Today we received a vivid proof that applications we make are really popular with users. Some of the players cannot do with just a game on the screen, they want to have their own tangible option!

Mr. N (won`t give up the name for privacy reason) expressed willingness to order from us a certain quantity of Bubble Wrap from the like-named game developed for Nokia Ovi Store. Definitely it is far more exciting to pop bubbles at home, when there are a few hundreds metres of real bubble wrap at you disposal!

Mr N was quite serious about the matter and inquired the price, method of payment and time of delivery. He also specified the desired size, as only 150mtr x 1.5mtr wide or 100mtr x 0.5mtr wide wrap would answer his needs.

That made us mull over the question what we will do if users decide to order a beauty from iGirl or spilled in Drunk Sniper liquid?

Maybe we should create less realistic graphics?

Tags: iphone development, nokia ovi development
Posted in mobile development | No Comments »

Sometimes iPhone apps get rejected by Apple due to not appropriate ratings set during submission. In this case Apple asks the developer to ‘to resubmit your binary and rate your application appropriately’. There is a catch though. If you do this – you will not be able to change application ratings (those will be non-editable). So don’t fall into the confusion: change the ratings before resubmitting the binary. If you did followed Apple’s advice and submitted the binary first – reject it, change ratings and upload again. It took me 20 minutes to figure this out so I wanted to share the experience with the rest of the world. Hopefully Apple will fix their email template soon.

Tags: iphone development
Posted in iphone development | No Comments »

Catching up on recent new stories and publications about projects developed by our game development and iPhone development arm – Apalon together with Resistor Productions.

http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/07/13/resistor-products-unites-facebook-and-web-site-gamers-in-disciple-online-game/ Disciple role-playing game debuts Facebook version

http://www.pcworld.com/article/167415/sexy_iphone_app_funds_a_startup.html Sexy iPhone App Funds a Startup

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2009%2F07%2F04%2FBUM618ID57.DTL&type=business SFGate interviews Toby Batton

http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2009-07-14-free-online-games_N.htm USAToday covers Disciple

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0907/gallery.dumbest_iphone_apps.fortune/8.html Drunk Sniper iPhone app made it to the TOP10 dumbest apps according to CNNMoney

Tags: facebook application development, game development, iphone development
Posted in flash, game development, iphone development | No Comments »

As an iPhone developer or a publisher you are eager to know the sales stats for a certain applications on Apple AppStore.

We noticed that it’s possible to guess the sales of a particular app by looking at the number of reviews of application in the AppStore. Sure, this is very relative guess and can give the results which differ up to several times but still it’s good for a guess. Knowing if an app made 1.000, 10.000, 50.000, 100.000 or 500.000 sales can really help with understanding the preferences of iPhone users. Please note – we talk about paid Apps with no specific geo-targeting placed in USA AppStore since it’s the biggest one. Generally this is the case for 95% of Apps out there.

Let’s compare the sales numbers published online vs number of reviews those Applications have and come up with the ratio:

- Ocarina, reports $1MLM in revenue on Dec 13th, 2008 with price changing from $1.99 to $0.99. Rough guess: 700.000 units sold by now with 1255 reviews. Ratio: 550:1

- iFart Mobile. Is at 300.000 units right now based their twitter post and on the sales data they published when the app was in TOP1 of all categories. Has 769 reviews. Ratio: 400:1

- Trism reported 250k in sales with the price being $4.99 and ultimetly dropping to $2.99. Our guess the guy made 200.000 unit sales. There 545 reviews now. Ratio: 350:1

- Wooble sold about 10.000 units for one week and has 50 reviews. Ratio: 200:1

And the last piece of info: calculate sales of the apps which have at lest 30 reviews. Smaller number of reviews could get irrelevant sales figures for many reasons, e.g. the first reviews could be made by friends and family of the Application Developer.

We welcome you to post sales data vs number of reviews other applications in comments and will be updating this post accordingly.

Tags: iphone application development, iphone development, iphone sales data, iphone sales figures
Posted in iphone development, management | 13 Comments »

After the recent successful launch of Atomic Checkers Iphone Game we do not reject the leads for Iphone game development any more. Previously Iphone Application Development wasn’t our focus because of the lack of expertise and we stepped into this market finally.

For those of you wishing to learn this science too – here is the nice link to the course prepared by Stanford.

Tags: game development, iphone application development, iphone development
Posted in cool links, game development, iphone development | 1 Comment »