Update:

If you rely on AutoWiFi please do not update to OS 4.1, you run the high risk of AutoWiFi no longer working. Apple has confirmed the issue and is investigating it internally. More updates will follow once I have more information.

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Preface

Theres currently an interesting discussion about App Store experiences in the cocos 2d forum, so I thought I’d share my experiences too.

Shortly before Christmas 2008 I published AutoWiFi in the App Store. Quick blurb: AutoWiFi is an auto-login tool for WiFi hotspots employing captive portals (WiFi networks which redirect you to a web site where you have to log in to actually use the hotspot) frequently used at cafes, schools, universities, hospitals, etc.

Submitted for review...

I programmed AutoWiFi in my free time because I was annoyed with having to type in my username (25 characters!) and password at the Vienna University of Technology every time I wanted to use the WiFi network. So it’s a utility I created for myself. But once it was done I thought, why not, publish it on the App Store for 1.99 US Dollars and see what happens… My goal was: Sell one copy of AutoWiFi to a complete stranger!

The Beginning

24 hours after I published AutoWiFi I checked in to iTunes Connect to see if I had sold a copy. To my amazement I had sold over 90 copies world wide! In just one day I had made back the money I had spent on joining the development program and reached my goal of selling 1 copy!

AutoWiFi climbing its way up the App Store

Things went very well in the next days: by pure luck my app was one of the very last to be reviewed before Christmas, so during I was at the very top of the new utilities page, allowing me to sell between 200 and 400 copies in the next 5 days. During the first month I sold around 4000 copies of my app; an amazing number if you remember that my goal was to sell just 1 copy! After Christmas sales started dropping, they went from 200 per day, to 100 per day, and then started level pegging in the 50+ range. AutoWiFi is 2 US Dollars, which, after Apple takes its share of 30% equates to roughly 1 Euro I get per sale. So in the first month I made roughly 4000 Euro.

Business as Usual

After the first two months sales dropped to around 50 per day. Whenever I released an update, sales would jump back up to 200-300 for a day or two, and then quickly start dropping down again. Releasing updates used to be a viable method to increase sales, however Apple changed the App Store layout a few months ago, and updates no longer count as “New Releases”, hence old apps are no longer bounced to the top of the pile when they release an update, and updates have little effect on sales numbers.

After being in the App Store for 3 months I decided going multilingual and added French and German to AutoWiFi. Since then sales in countries using these languages has increased by around 10%. It’s pretty easy to do if you’re not using pictures containing text and worth it if you have multilingual friends.

Now

In the last 3-4 months (so 10 months after I published) sales have dropped down to around 20 (so 20 Euro) per day. Here are todays exact figures (and today is representative for the last months):

1 year and 2 months later I have sold over 12000 copies of AutoWiFi, a figure I’m very happy with, especially considering the details below. I can no longer live off the income of AutoWiFi alone (around 10-25 Euros a day, between 250 and 600 euro a month, but the money I make is a nice bonus at the end of the month. AutoWiFi has made roughly 12000 Euro in 14 months, a good amount of money for the time invested, and especially considering I initially programmed it for my own use.

Website Reviews

AutoWiFi has never been reviewed by any website. I sent out promo codes to all sites I knew and read myself at the time (ModMyI, 148apps, iphone-atlas, ipodtouchfans, etc, etc, etc). Some of them put the apps into give aways (a good idea I think) but to this date no site has reviewed AutoWiFi. These sites receive huge amounts of apps for review, and so getting a mundane utility app reviewed (which uses iPhone’s standard UI because I want it to be functional and load quickly) when the reviewers are receiving great games and fun multimedia apps to review strikes me as nearly impossible. I do get the occasional blog mention tough, and when I do sales numbers do jump then (A blog in Russia mentioned AutoWiFI, sales numbers went up from 90 to 180 for the next 4-5 days. A blog in Italy did the same, as did France). Google is your friend here, set it to 24 hours and search for your app name to find out why your sales numbers are jumping.

The upside of this is: through pure word of mouth I have managed to sell thousands of copies of my app, something worth considering when your app is not getting the attention you would like it to have.

‘Lite’ Versions

To allow users to be able to try before they buy I released AutoWiFi Lite, hoping to improve customer satisfaction and improving sales numbers. What I learned was AutoWiFi Lite did improve customer satisfaction levels (people no longer bought AutoWiFi by mistake thinking it was some WiFi stumbler or similar). It however had little or no impact on sales numbers, my guess is that while a few more people did buy it due to being able to try it out, I also lost customers due to people trying it out and realizing its not what they were looking for. Still I prefer people buying my app because they really want it, and not by mistake. AutoWiFi Lite has 10000s of downloads per month just to give you a comparison with actual sales.

Advertising

I tried advertising with Google. I created ads and submitted them for approval with Google, only to get a message back saying im not allowed to use the words “Apple” “iPod” or “iPhone” in my advert. Seriously? I’ve created an App for the iPhone, how do I create a TEXT advert for an iPhone app without using the word iPhone? I don’t want non iPhone OS users clicking the link as that will cost me money. Hence I canceled my adsense account.

