Hey, this is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps! Now today, I want
to ask you, guys, should you change your app icon for the holidays?
Alright, so on my last video, I talked a little bit about an event I went to last week.
called Decode London which was thrown out by AppAnnie.
And on last Friday, I made a video just saying how I went there and
I was kind of disappointed I didn't see any - I didn't meet any indie app
developers. I mean, there may have been some there but I didn't meet any.
But I didn't talk about any of the stuff that the speakers talked about. Yeah,
a lot of the stuff didn't really apply. I didn't really find it very
earth-shattering. Although, there was a good information there. There was one
thing really interesting said by one of the speakers. So, one of the speakers, a
part of a panel actually, was Mark Sorrel from Rovio. He's a Head of Studio at
Rovio. So, you know, they were - it was him and and somebody from like a
financial application, I think it was. And they were talking about different ways
of getting people to re-engage with the application and some of the things that
they do. First of all, what I heard Rovio, I kept thinking with
the Apple 4.3 guidelines if they're gonna be like penalized for Angry Birds
space and all these - of different Angry Bird versions. If they're gonna have to
have a container app, but that's beside the point. I'll be watching. I'll be
watching because I don't think the big companies are gonna be affected as much
as us, smaller companies by the change in Apple guidelines recently. Ayway, one
of the things he said, well, I mean it's not so obvious really. He said, you know,
one thing we do know about our users is that if they're not in our application
then they're not spending money on our products or they're not spending
money, something to that. I'm paraphrasing, which is an obvious thing to say
actually. So, when I when I talk about apps
I'm usually concerned with acquisition. I'm used of concern with getting people
in and getting new users because my - like I've talked about before, my user
retention is actually pretty low. People will use it a few times, usually
like when they're on new and when they're going through and cleaning out their
phone and trying to claim some disk space, what my apps are usually some of
the first to go, I think. it's just, you know, I don't
work really hard at re-engaging them. And there's - we talked to before
about like different ways of re-engaging clients like or re-engage in your
users once they get that install. Like you could do stuff, like push
notifications and things like that. But he was talking about how they
do these this seasonal things. He said something funny. He said, "You may
notice that your iPhone screen looks all orange now because the Halloween and
everybody's updating their icons to for Halloween themes." And he said, they're
doing the same thing to, because you want users to be able to look at their
phone to see if your app has been updated, that "Oh, there's a new icon!" It
catches your eye and they remember it's thee. And they go back into it, which was
really - which is something that I was thinking about. Coz the first thing -
when I hear that kind of stuff, I think, is that something I could do? Is that
something that would work? And to be honest with you, I've never really done
any seasonal icons. Like we've done a little bit of seasonal stuff for other
things like the YouTube channel. We haven't done anything for Halloween.
You know, for our Facebook page and all that kinds of stuff, but
never with the app. Because you know, it just requires putting a new
version out there, but it might be something that's worthwhile, especially
with Halloween coming up a week away. It's probably too late for Halloween but,
you know, you got Christmas and all this kind of stuff. So, my question to you, guys,
and this is - I don't really have much to say on this, you know, I was
almost not going to talk about it because I've never done this. But my
question to you, guys, is have you done anything with seasonal icons? Have you
released seasonal updates to your applications to try to get new users? Has
it worked or measuring it, have you been able to find that pays off in any way?
And I really just want to see whether or not asking you, guys, you know,
the community - the app community, if you're watching this - have you done
something like this? Has it worked? Is it something to consider or is it something
that's a lot of time and not a lot of benefit? So, anyway, that's it for today.
I'm going to talk to you, guys, tomorrow!