Hey this is the Daily Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps!
Today let's ask the question: Should you remove old apps from the App Store?
Okay, so every so often I contemplate deleting some of my old apps and I
don't, because I don't see the purpose of it. So basically, this is
what happens - I'll get an email from somebody, or a comment or something
saying, with an enhancement saying, "hey this app is great" or "this
app is rubbish, you should do this to change it". And I'll get change
requests or sometimes it might be a minor little bug that's just not
that bad, but it's just sort of something that annoys people, and
I'll get this through and I'll look at it I'll think, "this is with an app that
we did that doesn't get a lot of downloads. It doesn't make any revenue,
and we did it ages ago, and I think maybe I should just
remove it. Maybe rather than make this change maybe I should just
remove it from the App Store, and I think then I could just
focus on the big apps. But the thing is with these little apps, I still
have hope that one day they'll take off, and I have had that happen in the past. Or
I had an app that just was getting two or three downloads a day and
then after a year of it being on the App Store, it just took off. It was Korean -
it was Korean flash quiz, I think.Or no it was Korean bubble bath.
And it just took off all of a sudden. I say it took off,
it got like 40 downloads a day, which is not really taking
off. So I think about removing some of the old apps, and the reason I keep
them is because I don't really see the reason to remove them. And it's
different with iOS. On iOS when a new version of iOS comes out and nothing
works, you know, like I had to update to iOS 11 - some of those I haven't updated
yet. They just weren't worth my time. If it's gonna take me
three hours to fix something or to add a new enhancement, and the app is
making me a dollar a month or you ten cents a month or something like
that, it's not really worth the time to put into it. But it's still
out there, so yeah. And I think, "Should I remove it? Should I just remove
it because it doesn't perform very well?" But the thing is, it doesn't
really cost me anything to keep them out there, and more importantly, I
invested a lot of money in it to begin with so I
don't really want to remove it. Except for on iOS.
You know, when iOS - when Apple - starts rejecting your apps
because you have too many of them, you know for whatever reason, they just start
getting the way they've been, then yeah maybe we can move a bunch of
them from iOS. It's one of the things that I was thinking about.
I was thinking "I think one of the reasons why it's easier to rank on iOS and to do ASO
on iOS, is because apps can actually die on iOS, on the Apple App
Store. So, it's either gonna be like, the platform keeps, you know - lots of apps
were not compliant with iOS 11 - I mean a lot of mine weren't. So I had to go
through and update them. I know a lot of clients come to me because their
apps are no longer compliant with iOS 11 and they want me to update them
because they had another developer do them years ago and
the other developer doesn't want to work on them anymore. I get that a lot.
But more importantly, a lot of app developers who try and aren't committed
to making it work, you know, when their Apple App Store - their Apple Developer
account expires - they don't renew, so all of their apps just drop off the App
Store. I have a client who we did an app for, it was a
company, and they just kind of got tired of the app. It was getting
a few downloads, but not very many. But it was a really
good app, it was some of our best work. But they just sort of let their
Apple Developer account expire so all their apps are missing off the
App Store. And you see this you see this a lot. So Apple is, you know...
One of the problems I think with Google Play is that it's gonna get to the point
where there's so many old, ancient apps out there, that nothing dies.
Everything just stays there. It's like old websites.
It's gonna get harder and harder to rank for keywords when you've got so much
junk out there, and nothing actually goes away. But I'm just as guilty about
this myself, I never remove anything. So my question to you - