“How long does it take to get into the app store?” is a question I googled many times leading up to the submital of my app. For those curious, as I was, here is the timeline of my App from submittal of the binary to appearing in the App store.
May 12 2010 7:11 pm – The binary for “Robodamus – Robotic Fortune Teller” is uploaded to Apple’s servers. Status is “Waiting for Review”
May 21, 2010 9:08 am – The status is “In Review”
May 22, 2010 9:30 am – The status is “Ready for Sale”
May 22, 2010 ~11:00 am – The iPhone application is present in the app store.
I’m not sure how quickly my app showed up in the app store but, it was fast. It couldn’t have been there any sooner than 10:30 as I was obsessively checking every 10 minutes or so after 9:30 until I decided that I could better spend my time buying supplies for a home improvement project. It was not until about 11 am that I relapsed into my obsessive compulsive monitoring of the app store and saw it pop up.
You can find my app here.
So, the answer to “how long does it take?” is about a week gauging from my experience.
Now that my app is sitting in the store, it’s time to try and market it. Here’s what I’ve done so far:
- Created a website for the app: http://www.robodamus.com
- Sent messages to all of the YouTube channels I follow(and like) that do iPhone/iPod Touch app reviews asking them to do a review.
- Contacted every iPhone app review site I can find that might be interested in my app. Actually I’m still in the process of doing this….
- Created a FaceBook account for my app’s character, Robodamus. As of this writing I’m up to 72 friends. I posted an announcement when the app was available on the app store. I also posted an announcement on my personal Facebook wall.
- Posted advertisements on most of my tutorial videos on YouTube.
- Created a YouTube video demonstrating the app.
Unfortunetly I have no way to gauge if my “marketing” is having any effect. Regardless, my next steps in marketing my app are:
- Keep writing to the numerous app review sites.
- Using the free Google AdSense advertising dollars I have. A $100 “gift” toward advertising came in the mail recently from Google, so that might be useful. I’ve always been curious how AdSense worked from the advertisers’ perspective.
- Doing a voodoo dance and hoping I get lucky.
Like Owen Goss in his “Numbers (aka Brutal Honesty)” blog post, I plan on sharing my sales data after I have enough to share. I find that sort of information really interesting but difficult to find.
BTW, make sure to check out Owen’s developer blog; it’s one of my favorites. His newest game, Monkeys in Space, is pretty sweet, so check that out as well.
-James
Update 7/24/10: I’ve posted my sales numbers for for the first two months of the application’s availability here.