I put up a few ads on Facebook (hey guess what, I’m allowed to use the word iPhone there!). I set the budget to 2 US Dollars per day and had thousands of impressions per day. Unfortunately 8 clicks on an ad would consume those 2 Dollars. So that didn’t help sales numbers either.

I have stopped advertising.

Disasters

Apple announces WiFi auto login (courtesy of engadget)

Don’t quit your day job! Never forget that Apple has full control over the devices and the App Store. Back in March 2009 Apple released iPhone OS 3.0 which introduced their own mini AutoWiFi (which frequently doesn’t work as it should) and which broke AutoWiFi. I won’t go into the details but you can read them here. During the months I worked with Apple to get AutoWiFi to work again sales numbers dropped to 1-10 sales per day, and my customers were leaving 1 star reviews because AutoWiFi no longer worked for them. I was lucky that I managed to sort things out with Apple and am back in business, but many others (e.g. here, and here) have not been so lucky and have found themselves suddenly income-less. Always consider this when planning your future.

Piracy

There are pirated versions of AutoWiFi available on the internet. Thousands of copies have been downloaded illegally (many of the illegal sites have download number trackers). So here are my thoughts on this. When I found the first pirated copy of AutoWiFi on the net I was proud! I’ve actually programmed something that a pirate considered worth purchasing and cracking! Does that mean I support piracy? No. I’m a developer, I mainly live off what I earn through sales. But have you seen the anti piracy adverts lately? Have you read what companies such as Ubisoft are doing to their legitimate customers to fight piracy? Lets not blow our socks off here. If someone pirates a copy of AutoWiFi then he’s not taking it away from someone else. Its information. It can be replicated for free. So comparing it with hard crime is crazy if you ask me. No-one has stolen thousands of dollars from me, what they have taken is the potential of me making that money, but thats still not the same as physically stealing money off me.

AutoWiFi is 2 bucks. The price of a flavored coffee. If someone _really_ can’t afford that then he needs more help then I do anyway. I’m not for piracy but its something that we developers have to live with and not go crazy about.

Summary

Without the App Store I don’t think I would have been able to publish an app that sells, as such I am glad there is an App Store. It has its faults, but it has its opportunities. Things to take along that I have experienced:

• Your app will sell the most copies in its first week. Once that is over your numbers will drop significantly (in AutoWiFi’s case from 200-400 sales (200-400 Euro) per day to 10-40 sales (10-40 Euro) a day).
• You will have sales jumps whenever you manage to get yourself mentioned in blogs (doubling or even quadrupling your sales for a week)
• Adding languages to your app is a good idea, but don’t expect miracles from this.
• Getting your app reviewed by a website, especially if its a non multimedia/game app, is extremely difficult
• Advertising didn’t work for me. A higher budget may help, I would’t know.
• A good app can generate sales without reviews or advertising – just by pure word of mouth
• Be nice to Apple, they are in full control of your app, they can pull its plug at any time.
• If you want to improve your chances of having your app featured in the app store: make it look great. The people who decide which apps to feature are very into aesthetics (I learned that during Apples Tech Talk World Tour)
• Lowering the price of your app will increase your sales for 3 or 4 days, but in my case always by the same amount of the actual loss due to the lower price. Its only worth it for very short periods.

I hope this will give some aspiring developers an insight to life in the App Store. Questions, comments and feedback are welcome. Good luck with your apps!

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Update 2: a total of 143,872 US Dollars have been donated. A great success!

Update: 119 US Dollars have been donated to Doctors without Borders for their efforts in Haiti! Thank you for purchasing to allow me to donate this amount!

Want to help Haiti by purchasing cool apps for your iPhone? Over 100 developers have joined together and will be donating all sales proceedings of their apps on the 20 January to a Haiti related charity of their choice.

Subzero.eu software has joined the effort: All proceedings of AutoWiFi on the 20th of January will be donated to Doctors without Borders, whose staff is currently on site in Haiti.

Great apps for you, and donations for Haiti. Visit http://www.indierelief.com for a full list of participating apps.

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• Support for networks with percent signs in usernames or passwords (e.g. Queens University)
• Improved support for networks with challenge data (e.g. neuf.fr)

I wish to thank Mario Pugliese and Phil Baxter for reporting these issues and working with me to test the fixes.

