Monster! is Ready for Sale

So my first update has been approved. I wrote about it in the previous post and now Version 1.1 called Monster! What Color is It? Take a Quiz! is ready for sale on the App Store. It’s exactly two months since the 1.0 was released on June 14. There are several points I’d like to emphasize:

1) The review took more than a day; 26 hours to be precise. I don’t know if it’s a common practice for app updates, because my changes to the app were minor and the Ver. 1.0 was reviewed in 4 hours (Greek Letter and Alphabet took just an hour of the reviewer’s time). Despite of a long review process, the game was approved without questions. OK, I’ll keep in mind that one should be patient.

2) Now I have another statistical parameter to follow in the iTunesConnect: a number of updates. Can it show the number of users who care? Over recent days, Monster! has been downloaded at a rate of 3-8 units a day. A total number of downloads of the Version 1.0 for two months is 527 but I suspect most of them to be bots.

3) The size of the app has increased significantly from 8.7 Mb to 19.1 Mb. It’s unexpected and I don’t have a good explanation yet. Perhaps, it has something to do with new background pictures. Generally, the larger app, the more reluctant people are to download it. So it’s in my interests to keep the size of apps reasonable.

4) There is no problem to change the name and the main icon of the game. The new name was chosen to put a strong word Monster! in the first place instead of a vague What. The name became long (but still short of 255 allowable characters) to include more searchable words. Version 1.0 contained the word quiz a keyword, and it’s no longer necessary. I’m proud of choosing new keywords in each language with the help of the sensortower.com website. I’ll look closely for the searching dynamics for each word I included. The first version had very poor choice of keywords that may explain its lower downloads numbers than those of Greek Letters.

5) Now I’m not afraid to use such long names for my future games. Today I’m going to add fruHarvest to iTunesConnect and it will be very likely my next app. Finally, all the time spend on drawing will bring its fruits.

6) The change of the name pushed me thinking about the URLs I write down in this blog. I used to copy what iTunes suggested me, for example, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/what-color-is-this-monster/id655223910?ls=1&mt=8. But then I realized that the inclusion of the app’s name is a silly idea since the name is about to be changed. And I shortened all refs to https://itunes.apple.com/app/id655223910 (https://itunes.apple.com/ru/app/id655223910 for a Russian version). However, the old URL seems working fine (at least now).

The Fate gives Monster! Quiz the second chance to conquer users’ hearts.