Want to Sell Your iPhone App? Here’s What NOT to Do

Nitasha Tiku — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:02:05 -0400

In iPhone app development, as in life, it's best to learn from the wisdom of those who came before you. So independent New York coders, look up from your Apple SDKs and take note of all seven tactics that Stoic Jester Studios used to sell a game called Bullseye Factory. Then, go ahead and do none of those things. There are some obvious ones among the fruitless strategies to avoid, like "Getting hacked" and "Releasing an Imperfect Trailer." But apparently posting on Hacker News, especially if it ends up with the rah-rah TechCrunch treatment, is unlikely to get you much constructive feedback. "The denizens of HN aren’t much on sugar-coating." Likewise with using new technology because you think other developers are just sleeping on it:

"When I first got an iPhone 4 and tried the first gyroscope games, I was pretty much blown away by the accuracy of control that it allowed. But there weren’t many games out there that utilized it. So when I started writing my next game I thought that perhaps this was an angle I could use to try and stand out a bit. Well, I promoted the gyroscope aspect of it everywhere I could, and I was able to determine pretty conclusively that I’m the only person in the world who cares about the gyroscope. So, in the end all I really did was just limit the size of my potential audience."

Betabeat » stoic jester studios

Want to Sell Your iPhone App? Here’s What NOT to Do