Fling! released on Android

After a couple of years, over a million sales and over 10 million downloads for iphone, we’re finally venturing into Android waters with a port of Fling! for Android.

And to mark this occasion we thought it might be time to resurrect this blog, and with some future posts we’ll describe how life as an independent iphone games developer has panned out, from the initial rollercoaster ride at the top of the AppStore throuhg to today, and compare how things on Android go with the Apple AppStore ….

But for now, its enough to mention that we’re mighty proud of our Android port – we’ve worked hard to made it work on all the various Android devices as close as possible as the iPhone version. It comes with all the latest additions we made to the iPhone version – the extra levels, the new themes, the support for 6 different languages, the new Frenzy game-mode, etc. And Android users can even post their scores+progress to the same leaderboards that the iPhone users are using.

So to all the Fling! users who’ve been waiting for a version for their Android phones, or have Android friends who were waiting, grab it now and help Fling! become as a big a success on Android as it has been for the iPhone – https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mbgames.fling

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Sitting on top of the AppStore!

We blogged earlier about how our iphone puzzle game Fling! hit #1 when we gave the full version away for a couple of days.

Shortly after that, the actual free version was finally approved. Since then, Fling! has had an amazing run, and has been sitting the past few days at #1 of both free+paid top 100 apps in the UK, and in the top 10 of the other English speaking stores – US, Australia, Canada, … 🙂

It’s really been great to see just how Fling! has been so popular with gamers everywhere, and we’re grateful to everyone who downloaded it for helping make it a success.

What advice can we give from this ride for other iphone developers? Well, we might be a little afraid of giving away our ‘secrets’ to success, but really there’s no big-secret here:

• For us, the model of giving away a trial version of an app in order to sell the full version has proven essential – while we just had the full version of Fling! available, even while it was featured by Apple, we had relatively insignificant sales or momentum. In our opinion, this trial-version model works great for both gamers (as they can try before they buy), and us (as we haven’t found any other great ways to get our apps noticed).
• How easy it is to replicate this success with the free trial-version and paid full-version model we can’t say – obviously a lot depends on how popular a game proves to be. For example, there’s another game with a trial version sitting above Fling in the free apps in the US for the past week, for which the paid version of that game hasn’t cracked the top 20 while Fling climbed well into the top 10. And even if a game has a free version which is compelling and thus produces as high a percentage of ‘upsales’ as Fling! has, is there any guarantee that the free version will climb to the top 10 free apps in the first place? Its hard for us to say what determines this – our previous game Fuzzle had a free trial version which while also essential to Fuzzle’s success, never reached such heights in the charts (and this despite Fuzzle being featured by Apple under “What’s Hot”, which our experience is showing to be somewhat of a boost but in no way guarantees an app’s success, and despite Fuzzle being released at a time when there was much less competition in the AppStore).

One final note of advice for aspiring iphone developers – don’t assume that even if your game hits the jackpot and reaches the top 10, that you can now retire happy ….. being in the top 10 is great, but its not going to make you rich overnight – if your app spends a couple of days in the top 10, you might come away with 20,000 in sales from those two days (a bit more if you can hit #1), which at $0.99 per sale minus a 30% Apple cut may or may not make you happy … for us, we’re happy but not retiring just yet, and we’ll be continuing to add new features to Fling! to keep it hot for a while longer before focusing on our next big thing 🙂

How to reach #1 in the AppStore

Want to know how to convert an app from drowning in the sea of over 65,000 apps, selling in single or double digit numbers, into the #1 downloaded app in the AppStore within a week?

Well, we have an answer for you …. our big secret …. unfortunately it may not make you much money, but here’s how we did it – you switch the app to free 🙂

Our app Fling!, despite being well received and even being featured by Apple (featured under “What we’re playing”, which it turns out isn’t as lucrative for sales as being in something like “What’s hot”), was not selling a great amount, so this week we decided to try making it free as a promotion for a few days and sure enough, like our previous app Fuzzle before it, within three days it had rocketed to the top of the free apps, sitting yesterday+today at #1, having leapfrogged over the thousands of ‘lite’/’trial’ apps and everything else that was being giving away for free.

So what does this mean? Well …. we would say that this shows that a reasonably polished, good-looking app that users are happy to pay a few dollars for, can probably reach #1 in the free apps by going free …

And while this is undoubtably cool, and the idea that an individual or small team can (still) make a small iphone app and with zero marketing dollars have it potentially seen+played by millions of people is really amazing, what this doesn’t tell you unfortunately is how to make $$$ by doing this ….

In this regard, our thinking is that we hope the word-of-mouth etc might make up for the loss in potential buyers, and that this will help prevent our app being lost in the sea of apps. And if not, well at least the about 500,000 users who downloaded it in those four days will get to enjoy our game, who otherwise might never have heard of it 🙂