Ok, thanks for your advices.
Thank you very much for your help man, this is a very helpful thread indeed!
Since i am here, i would like your opinion on my last app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dohsoft.offroadrally
I thought it could get quite decent downloads, but i am getting 70-80ish a day and the first month is nearly over, so i guess they will go down too…i don’t get why it gets so little attention…there are a lot of games under rally or offroad keywords way ahead of mine and, frankly, definitely worst/uglier than mine 
Lest begin:
- Your icon doesn’t stand out, look here: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=Offroad%20Rally%20Race&c=apps every EVERY app looks exacly the same to me, except maybe this one https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coolmastergames.offroadracing. The border and ‘new’ text are the problem here, they look like made in paint in 5 minutes. You used the wrong color for border and text as well. Also car you chose is static, that doesn’t entice any emotion.
- Screens you chose are not the best - second one is good, swap the first one with the police car. Ingame landscape looks bland (clouds), that doesn’t make very good impression.
- Movie - you use effects that make it look like made in the '90, but thats not the main problem here - show the customization first, than racing.
- Game feels extremely lonely and depressing - no other cars, empty landscape, no funny signs on the side, no commercials, - it really lacks the spark (play nfs underground for comparison)
Basically your problem is the game itself and the fact that all the racing games look and are presented in a very similar way. Try producing something more unique with more cool stuff and you should do much better.
This is the private message I got from lordraider, I’m posting here to remeber to answer it a bit later:
hello,
I made already 2 posts, but no moderators publish it .
So I try to contact you here.
This is what I posted, maybe you can give me help?
Hello,
This is a nice thread .
I have released a game where you have to mine down by matching jewels and find coins within a timespan.
It is on the store for a month now.
You gain extra time if you destroy a row of green blocks. So it’s quite a challenge.
There are leaderboards and achievements to keep the player interested for some time
I’m going to make another bigger game out of it in the future with alot more features and IAP.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jm.cesharp.com
I invested 300$ in PPI at app brain, it brought me 270 installs ± and it improved my ranking a little bit.
The user retention is pretty nice for such small game, some played it 5 times, some 15 time, some even 30 times or more.
That baffled me , people like jewel games it seems. Even if the logic is quite simple.
I tried to make the game look nice with as little costs as possible (maybe not the right move …)
I’m getting around 30 active users a day , and 4 - 6 new organic downloads a day now.
I’m only ranked in the keyword mine, the best, jewel mania and some other multi word combinations that narrow down to my app title.
Is there a way to improve visibility or ranking by improving some things around my market page or game?
Thx in advance !
Thanks for your detailed analysis…there are definitely a lot of things to think about and try to improve, but you made good points indeed. I’ll try to work on them to see if i can improve there. (sigh, i was quite fond of the video…despite it being made with windows playmaker i thought it had a decent look :D)
Hi,
I’ve just made two simple games and post on the play store, no marketing yet, but your review would be very helpful for me.
Brain Bugs: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrologicmedia.brainbugs
Ice Hockey Penguins: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrologicmedia.icehockeypenguins
Thanks!
I’m sorry that Im quite busy lately. Here to say thank you for the above tips as well as the information over skype. Greate service you had there. Thanks!
Hi Bronsoner, I’d appreciate if you could take a look at this game: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xdebugx.colorSwap
We did some marketing in the first 30 days. We mostly bought ppi from appbrain and AyeT. We got into the top 100 new casual in Germany and top 200 in a few other countries. But we didn’t get any organic installs from those rankings. After the ppi campaign ran out we dropped out quickly.
Here’s the thing, we must have done something terribly wrong. We got featured in google play in the list “Save Your Progress” for about a week in US and Canada. Even during that time we only got about 60 downloads a day. Before we were getting about 40 downloads a day. Is our aso that bad?
Hello,
Could you check out my game? It’s been up for 12 days now but not doing as well as I hoped. Thank you very much!!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.youline.fallingpanda
Hi everyone,
I have to admit, this is one of the most interesting threads in this forum since quite some time. Every message I read really makes me read the next one and then the next one, especially the advices, also to look at the app itself, trying to analyze the weak points, what can be improved or has been improved, and how the advices helped the developer improve the popularity.
Thanks Bronsoner, great work man! You hit the target directly - the marketing has always been the pain-point for every android developer.
As the top message of the thread says, I will try give my feedback with general advices and my experience on how to improve download rate of an app.
-
Regular updates of an app helped some years ago, but not anymore;
-
Changing the keywords sometimes helps, sometimes makes things worse. Keep experimenting, but wait for some time (1 week) before you change again. Also, never use copyrighted words like Facebook, Angry Birds, etc. I am not a master in ASO, but one of my apps was doing 10-20 downloads/day until I tweaked it a little but and it started doing 150-200/day. This was a lucky hit some 3 years ago, I am not able to reproduce it anymore. General rule: always use a keyword in the title, otherwise the app will never be discovered without marketing. Also keep in mind Google changes the search algorithm.
-
When creating an app, think about selling first. Do not produce exactly what you like at most, but concentrate on a niche where you can sell.
