iMessage, iMessage everywhere — Digital Products Trends in Europe — September 2016

Digital products counted globally have their inflows and outflows. What are the powers that influence their living cycles? September this year is a period that can give us an answer. Probably not the only one but certainly sure.

Results

In September we encountered few surprises in our trend charts describing ‘Made in Europe’ collection on PH website. Total number of products hunted this month in Europe reached 167 (with 171 in August). All them you can see at September collection but here we are going to summarize it. So you can find out with us some interesting shifts between channels and categories.

If you want to check the previous month’s trends you can read our article about August digital trends.

Now have a look at charts and read, what do PH makers think about it.

The boost of messaging apps had one good reason — opening iMessage platform by Apple with iOS 10 upgrade. And because beta version of new iOS was available before, some developers’ products were ready to start together with iOS 10 first run in September, 13th. Makers like Raul Riera (Emoji Stickers) did their best not to sink in the flood of iMessage apps and stickers:

Given that I knew there were going to be 1000s of apps and most of them stickers, I wanted to provide unlimited value to the end users. Most of the stickers available are just a subset of images. With Emoji Stickers you can create your very own stickers and literally have an unlimited arsenal at your disposal.

We observed decreasing number of total mobile apps hunted — from 57 in August to 45 in September. But this drop concerns more iOS than Android apps.

iMessage platform new makers had a really busy time! Castro for iMessage’s maker, Oisin Prendiville, reminds September the 13th:

We were eager to get the app ready for the launch day of the new Store because that was logically going to be the day that iMessage apps would get the most attention.

Opening this platform resulted with the mass of sticker packs and apps. In Pelle Beckman’s opinion (DevStickers’s maker) both had to be unique to gain the attention.

Your app or stickers pack needs focus.

In case of DevStickers Pelle has focused on developers but did they focus on the sticker pack enough? We’ll see as stickers got really crowded in September.

What about other iMessage purposes? First apps that appeared on iTunes derived from already active traditional products. One example could be Instant Translate for iMessage where the new platform became kind of a feature to Instant Translate app. It’s just one tap closer when you chat with the foreigner and don’t have to copy and paste the text from any translator.

The other example is mentioned Castro for iMessage where we also see the usability as a core value of iMessage product. If you want a podcast recommendation from your friend it was never easier, as we can read on blog:

The Castro iMessage App makes sharing episodes even more convenient.
- Easily share recently played episodes with your friends and family
- When you receive a recommendation from someone else add it to your queue without leaving the Messages app.

But how did free iMessage app support Castro regular sales? Oisin Prendiville explains why time was so important:

I don’t think it’s a huge driving force in new sales directly, but it helped generate a lot of press coverage at the time and we were featured prominently in the App Store in many countries which helps a lot.

Also, it’s nice to have an integration like this that our competition don’t have. It helps set Castro apart and strengthens the History section, which was already a unique feature of Castro.

Desktop channels in total kept their positions. New products covered more operating systems because many of them were browser extensions (Chrome and/or Firefox). Did they notice any changes in installs after Product Hunt mention? We asked the maker of Ultidash, Matteo Bulgarelli:

The day we were hunted on PH the number of downloads reached the highest peak we’ve ever witnessed for our extension Ultidash (about 3x the current daily number of downloads). Besides downloads, what really mattered was the visibility we gained and the contacts we collected. If I counted the number of indirect downloads too, the ones generated from the connections reached from PH, I would easily deal with numbers in the thousands.

In September there were no significant changes in B2C categories’ share in comparison to August. We just noted a decrease in E-commerce and more interest in Communication. That last category is the one where we put almost all new iMessage apps with many sticker packs.

We asked Simon Schmid, maker of Kaomotion, what should the makers be aware of when launching such a product? What were the surprises on new iMessage platform?

When I launched it was relatively unclear what would work and what wouldn’t. Today you can see the whole sticker store and what kind of stickers are sought after. I would specifically go after any of these categories that get featured. Also, if you go for a paid app, it’s very important to show the value in screenhots and potentially a video.

Also in B2B categories there was no revolution. Just HR apps went down and some general productivity tools (not only for developers and designers) appeared on the market.

So we asked the makers what is the future of productivity tools available for B2B sector on the market? Istvan Lam, co-founder and CEO of Tresorit, believes there are two challenges that need to be tackled to make productivity tools popular for businesses.

These tools need to fit the workflow of people who are working within already existing systems, so they need to offer various integration possibilities with business applications (like emails, CRMs etc). Another primary challenge is security. Developers should find ways to make user authentication and data management secure, in order to make these applications widespread and not just part of the “shadow IT” that people use unofficially.

The same opinion we got from Benjamin Kowalski, Yotilo’s maker. He finds security and accessibility fields still not well developed. And what are the strenghts of his app on the time tracking apps market today?

It’s free and you don’t need to sign up. Setting up is always bad when you work in the fast paced agency business.

Benjamin took a positive and fruitful lesson with his first launch on Product Hunt. Read his 14 learnings from Yotilo submission.

But is it also worth to submit an upgrade?

Upgrade — to be or not to be (hunted again)?

Some products submitted on PH are not really fresh startups. Sometimes they are just an upgrade of an existing app. What are pros and cons of such a hunting?

Doris Lane from FlexiHub has not sent a new 3.0 version to PH. She explains:

We didn’t get any reasonable feedback from the first try. And in version 3.0 there weren’t any revolutional features compairing to the previous. We added the invite feature and now you can send invitations to access your devices.

But Istvan Lam from Tresorit has a different story to tell:

So far we’ve only submitted a “new product” via contacting the Product Hunt team (we had a previous listing of Tresorit submitted by a hunter, not by us), which was the update of our app, Tresorit 3.0. We think it was the best thing to do as Tresorit 3.0 has been an overall redesign of our user interface.

What is your opinion about submission of an upgrade? What do you think about our September report? Tell us about it and we won’t leave you without reply!

Do you need team for web or mobile app development? We’re happy to help.