Hey, this is the Daily Overpass.
My name is Eric and I make apps.
Now today, let's talk about reasons why you would not want to release your app to all
countries.
Okay, so today I want to answer a question that came on yesterday's video from Gavin.
Gavin said, "Hi Eric, I've been watching many of your videos, I'm glad that you keep up
the channel.
I find it hard to find info from people who actually have apps on the store."
(Eric) "Thanks, Gavin.
I appreciate you watching."
(continue reading) "I currently have my first app on Google Store in alpha testing at the
moment, and I was wondering if you had any advice about which countries I should release
it to.
Is there a reason I should be worried about releasing to all countries?"
Now, this is a really good question because I haven't really thought very much about this before,
right?
For me, it's always been just released to all of them.
I've never seen a downside to releasing to all countries.
Every single one of my apps, it just - when I go in - when I go into the pricing and availability
in the iTunes App store or if I go to pricing and distribution in Google Play, I just select
all countries.
I've never seen a downside to doing that.
In fact, even like my clients, like I have one of my clients who does like trade show
events, stuffs like that, so, at different places around the UK, it's never - there's
never any reason that anybody outside the UK would need to be able to see this app,
but I've never seen a reason NOT to be able to make it available to them.
Somebody might be traveling in or whatever, you know, there's no reason - I've never seen
a reason that somebody should send them a link to the app and then they go to the app
and not be able to download it, right?
So, that is my - that's always the way I thought about it.
I suppose there are like - there are a few different reasons why you would not want to
release to all countries.
And these are the reasons that - these are the only reasons I could think of.
First, and this is very unlikely, is if your app might offend like a certain nation.
Like, let's say your app is kinda racist or something.
I know this is reaching, I know this is hardly likely, but let's say your app was anti-Canadian,
or anti-whatever.
And then you don't want them to see it and maybe you might don't wanna make it available
to their countries.
I know that's hardly the case.
I don't think there's a lot of people putting racist apps out there, right?
And I don't - it's not like Google or Apple would allow them anyway.
The second reason would be if you really rely on in-app purchases, so like the app doesn't
make any sense if you don't - if it doesn't allow in-app purchases, then, in that case,
you might want not to release it to countries that don't have in-app purchases available.
This is more for Google Play than the App Store because I don't think the App Store
has any markets, least none of the App markets they have available are don't allow - they
all allow in-app purchases.
On google Play, some of them do, some of them don't.
And the third reason would be more for, you know, just limiting the distribution.
Like if you have an Uber-like app, where you rely on user-contributed content and you might,
base on location, you might want to reduce the scope of that application to begin with.
So, to give you an example, like when you think about Facebook, I mean, I'm sure you,
guys, if you've seen the Social Network movie, or if you're like me, you've read books about
how Facebook got started, and they started by not making this platform available for
everybody in the world.
But they did it based on the university by university and so, it would grow a little
bit here, and they would move it to another one.
And they would focus on one market at a time.
And I talked about this before about the Uber-model, a lot of the clients that we - that we talked
to, that we pitched to, a lot of their app ideas are like uber-related.
So uber for this, uber for that.
And one of the one who made a joke about before was uber for babysitters.
So, let' say that I have - we're making an app for Uber for babysitters and then we have worldwide
distribution.
It would be very difficult if say, like I'm here in England, and I download the application,
I'm looking for a babysitter for my kids and the nearest one is in Brazil.
Or South America or some places that are miles and miles away.
And in that situation is better to focus on small locations, but even then, that's more
of a marketing thing.
If you were to market a certain location at at a time, because as we've all learned the
hard way, just releasing an app on the app store doesn't mean people are gonna use it.
You have to go out there and make them aware of it.
Those are just some of the reasons.
But to answer your question "Is there any reason you should not release to all markets?",
I don't know of any reason.
This is one of the things I thought I would ask you, guys, all about.
because from ASO point of view, I've never heard anybody talk about limiting your distribution
to certain countries or to certain territories.
I have one client who - he makes his app only available to the US and everytime there's something
I need to look into, it's kinda - it's kind of a pain because I can't even get to the
application.
I have - some of my Ear Spy copycats will not release to the UK so I can't find them
and stuff like that.
And it's really - after a while I started realizing they're doiing that because my team in the Philippines
finds these things and it's not available in the UK, which is kinda sneaky but I think
that's pretty rare.
So, my question to everybody else out there is can you think of any reason not to release
in all countries?
What do you do?
Do just release to all countries like I do?
Or are you more selective and is there's a reason you're more selective?
Anyway, great!
That's a fantastic question! I'm really interested to what everybody says about that one.
That's it for today!
I will take to you, guys, again tomorrow!