Importance of inital ranking in Android Market
I have read online that its best to publish your app as soon as possible and do updates as much as possible. Think the mantra “deploy early and often”. Initial I subscribed to this idea, because its super easy to push out updates via Android Market, but I have found its not a good idea, and here is why.
The majority of my sales happen on days I do updates, the reason is Google tends to promote them. I have noticed that apps that have a good ranking (4+ stars) tend to get promoted longer and get much more play. Which makes you a lot more money.
The market doesn’t facilitate feedback to developers very well, so to file a bug report, users leave feed back and a ranking. If you have a bad bug, you might get a bunch of one start ratings, and even if you fix the bug in minutes, the users aren’t going to download your app again, and aren’t going to change their ranking. These poor rankings really hurt long term, especially for new applications that don’t have a lot of marketing behind them.
Lesson learned, TEST TEST TEST, your reputation on Android market counts!
-James
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This is good information to keep in mind. Thanks.
This is very true, but my experience is that even when starting with poor ratings, you can improve your application, and finish with a correct rate / download numbers.
My game ‘Word prospector’, a casual word game, started with low ratings ( < 2.5 ) because at that time I hadn't any device, and there were some serious flaws.
But keeping the good work, and continuously improving the game, I now essentially have good ratings (my mean is around 3.9), and with more than 70 000 DL (it's a free game).
So it's sure that starting with high ratings is a good thing, but
1) Improving your application DO improve your ratings
2) submitting the application early is good for morale and motivation !
alocaly:
the fact that your game is free is the main point there. Its easier to get people to try a free app even if it has a few bad ratings. Since its free (and regularly updated) you get lots of new downloads. As such, the new ratings will eventually even out the bad initial ratings.
With a paid app, if you get bad ratings from the start, most people will not bother to spend money to try your app.