from a developer

[spitefulgod]

I'll start again, I recently created a windows phone app, I did create one for wp7 a while back but I got a load of crap for it then some SAD legal speak from some company so I had to let it go. I've released a new app and called Whisper Notes, as of week 2 I've hit 26 downloads mainly due (I assume) to keywords not working, its a social notes app but doesn't appear at all against any keynotes. In fact its virtually undiscoverable in the market place. Anywho I've done updates regardless and I've got to the point where it I'm not even sure if the app is working, on my own devices, friends devices and emulators it works fine but I'm getting no interactions on my app whatsoever. I've tried getting people to test my app but no one wants to participate, I've tried to get people to review it, or pay people to review it and nobody wants to give a s*** my last thread to get beta testers on this forum got deleted. I spent at least an hour a night for two months to relearn c# and XAML to release my app and as a single developer doing this as a hobby I'm done once more with WP I've decided to buy a mac and an iPhone learn swift and port to iOS and see if I can get a foothold there, the WP developer community is in a sorry state for the little guy.

 

[mikepalma]

I like this app. It is really well done and the mapping feature is so smooth, so unlike others. One little bug, sometimes when adding a photo the app will crash. Perhaps i missed it, but is there a way to share a photo w note via text message?
Great job overall!

Ps when searching for social notes, it came up seven spots after WhatsApp

 

[anon(5326758)]

I wonder what the cause of the low hit rate is - discoverability? Featureset? I have known devs who created apps on iOS and found the same results as you, and in doing research they found it was because similar apps that did half of what their app did was enough for most users.

To me, the barrier to entry on the app Whisper Notes is that it immediately requires the creation of an account. I have ~200 accounts with various sites/companies, making it hard to justify the risk of creating yet another username/pw unless I know I am going to use the app. I wonder if people on other platforms just don't care and recycle their username/pws, then watch haveibeenpwned to see if they need to reset their username/pws?

Anyway it sounds like a good idea for an app, and might have been helpful on a recent family trip.

 

[Eric J F]

From a user's point of view, it is very difficult finding apps I'm interested in. The Store categories and the search function don't really result in many appropriate apps, and keywords are missing that should help me find apps to try. The worst Store function is the 'Related' list. Few apps seem to have much to do with each other, and it certainly doesn't show me similar apps.

As an example- I like natural history identification apps, such as birds, mammals, etc. There is no keyword I've found to look at all available apps. 'Field guide,' 'birds,' 'mammals,' only include one or two out of eight or ten I've stumbled over.

I've never used the Android or Apple app stores, so I don't know if they're any better, but MS would be more successful with a more accurate and descriptive store.

MS should contract with Amazon; they are great at organizing similar products together.

 

[Eric J F]

And- my reviews often take a few weeks to appear, and occasionally they never do. If I were a developer, I'd be pretty frustrated with that.

 

[nmercy]

My Car Log started off really, really slow as well (no advertising so...). The biggest jump, around 40 new downloads a month, I had was when a friend reviewed it. but then I released a new version and my downloads dropped to under 10 in a month. For a while after I updated it I was getting 0 downloads, then they slowly came back. Made it to about 30 a month, updated again, but fortunately didn't drop as much as the other update.

It is a very odd system and could be making correlations where none exist, but seems odd.