App Story: The Trip Through The Desert

Much has been written already on the difficulty of independent software developers to make it in the App Store these days. I probably should have know better, yet here I am about to write the same old story with different names. As we endure our own trip through the desert, I’ll do my best to document our experience in a series of posts catchily named “App Story” (lame, I know).

I won’t deny that I’m writing this partly because I need to vent. But the main goal is to put my thoughts in order, and hopefully learn something. And perhaps help (or entertain) someone the same way that other’s people’s candid posts have helped us. Okay, mostly vent, but in a helpful way.

There’s risks too: in the odd chance that anyone actually reads this, I expect to be bludgeoned in public with a hardback copy of “The Lean Enterprise” or some other modern bible/cookbook that I neglected to read. Is lurking on Hacker News not enough to learn all there is to learn?!? (And lurk I do, I’m the hardest lurker in the history of lurking-kind.)

Here we go.

The Idea

The idea for the Amigo Spanish Keyboard arose in 2014 around the time Apple announced the opening of iOS to 3rd-party keyboards.

My partner and co-founder is learning Spanish (intermediate level) and she found it really annoying to write emails or text messages in Spanish on the mobile phone. Switching to Safari or to a dictionary app to find the translation of a Spanish word, or the conjugation of a verb, killed all her speed and was painful. So, why not integrate an English-Spanish dictionary and a verb conjugator in the keyboard itself? Scratch your own itch.

We started acting on the idea a few months later by building an early prototype. She liked it. We showed it to other people and they liked it too. We realized it had real potential when she started preferring to write in Spanish on her iPhone rather than her laptop.

We then of course looked at the addressable market: X million American schoolchildren take Spanish, so do Y million college undergrads per year, plus businesses and whatnot, not to mention the U.K. and other countries, multiplied by a factor for iPhone ownership. We made further rationalizations, e.g. Duolingo’s success creating tons more language learners on mobile phones. Grammarly, Hemingway thriving with English writing tools. Etc…

The Development

So, on the solid foundation of a strong hunch and confirmation bias, we engaged in a 6-month marathon of:

  • creating an iOS 3rd party keyboard (more to it than you’d think, read the horror stories),
  • putting together an English-Spanish dictionary, filtering it to make it age-safe, and fitting it into the keyboard, both in terms of UI/UX and in terms of memory usage (~35 MB of RAM is all you get before your keyboard gets killed by iOS, and that includes views, graphics, everything),
  • developing a verb conjugator,
  • developing a Spanish text predictor,
  • and we even threw in the rudiments of a Spanish grammar checker (so much for MVP).
  • We also made it a point that you don’t need to give it full access for privacy (and performance!)
  • The finishing touch: a space bar with a mustache, for hipster glory.

We then put a posting on Reddit (/r/Spanish and /r/Learnspanish/) asking for feedback and beta testers. We got a modest but very positive response and started our beta testing.

Because of the negative reviews that most keyboards were getting in the App Store (and still do), we did extensive testing and tweaking until the thing could automatically type the equivalent of a small novel without being evicted. Every leaked byte was relentlessly chased and banished (can’t help thinking of Liam Neeson here). Parsing algorithms were rewritten to reduce the working set. The view hierarchy was flattened to a minimum. Etc. After a few iterations, feedback from beta-testers was all positive, with no show-stoppers.

Our baby. We’re so proud.

So we submitted to Apple with arguably the worst timing we could have chosen: three weeks before WWDC. And then it took them 17 days to review our app.

The sensible thing would have been to go on holidays for a month and release the product then. But when you’ve spent the last nine months of your life working very, very hard on something, you simply can’t believe that nobody’s going to give a crap about it just because it’s Apple’s developers’ conference (I’m an idiot).

The Launch

For the launch, our main action was to write personalized messages to ~60 tech journalists and language bloggers (actually, we had contacted the bloggers and local language schools previously and offered them to participate in the beta). Just one journalist featured us, everyone else was preparing for WWDC or simply didn’t like the pitch. Fair enough.

We also put some advertising on Twitter and Facebook, but we didn’t want to spend a small fortune. We didn’t try to get someone to post us in e.g. Product Hunt, because we sincerely don’t know anyone. We didn’t want to go all “growth-hacky”, because we suck at it and because we naively wanted “real users” to discover and validate the app. We thought our app was useful and would be appreciated (well, we still think that).

We also had high hopes that Apple would at least list us in the “Keyboards” section of the “Utilities” category. We believed this was a product that ticked many boxes:

  • Innovative: how many other keyboards do anything similar? Zero.
  • Useful and educational.
  • Well-finished (we hope, although the design can certainly be improved).
  • iOS-only.

