Income February 2016

February 2016 is gone, let’s have a look at AppStore income.

Bad weather, again. Especially the early spring holiday week that we have in Belgium was very wet. That’s quite a setback as I’ve made good money during the last years when the sun was out in that week.

As a result February 2016 produced about 77% of earnings same month one year ago. End result is 514€.

The good news is that I didn’t spend any time on the apps this month, apart from submitting an update. There’s a lot more profit in that amount because this time last year I spent a lot of time working on the apps (and not for customers as a result).

New app

My latest app De knooppuntenapp: wandelen in Nederland was submitted and approved.

This app brings +8000km of walking networks in the south of The Netherlands. In time I’ll add more networks to this app, as there are quite a few.

For the first time in quite a while I got a question from Apple during the review process. They wanted to know why Audio Backgrounding is enabled in my app. I explained the use of voice navigation and sent some screenshots through the Resolution Center and all was fine. I’ve had voice and audio backgrounding in my apps for quite some time now so I’m unsure where this question came from.

Bundles

Last year I removed my app bundles from the AppStore but I’ve brought them back some weeks ago. I still advertise my apps inside my apps using iTunes Affiliates links and some money is coming in from that. Since the bundles are very visible in the App Store I’m hoping that I can make more Affiliate money that way.

Guides

I did spend some time doing backend work this month but it was all time outside of customer hours. One thing I would like to do this year is to give every app a built-in store where routes can be purchased. They won’t be simple routes like users can make, I like to think of them more as _guides_.

I got the idea after I bought some paper books last year. Every route in those books is more of a guide, with POI’s along the way, often with some history behind the POI’s. The added value of such a paper route is that you _learn_ a bit along the way.

The plan is to find articles and pictures for a route, wrap them into a zip file and offer the bundle as an in-app purchase. I’m looking to do a lot more than just throw some data from different api’s onto a pile and call it a day. When the cycling or walking is done I want users to feel it was money well spent.

The plan is to integrate the content of the guides in voice navigation. So while cycling or walking a guide, voice won’t just tell you which nodes to follow, but it will also notify users when important POI’s are coming up.

I’ve got a few cool ideas for different guides. There will be guides which take users past breweries for example. Guides might also plug into historic events, such as World War remembrances or locations used in popular tv series.

It’s an ambitious plan and it will take quite some time to get it right. Right now I have the code to find related articles and pictures and I can filter out the useless pictures. The plan is to write code so that guide content is gathered automatically, with only the tidying up and linking done manually.

The backend can host the zip bundles and I have written in-app purchase code before, so that’s all the boring stuff taken care of. I’m unsure of the how’s and what’s, but I’m considering doing _something_ with these guides on the Apple TV as well.

I’ll talk more about the building of the guides concept in future blogposts.