I started building Grades almost exactly one year ago. At that point I had no experience with Objective-C, no clue about designing iPhone apps, and certainly no insights into iPhone app marketing. Attending school and having a part-time job certainly didn’t help either. That being said, I am very excited to announce that Grades V1 is finished and awaiting approval by Apple.

Perfectionism VS Time

I’ve been caught between two strong forces this entire year: one, trying to make the app the best it can possibly be, and two, wanting to call it a day and actually start making money from it. I have to say that the app is *not* perfect yet—there are still improvements and refinements I wish I could have implemented before launch but I think its going to be okay, you have to stop somewhere.

I do know that the reaction from beta testers has dramatically changed since I launched the beta program a few months ago. It went from “hey, thats cool, it will help me” to “Wow. AWESOME!” That wow is what I’ve been after all this time, it’s what motivates sharing. I’ve recently learned that word of mouth can drive an app into the top charts without the help of the press or Apple—more on that later but its from a very reputable source. This makes “share-ability” key, which means your app has go the extra mile to be remarkable.

Release Date Madness

We all cringed when we heard about Furbo’s release-date nightmare. Until recently, Apple allowed developers to choose the release date of their app (assuming it is approved in time). Great. The problem was that the app store’s sort by “release date” function, key in catching the eyes of casual app store shoppers, actually sorted by *approval date*. So to Furbo’s horror, when their app hit the app store (on the release date they set and a few days after it was approved), their app started out pages deep into the “release-date” section of their category. There were ways around this problem but they all meant that we developers had no control of when our apps were actually released.

Thankfully, it looks like that problem has been fixed. David Barnard of App Cubby told me his latest app was approved on Friday and then sorted appropriately when it was released on Monday. This is good news for everybody. It means we can actually plan on a release date and be able to tell the press when they can expect the app to come out (so they can have their reviews ready in time).

Another quick note: I’ve gotten anecdotal evidence from Twitter that the app review team does indeed work on the weekends.

Enough for now. This next week is going to be exciting.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Grades, iPhone App Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.