Feature in the new App Store: Bobaka Studio experience
On October 1, the interactive book for children “Green Riding Hood” by the Russian-Belarusian Bobaka team became the “App of the Day” on iOS 11. We tell you how it happened and what results it led to.
The feed is the main new feature in the App Store
One of the key differences between iOS 11 and previous versions of the system was the new App Store. The store has added an application feed, updated every day, and a significantly modified showcase.
The feed, which Apple calls the “Today” tab, is updated regularly. Every day a new selection appears in it – four cards: three applications and one collection of programs. The selections for the previous days go down. Cards that appeared more than 6 days ago disappear from the feed.
Feed in the new App Store
Obviously, the appearance of such a feature was dictated by the desire to strengthen the value of Apple’s promotional support, which, according to some teams, in 2017 ceased to play such a huge role as before.
Another goal of the innovation could be Apple’s desire to reduce the impact of free tops used by advertising companies to promote products: in the new showcases, the charts are pushed almost to the very bottom.
Whatever tasks the platform holder actually pursues, there are two other issues facing game developers today: how to get into a new tab and whether it makes sense.
You can attract Apple’s attention by achieving success
For answers to these questions, we turned to a representative of Bobaka, whose children’s app Green Riding Hood became one of the apps of the day in the feed last Sunday.
Green Riding Hood in the upper right corner
This is not the first feature for the “Green Hat”.
Previously, Green Riding Hood became the “App of the Year” (in the Russian App Store) and the “Free App of the Week” (on the App Store in the world).
The studio’s previous projects also received Apple support. But this does not mean that it has always been so.
“The editors of the store paid attention to us only after we were able to independently (with the help of the brand’s website, social networks and YouTube) to drive our “Game Library with Barboskins” to the first place in downloads in the App Store in Russia in 2014,” said Bobaka producer Alexander Nasonov.
But Alexander explains the big story of the Green Riding Hood feature not so much with the success of previous titles as with the quality of the project: “She’s cute, cool and it’s not difficult to fall in love with her. I think the editors of the App Store fell in love with her too.”
According to Alexander, the preparation of graphics for the new version of the App Store began long before the date of the feature itself. The main thing that has changed is the amount of content requested from developers. “We were a little scared of how much promo art had to be prepared. It used to be a single file, but now it’s a whole set of large templates “for all occasions”.”
Green Riding Hood
There were no guarantees that the application would receive promotion.
“But if you believe in your application,” Nasonov notes, “there is always an opportunity to send a request for promotional support through a publicly available official form. In the instructions to the form, Apple draws attention to the fact that it is better to do this in advance — 6-8 weeks before the release of your application or the release of a big update.”
So it was with the materials that the Bobaka team prepared for the “Cap”. After sending them to the editorial office, the company’s employees returned to their business. They found out together with the users that the project received a promo.
Alexander does not know how to explain the promo in the new tape. “For some reason, it turned out that the “Cap” became the first “Application of the day” among domestic games. But now, most likely, the rest of the products from our other major studios will go.”
The feature in the App Store also affected the performance of the game on Google Play
On the day of receiving the “App of the Day” feature, Green Riding Hood installations from the App Store increased 4 times. Apple’s attention to the interactive book was also reflected in downloads from Google Play. They also grew 4 times.
“On iOS, the daily installations of the “Cap” on October 1 amounted to 15 thousand,” Nasonov said.
“On iOS 10, the feature on the main iTunes (big banner) brought 50-70 thousand in one country,” said Andrey Drobitko, the founder of SketchAR, whose application yesterday, October 5, also received the “App of the Day” feature on the App Store in iOS 11. “With the new design and structure of the App Store, there is not much actual data yet,” Andrey answered the question about how many SketchAR users brought the new promo.
Plus, now it is necessary to make a discount on the fact that the penetration level of iOS 11 has not yet reached its maximum. According to Mixpanel, as of October 1, iOS 11 was only on 35% of Apple mobile devices in the world.
The main traffic of the “Caps” came from Germany, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the UAE. It was in these countries that the application received the largest number of users who visited the game page (Impressions) on the day of the promo.
It is unclear what the long-term effect of the promo will be. It will be time to sum up the first results after Sunday, when the application disappears from the output. But, according to Nasonov, the global promotion within the framework of the “App of the Week” campaign, which was held at the beginning of the year, was more effective for the company, because it covered the whole world, including one of the most desirable market for developers — the USA. Then it brought the company 1 million downloads within a few weeks.
