Time Slip

Programming, for non professionals really can be a challenge at times. But the satisfaction that comes after solving a 2-day old problem really can be a cheap thrill.

At the beginning of last night, I decided to add Facebook sharing to Float. 

All was going reasonably well. The Facebook instructions were specific to Android Studio, while I use Eclipse, but this post helped me enormously in that respect. He explains how the Facebook project will have missing dependency errors when first added to eclipse, but it's easy enough to identify them and add them. 

His example was the android-support-v4.jar but I also found the android-support-annotations.jar was needed. Working through these steps and then the Facebook guide for a sharing intent I made my first Facebook post from Float.

Then I unintentionally initiated a 2-day programming time slip. I don't remember what prompted me, but I started updating a lot of things using the Android package manager. All hell broke loose and nothing would build!

Two long, late nights were spent trying to get my updated Eclipse and ADT environment, and my Float project to play nicely, when finally I stumbled on this remarkably simple solution...

Turns out, in my updated packages, android-support-annotations.jar is included in android-support-v4.jar. removing android-support-annotations.jar from my Facebook project solved all my problems.

Luckily I didn't try anything to drastic without being able to undo my changes before finding this out. Interestingly, this wasn't even the accepted answer to the Stackoverflow question (though it has the most votes). Sometimes you just stumble on the right answer.

So, two nights lost, maybe I'll finish adding Facebook to Float tomorrow.

(photo of cat is for no reason other than it ids a funny cat).

Sensor Tower Keyword Analysis Revisited

I'd love to know what caused this sudden loss of keyword performance...

I'm getting that sinking feeling again.

(Statistics from sensortower.com)

Sensor Tower

Becoming an App publisher is no "Field of Dreams."

And by that I mean, "If you build it, they will come" is not a valid moto! I think it's fair to say the making of my first app, Float, was for sure the easy part. Getting it seen is by far a harder task, and something I'm ill prepared for.

I have my app on the devices of a handful of like minded indie developers and family and friends (thank you to all of you!) and some of them are very complimentary. But getting even those people to share or rate or even +1 the app in the play store is hard. As a result, my app lingers way down the rankings, even if you search by its precise name!

So, having stumbled upon Sensor Tower, I've been inspired to focus on the keywords in my app store description.

Sensor tower has allowed me to much more easily establish my ranking for certain search terms (previously I'd have searched and scrolled through 250 apps to determine that I'm not ranking).

It also allows me to track how my ranking has changed over time (See image below, which I'll come back to shortly).

Another really helpful feature is the ability to choose specific competitor apps to track and review their own strategies.

So, I decided I needed to make some changes to my app store description today having viewed my app floundering at 70 in the rankings for searches of "float". I changed the name from "Float" to "Float Tile Puzzle" and added new text to describe the game in more detail, using the terms "Tile" and "Puzzle" a few extra times, as well as "Mahjong" and "Sudoku" once or twice.

The result was not ideal! With the new name, my app instantly plummeted in ranking for search term "float" and did not appear on the rankings for either "tile" or "tile puzzle"

I can only hope the changes will be helpful in the long term. And at least I now have Sensor Tower to help me measure my ranking.

It's not perfect though. The free account is quite limiting (though they do give away a Pro plan to students and indie developers for posting a review of their platform ;))

It also could do with an android app. I couldn't find one (I assume that's not because they haven't optimised their own rankings!) and the web page performs very poorly on a mobile platform.

I hope I can post the image below again soon with a significant bounce back in search performance!

Dealing with Criticism

In shamelessly trying to promote Float, I've been joining and posting to Google+ communities looking to:

1. put the link to my app out in the big wide world
2. possibly gain some useful tips for improvement
3. I'll be honest, a healthy does of backslapping and "well done old boy. Great app!" is naively hoped for.

From most posts, I got a good deal of 1, also a little bit of 2, and a tiny but of 3. Actually, there was no 3, except from my parents...

But from one community, I got a more critical response. Now I'm a big boy, I can brush that aside, but I'm curious about why this happened suddenly and in one specific community. Oddly, I was more responsible in this community than in some others. By that I mean I posted in a conversation topic that was specifically meant for feedback requests, and I requested feedback on a specific element of the app (the palette choice and use). In other communities I was simply one of many "Hey, check out my app!" posts.

I had one very unfair and critical comment right off the bat, to which I responded with "OK, so what don't you like about it?" To that reply, a different poster responded with "do you really not see the problem with the user experience?"

What am I meant to do with that? And why was I being ganged up on? I checked out the profiles of the people commenting and one of them at least seemed to be a professional android developer. I felt like perhaps I'd found myself in the rough pub at the wrong end of town. Maybe I should avoid this community and stay where novice hobbyist programmers are more welcomed.

But before tucking tail and backing out of the saloon doors I faced up to my attackers, commenting that their responses were of no help.

To this I got mixed responses. One then responded with an apology and some helpful criticism that I've taken on board graciously. The other (the professional) responded sarcastically, accusing me of not understanding users because I don't play other games (there may be some truth in that... who has time to play games around here?)

So, I deleted his final comment that I deemed to be sarcastic. Would you have done the same thing? The censorship feels wrong, but I'm a small time developer in a big timer's game... one or two negative comments can make things really hard. I don't have time for a war of words I'd only lose anyway.

I'm a little surprised (but grateful) that I have the freedom to delete comments on my public posts in someone else's Google+ Community.

Was I wrong to delete the comment?

The original post (minus the offending comment) is here.