2015, Year in Review
<> Posted on January 12, 2016 in AppsLife
This past year I've released two apps on the App Store, WheelMasks and Colors AlTaglio. As I've written before, my objective with WheelMasks was to prove that I could still be a developer after spending some years on my illustrator career, and in that sense I consider it a success. On the other hand, I developed Colors AlTaglio because I thought it would have a much wider audience and because of that it had a bigger chance to have minimum traction. I'm afraid to report that's not the case.
When releasing AlTaglio I tried my best reaching out to blogs and review sites to increase the awareness for the app (I even drew a comic!). A few bloggers told me that they'd look into it and thankfully two of them talked about it on their blogs. Sadly this doesn't attract enough attention so I have to rely on App Store searches because my marketing budget is 0€, and this is where I've hit a wall. Release day was way better than WheelMasks', not a big accomplishment believe me, but after that, App Store views fell to the floor and have been there since.
I've tried changing my keywords and even the app name to do some App Store Optimization, and this has helped a little bit, but I'm consistently getting 1 digit numbers every day for App Store views. However, conversion percentage isn't bad at all and this keeps me hopeful that if I could increase views that would help a lot.
On the WheelMasks front things are looking slightly better, these past weeks App Store views have been increasing and purchases have doubled. Don't get your hopes up though, they were pretty low. I think it's thanks to a combination of Holidays presents, the release of the Apple Pencil / iPad Pro and probably the release of Procreate 3. In addition to that, I've finally settled down to just one In-App purchase to unlock all the functionality of the app. This seems to work way better than having multiple In-App purchases for the different color modes.
Taking all of this into account I've decided to end my "entrepreneur" career for the time being and focus on finding a job as an iOS developer. The kind of money these apps make doesn't really justify spending more (or any) time on them, but I'll probably be updating WheelMasks for new iOS releases until there's a change that requires too much work.
AlTaglio is different though, it's a commercial failure but I still see a lot of potential there in regards of what I could do manipulating images in the HUSL color space, so I'll keep working on it because there's some things that I really want to try. However, I'll approach it as a hobby now and I've promised myself not to work on it more than a day each week and focus on new objectives.
What I'll Do Now
If it isn't clear yet, I'm available for hire!
I've done a couple of interviews already and I've confirmed that most employers in the Barcelona area aren't looking for an iOS developer knowledgeable in graphics stuff. To increase my chances I'll be working on a new open source iOS app to show that I can access networks, deal with JSON, use Core Data, put my View Controllers on a diet, unit test, etc… I haven't written a single line of code yet, but I already have a prototype done with Pixate Studio and I'll begin coding this week, you can find the public repository here: Agenda
