as far as I can tell), yet it has hit top grossing in the category in a few major stores.
I'm wondering whether Apple will ever offer either:
1] a dedicated education app store, invisible to non-volume purchasers.
2] a mechanism for allowing volume purchases of in-app content.
The issue in schools is that older kids are smarter that the teachers and can fool them to do what they want on the iPad Or simply they can the hack the device to do what they want - there was a big story in LA schools about this - but I believe it is learning as well no ? I remember I learnt a lot about security and Unix when I was hacking the network of my university 20 years ago :-)
Let's say that you can't always play with your kids, so sometimes it's nice that they have some toys to play with...By the way, my kids are just around with friends and they are playing with.. Playmobil (whereas there 5 ipads available)
