My app has been featured three times now by Apple (TextPics) www.textpicsapp.com. The first time, in early 2011, it spent around two weeks at around the #3 Top Paid app position, the second time (late 2011) it made it to #8 I believe and the third time it was a lesser feature in a subsection specific to valentines apps but still did top 25.
I've spent a LOT of time thinking about how to get featured and how the whole mess works, and as for my experience, my first feature was simply based on being a new idea (TextPics was the first app for ASCII art texting - before I experienced Attack of the Chinese Clones) with excellent growth, lots of updates, and a positive rating. These three points were actually laid out on Apple's developer portal and TextPics satisfied all the points and was lucky enough to be chosen.
The second time around I specifically made a move with the aim of getting featured - I made a Christmas edition update. I changed the icon (put a Santa hat on the bunny), the loading screen, and new content was almost exclusively holiday pics. Apple appears to put Christmas features on the main feature page, rather than a sub-page like our Valentines edition. Lucky me, my plan actually worked.
And although it did not matter for us from a server standpoint, Apple did actually contact us before the first featuring asking for artwork and assets. I assume we were in line to be one of the few apps featured so prominently in the hero section, but that did not end up happening.
Every feature for us started on a Thursday, lasted one week, and then moved to the What Hot section for another week.
Between being featured multiple times and being at the top of the app store multiple times I learned a hell of a lot about app store customers, apps store sales dynamics, ratings, and everything else App Store related, though beyond "make a great app and update it often" I can't think of what else can help other apps get featured.
I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has, as I know first hand what a mystery the whole process can be.
My understanding is that there is an editorial meeting once a week in which Apple decides which apps to feature. I'm assuming that bigger companies have contacts in the editorial group. Can anyone speak to this?
This is true. They will contact you if they need "brick" sized art for the horizontal auto-scroll headline apps. They also may contact you if your app is in "hold for developer release" while they're making their decision. If you are in contact with them, I advise against releasing an update during the process. It muddies the waters with the editorial team and you really just want to make their decision simple.
Featuring changes every thursday. The week after featuring you end up in the "new and noteworthy" section which is like getting 1/2 to 2/3rds of a featuring.
Apple changes up the featured sections once a week. And big game companies do seem to have contacts within Apple to help coordinate launches. Frequently big games will be launched on Thursday morning to coordinate with the featuring change up.
For example, Horn was released last week on Thursday and was simultaneously the "Editor's choice" for the App Store feature.
I've never heard of anyone having a contact within Apple's app review/editorial section, from all my readings on Quora + Message boards to an insider email list which have execs from mobile/social gaming companies.
Seems they are very secretive with this stuff too, nobody even knows how many app reviewers they employ, or where they're based out of.
From what I have worked out I believe the "What's Hot" section may be automatic based on current download trends. The fact that most apps from the New and Noteworthy section end up in there is because they are suddenly getting a lot of downloads.
Good blog post, we have a similar one we're posting shortly about our experience with App of the Week. And sharks. :)
We're a small company and our app Opuss (opuss.com) was app of the week for UK/Ireland. While we were contacted in regards to "brick" sized artwork, we had no such expectation and just dutifully provided what they requested.
For the next 4 weeks we got a nervous twitch each Thursday around 5PM GMT (about an hour before 10am Cupertino) as it can also set a precedent for other stores. (In our case the Nordics and Germany as well). If your server logs look fishy around this time and you have EC2 or equivalent, fire up a few extra servers for those few hours. Trust me.
> responding to a constant stream of incoming user feedback and support requests via email (we make it really easy for our users to contact us within the app.
Best tip of them all. Deal with user support requests trough email so they won't get back at you with bad reviews. Seems obvious, but lots of devs don't do it.
I was referring to some decisions we made in our server implementation. A big part of our app is the ability to share your lists with other people and see changes in real-time, which is mediated by our servers.
Members of the U.S. Congress[1] have looked into the privacy implications of apps which have "call home" features. Obviously, nothing was done and this is still an issue. Go figure.
Some apps like the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn apps would upload the users' address books, scrape calendar information, access email/SMS, etc.[2] I think that has changed from "industry standard" to "frowned upon".
We had a similar new and noteworthy experience with our app (labelbox) in spring 2011. We were asked a couple of days before to provide artwork and assets. The app got featured and we got similar results. We peaked out at 100K downloads in one of those days, enough to get us just inside the top 25 in the US charts.
We've also had an experience were we were asked to provide assets and graphics 'incase' we were featured that week, but ended up not being featured at all (phototreats). The process is a mystery, but one thing that seems common is that almost all apps that are featured have great beautiful, easy to use design.
Producing an interesting, well-functioning, nicely-designed app is the best way to improve your chances of getting featured. There's no guarantee, but half the battle is really just standing out from the incredible amount of crap apps released on a daily basis.
My first app, Foodmatic, actually got featured in New & Noteworthy as well when it launched. Unfortunately, sales fell off as soon as the feature ended and the app was kind of a failure haha. But no doubt getting featured can be a huge factor in the success of an app.
Interesting,both of these cofounders worked at Apple for 6 years and they still ask readers to "privately" send them a contact address for getting featured on iTunes if there exists one.
Congrats, it looks very polished. Couple of questions - How many months and how many developers did it take to build this? And how do you plan to monetize this?
The path to creating AnyList was long and winding, so it's hard to say exactly. It wasn't always going to be a standalone app, and we built some stuff that we ended up not using as a result. We've been working on the app since last fall, but we weren't always working on it 100% of the time.
Tell me if I'm wrong here but a world where developing a grocery list app is measured in months is a world where there is something seriously wrong with our tools.
I'm not denigrating the app. I haven't tried it. But how is this not a 95% solved problem. Shouldn't our client and server frameworks be doing most of the work? And then maybe a few days to improve the UX and the design?
7 out of 10 results on https://www.google.com/search?q=anylist are for the app itself, including the top 5 results. Maybe you searched for “Any List” instead of “AnyList”?
I've spent a LOT of time thinking about how to get featured and how the whole mess works, and as for my experience, my first feature was simply based on being a new idea (TextPics was the first app for ASCII art texting - before I experienced Attack of the Chinese Clones) with excellent growth, lots of updates, and a positive rating. These three points were actually laid out on Apple's developer portal and TextPics satisfied all the points and was lucky enough to be chosen.
The second time around I specifically made a move with the aim of getting featured - I made a Christmas edition update. I changed the icon (put a Santa hat on the bunny), the loading screen, and new content was almost exclusively holiday pics. Apple appears to put Christmas features on the main feature page, rather than a sub-page like our Valentines edition. Lucky me, my plan actually worked.
And although it did not matter for us from a server standpoint, Apple did actually contact us before the first featuring asking for artwork and assets. I assume we were in line to be one of the few apps featured so prominently in the hero section, but that did not end up happening.
Every feature for us started on a Thursday, lasted one week, and then moved to the What Hot section for another week.
Between being featured multiple times and being at the top of the app store multiple times I learned a hell of a lot about app store customers, apps store sales dynamics, ratings, and everything else App Store related, though beyond "make a great app and update it often" I can't think of what else can help other apps get featured.
I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has, as I know first hand what a mystery the whole process can be.