-
Posts in Facebook helps for some 50-100 additional downloads within a week or so (depending on how many friends you have). However, some of the real friends would give a valuable feedback - this is really precious. Posting in dedicated groups for games or android development didn’t work well for me;
-
Posts in forums: almost no use for downloads themselves. But you can learn some nice tricks the other participants;
-
Posts in sites for reviews: so far I wasted all my time. I was not able to get any review. Only a few sites answered and they all asked for money for a paid service with the explanation that the free service is capable to cover only 4-5% of the requests.
-
We tried with a friend a kind of cross-promotion. He added a button in his game’s main menu to my app and I did the same with my app. My app was making around 100 downloads/day at that time, his was making around 200/day. Nothing changed for a couple of weeks.
-
Posts in reddit work for 1-2 days once and can eventually bring 1000-2000 additional downloads. But according to their policy you are not allowed to post self-promotion more than 10% of all your posts. So, you will usually be kicked out on your second or third post.
-
Adding a Video. Many people say this is a download booster. Not for me. I was carefully watching the number of downloads and number of visits in my videos. Most of the downloads were done without watching the video. For example for 100 app downloads/day there was a video watch rate of 7-8 users a day. So, a video might make sense in order to get a bit higher ranking from the search engine, but investing into an expensive video doesn’t really boost the downloads.
This should be enough for today. Whenever I find out more interesting things to share, I will come back.
Meanwhile I will appreciate your feedback on my app Fish Maze, what is good, what is bad, and how I can improve it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=maplabs.fish
Regards
The word “Memory” is registered trademark of a German company - it can not be used in app name.
Early or late they will find your app, send a IP claim to Google and after that Google will suspend it from Play.
So you are lucky that you app is not visible, because you have time to change the name.
That is not true, same as word ‘saga’ for King.com - this word connected with games that try to emulate Candy Crash is truly forbidden, otherwise you can use the word in common sense meaning anytime you want.
Sorry guys for the delay - lot’s of work and I cought a cold, I’ll try to answer as soon as I get some free time.
I know from personal experience with “Memory” - my apps with memory in name received 7 days warning from Google play support team, the same happed in Amazon Store. I was clever and lucky enough, not to be suspended without warning, and changed the names of my apps. By the way , I checked the Memory trademark on European and US trademarks official sites and it exists really. The issue is not so simple, because trademarks are country specific. . I do not have time and motivation to enter deeply in this s**t.
Hi there,
I was wondering if you’d take a look at my latest app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.limbersoft.santarunner
Mostly interested in ASO in this case.
Thanks in advance.
- Icon sucks - looks like made in paint in 5 minutes, color is nice, but it doesn’t show quality - jewels in game are much better, icon is your weakest point. Compare it with some of my icons: Michal Ksiadzyna $5 App Icons
- Screens are ok - there are a lot of them which makes up for vertical layout, too bad they are repeated
- Description looks a bit poor - wall of text, short sentences and small. Put features first, make it structured better. Some ASO, but not much - you really could improve here.
- Very small noumber of reviews will hurt you
- Your ‘website’ doesn’t build trust at all
Brain Bugs:
- Great icon
- Poor screens, they really don’t show anything, except a lot of green, also they are repeated
- Almost no description - write at least 1000 characters description with keywords and you will see significant improvement over time
- Small number of reviews and downloads - you really need to promote your app for at least a month
Ice Hockey Penguins:
- Much worse icon, it’s too cluttered and while it shows hockey penguins it doesn’t grab attention like it should
- Only 3 screens and only first one looks cool enough
- Movie starts off slow, show me gameplay
- Same story with description and reviews/downloads as Brain Bugs
- Different app name and link name - doesn’t build trust, but is overlooked by most people so it can slide, but won’t help you for sure in ASO
- Icon - Cute furry creature is nice, the rest is simply bad, background, effects … really needs work in order to show quality outright, the idea though is good
- Screens are very nice
- Movie - why the extreme zoom that makes it pixalated?
- Nice description, just try to be less heavy on ASO in first 3 sentences, some people actually read those.
In general just change the icon to something that shows more quality and you will get a nice bump in daily downloads.
- Icon - quality is ok, the glass effect is nice, but it’s .jpg from what I see not .png (hence white corners) - that really hurts the trust your game gets. There you go, took my like 1 minute to fix it for you: Dropbox - File Deleted - Simplify your life
- Screens look nice, but you need to add more of them and more veriety, first one is very nice
- Thats practically no description, write a nice, long description, captivating opener and add some keywords. You might consider hiring someone with better english to do that for you.
- Your website doesn’t have english version
- Have some patience - 12 days is way too little to expect anything
- The inside of icon is nice, but you chose wrong shade of red for border. Thats a very aggresive red, not the one you need. Don’t use black shadow and make it brighter.
- Screens are nice, but there are a bit too few of them, add more
- Write few nice sentences in description - bullet points are nice, but not when the whole description consists only of them. Also tell me why your game is uniqe, don’t brag outright that your game is ‘One of the most addicting games on Android!’ with <500 downloads … even plants vs zombies doesn’t use a sentence like that and they could … also no ASO whatsoever - this will hurt you in long term
- Size is a bit much, but it’s 3D so it’s understandable, but it would help if you could reduce it
- Fact that you have simple apps on same account doesn’t help in building trust for this game
Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll try to implement them. What do you think I could do in terms of ASO? I’ve already changed up some of the keywords to less competitive ones, but I’m still new to this.