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Details:

• Cartoon asian style (thick outlines, few colors, asian ninja theme, draw style as in dexter’s lab or the iPhone game Sooziz, theme style as in Avatar – The Last Airbender).
• Typical sprite sizes: 40×40 and 80×80 pixels
• Sprites need to scale down well (the sprites need to look good when zoomed out, will not be zoomed into though)
• Sprites need to be drawn from the top as well as the front top (as in command and conquer for example)
• A good example of a similar game (art stylewize) is Fieldrunners for the iPhone

Scope:

• 4 types of 8 direction enemies drawn from front-top and top.
• 5 types of enemies which only move from right to left drawn from front-top and top.
• 2  8 direction cannons
• a few stationary objects (e.g. an asian castle, castle walls, 2 magic cannons which don’t rotate)
• around 6 maps, 1024×666 pixels, generally grassland with a river in the middle
• around 7 pages of a comic which tells the in game story between the levels
• UI elements (buttons, labels, in game and out of game menus, etc)
• 3 Banners for promotion purposes

Style:

• The style we’d prefer would be similar to the style found here: http://www.fullyillustrated.com/portfolio/design/

Here is a current screen shot of the game using dummy graphics. Note that the texture memory is already low so only minimal animation is possible for a few objects.

We are looking for someone who can work on this project with us. You should be able to work independently and reliably, has a good eye for aesthetics and is able to create a unified style throughout the game. You will also be able to use any art you create in your portfolio.

If you’re interested please contact , include information about yourself, a link to your portfolio, an estimate on time required based on the scope above as well as your salary expectations. Please also state if you own a Mac and iPod Touch or iPhone. If you need more details please contact us too.

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AutoWiFi Lite, submitted to Apple at the same time as AutoWiFi is still in review, I’m hoping it will be released soon, until then, don’t use AutoWiFi Lite to test if AutoWiFi works.

It was a tough ride, but we’re back in business.

*update*

AutoWiFi Lite 1.0.127 has been released too.

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Notice those thin white and black lines? It should actually look like this:

There currently is no real solution. The common work around is to copy the correct color(s) to the borders of the sprite. mkatlas.pl, a script by Matthias Hoechsmann that comes with cocos2d, includes a simple algorithm which takes the corner color of the sprite and copies it into the borders. This solution however does not work if the edge of your sprite has varying colors.

To improve the work around I have modified the script to copy the edge of the sprite into the borders (when mkatlas is run with -p 2). This way the correct colors are now next to the actual sprite and the artefacts disappear.

The improved script is available here (scroll down for the newest version).

Thank you to Ricardo Quesada for correctly diagnosing the problem and Matthias Hoechsmann for the original mkatlas.pl script.

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Status:

OS 2: AutoWiFi works

OS 3.0 iPod Touch: You need Boingo WiFi (free) installed and AutoWiFi will work

OS 3.0 iPhone: You need Boingo WiFi (free) installed and you need to launch for a second or two before launching AutoWiFi, then AutoWiFi works.

OS 3.1: Once this is released, and once Apple approves the 1.0.127 AutoWiFi update, AutoWiFi works.

A little history lesson:

With OS 3.0 Apple introduced its own Auto-WiFi login system. It shows you the login screen from any application and tries to log in with your data. If it works it saves your data and will use the same login data next time. If it fails or you press the cancel button it disables your WiFi connection and enables your 3G connection so that you aren’t left in a state where your internet connection isn’t working. On paper, a great solution.

In practice however things look differently. Their system has problems, and fails to work with a great number of hotspots, I’ve tested it with 10 hotspots here in Vienna, and it failed on 8 of them. And as their system disables the WiFi connection if it fails you cannot log in manually via Safari, locking you out of said hotspot, forcing you to use 3G (not sure what happens on an iPod Touch).

During the beta testing of OS 3, I warned Apple via bug reports and emails about this problem but got no answer (until I opened a DTS ticket). Apparently so did the other companies that provide WiFi login solutions.  Apple’s solution was to disable their own system when it sees a WiFi login program installed. So, if you have Boingo WiFi installed (there are other programs too), Apple’s login system is off and you can manually connect again, or  use AutoWiFi.

Unfortunately by the time Apple had informed me about this solution (I had to open a DTS ticket and wait a while as the devs were all busy heading off to the WWDC) the gold master of OS 3.0 was out and AutoWiFi was not on the list of programs where Apple’s system is disabled. I guess having over 10000 customers isn’t enough for Apple to inform you of such things on time. At the same time though I must say that once you have contact with the DTS team, they are very competent and will find you code level solutions.

The state of things today:

Two things need to be done for AutoWiFi to work with OS 3: 1) AutoWiFi needs a slight modification to force the enabling of WiFi on phones. 2) AutoWiFI needs to be on the list of Apps where Apple’s built in system is disabled.

Issue 1) causes the problem where you need to launch Boingo or Safari first before launching AutoWiFi (iPhone issue only)  and is present in the current AutoWiFi (1.0.124) version in the App Store. Version 1.0.127 solves this issue. Version 1.0.127 was submitted to Apple end of July and is still in review (thats over a month now).

Issue 2) has been solved by Apple. Once Apple releases OS 3.1 you no longer need the Boingo WiFi app on your device for AutoWiFi to work. Yeay!

The future:

There is a plan for AutoWiFi in the long run, but I can’t discuss this at the moment. Once I can disclose more you’ll probably read it here first .

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I also want to use this blog to link useful things I find and use for programing Apps, and document other things to do with the App Store which may aid other developers in similar situations.

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