As an end-user, when you create your iTunes account, you select your country and it is natural to see app descriptions and all the user reviews only in your language. So, it is a global market, treated locally – and you get used to it. Every country’s App Store has a profound separation between each other. All the rankings and featured lists are calculated based on the amount of downloads of that particular country – it does make sense, doesn’t it?
We launched our app in all countries’ App Stores and, as new developers, we didn’t know what to expect from a global perspective. Personally, I imagined the level of success would be shared across several countries, at least on a certain magnitude. To my surprise, it is perfectly possible for your App to have thousands of downloads in a few countries – and remain totally unknown (I mean, almost “zero” downloads) in other important countries as well. France was one of those countries with very few downloads – iMimic totally off the charts.
Past Sunday, April 3rd, we monitored an unexpected peak of thousands of downloads – from France! We didn’t start any press releases or promotions; we also had no French friends in our social networks that we were aware of. I suspected of a French boy that I had shown iMimic on my iPad during a flight from Paris to Madrid a few days before – but that sounded too incredible for us. It remained a mystery during this week.
Fernando accidentally found the following blog post: “Dossier applications iPhone : votre iPhone devient nostalgeek avec ces plus de 10 applications ‘vintage’ !” (Your iPhone nostalgic with more than 10 vintage applications). iMimic was among the selected apps.
(later we will translate to english)
iMimic – Vous vous souvenez d’un jeu rond, coloré durant lequel votre mémoire et votre attention étaient parfois mises à rude épreuve. C’est sûrement le célèbre Simon qui réapparaît après de nombreuses années gravé dans votre mémoire.Une musique monte, les couleurs se succèdent et votre objectif est simple :mémoriser. Mémoriser cette suite de couleurs , dans l’ordre au risque de devoir subir un affreux buzz, désagréable et humiliant.
Simon est disponible dans de nombreuses applications mais j’ai choisi celle-ci premièrement parce qu’elle est gratuite et deuxièmement parce que c’est celle qui ressemble le plus au jeu original.
We don’t know how the writer got to know about our game – but he is right: iMimic is just one of several similar games. We stood from the crowd by having the most realistic, faithfull gameplay and polished interface of them all. Unfortunately, having a good app is not enough to automatically appear in the charts. The App Store is now a very crowded place and users rarely seek for interesting apps in the lists after the first page. Good reviews in the specialized media are essential. Specialized local media even more.
iMimic almost immediately jumped to the #1 Free iPhone Educational Game on France and remained in that place during 4 days. Also, we reached the 78th position in the French general Free apps chart. Notice iMimic is all in English – we don’t know how better it could have been if we had translated versions.
To wrap up, there are several handy tools and services for global analytics and app tracking, with per country details, in a single dashboard – something even more important if you have more than one App to take care of – but this is a theme for a future post.