But Apple didn’t feature us. I wrote to them, begging to let me know why (was it something I did?) and got a nicely worded yet utterly empty answer. Since then, each time they feature another freaking emoji or GIF keyboard it’s like a small dagger though my heart. It makes me feel physically sick.

The launch was an unmitigated disaster.

We didn’t get any traction. The app may as well be invisible. Nine months of hard work and no-freaking-body can find it. We got something like 20 App Store views per day, on a good day. A few good souls purchased Amigo. To all nine of you, thank you with all our hearts: we’ll keep Amigo going for you.

Amigo’s first week sales. Ouch.

In desperation, we made it free. Which gave us a few hundred downloads because it was caught up by the sites that monitor that kind of thing. But most of the downloads were not from real users. The next day we got 300 downloads from Switzerland. The analytics showed that most of these people didn’t even open the app once. We’re guessing they just downloaded it in case they ever needed it, and proceeded to delete it immediately. Same with 70+ downloads from Korea on another day.

Lessons Learned

(…the hard way.)

  • Don’t send any (new?) app to Apple anywhere near WWDC or Christmas or any other significant event. The typical 8–9 days approval time may actually be double or more.
  • It was also probably the worst time of the year for an educational/reference-type product: all the schools were winding down and going on holidays.
  • If Apple doesn’t feature or highlight your product, your chances of being found in the App Store are near zero. No amount of ASO is going to lift you out of the black hole. Anyhow, there’s always going to be someone with more time than you optimizing keywords.
  • Uniqueness, utility or quality of your product is not by itself a guarantee of being featured. Below, there’s a screenshot of a section of the U.S. App Store where we hoped to be featured. (BTW, it’s an interesting choice of colors by Apple. Is orange on yellow any good for dyslexia, color-blindness?) Arguably, most of these keyboards are not very useful to a majority of U.S. customers (and voila, you can see that the number of reviews for most of them is minimal for a featured app). There’s one that doesn’t even belong in there, as it doesn’t have anything to do with typing in other languages (the “5 Row Keyboards”, 2.5 stars with a lifetime total of 14 ratings, of which 43% are 1-star). There are millions of U.S. students who take Spanish every year, for Pedro’s sake! Yet, sadly, Amigo’s not there with his friends, sniff. Even worse, it’s not a matter of limited space: other subcategories have actually more keyboards featured so they wouldn’t even need to remove another app to add ours. (BTW, not picking on other developers, I’m happy for them that they got featured. I’m just pointing out the arbitrariness of Apple’s featuring.)
Featured apps in the Utility/Keyboards/Type in Another Language section. Color scheme by Apple®.
  • You can’t figure out what Apple want to feature. Yes, writing an Apple Watch app would have got you featured this year, but we can’t all pursue the latest just for the sake of being featured. Inane, unoriginal, low-quality apps are featured every day, and solid, useful apps get passed by.
  • At least for some categories, Apple don’t seem to rotate the featured inventory to give new opportunities to other apps. The screenshot above was taken today, but it’s been pretty much the same for many months. This is utterly wasteful for app developers and for Apple itself, who could be a lot smarter in maximizing profit and user satisfaction. Perhaps this is such a small category they don’t even care about it.
  • In the end, it comes down to creating your own external buzz. It’s infinitely easier to be noticed by Apple and the media if you already have managed to make a lot of noise elsewhere. This is a chicken-and-egg problem, especially for an independent developer.

Next Steps

These days, we get a trickle of organic downloads, in the 20/day range. It may be people who find the app searching in the App Store, or it may be word of mouth. Looks like, when they find it, people do overwhelmingly tend to download Amigo (it’s still free). But we have no chance of growing a large audience this way, let alone monetize.

Perhaps it’s us. Perhaps it’s our product. I think about this every day. But we haven’t received a single negative review, nor has anyone ever told us it’s a useless piece of crap. We really don’t know. Are we in product-market fit hell, or just distribution hell?

I wish Apple rotated their listings and gave more apps a chance, or did some sort of A/B testing on a large scale. That way we could see if it’s our product or our lame marketing. I wish they improved the App Store analytics that they just released. I wish they gave some feedback or guidance on how to be featured. We can learn and improve.

Actually, we desperately want to learn and improve.

So, how does an independent solve the chicken & egg problem (without spending tons of money)? No idea. If we find out, I’ll let you know in a follow-up post. If you know, please tell me!

We’re not giving up. The trickle seems to be growing, and these users seem engaged. It’ll be back-to-school season soon. We’ll be releasing version 1.1 of Amigo shortly, with speech. And we’ll keep updating Amigo while we have ideas or feedback. Because we care about what we do.

For our next product we’re going to be more careful. Perhaps do a Kickstarter, although I suspect that has its own chicken and its own egg too.

Thanks for reading this far. I’ll keep you posted about our progress.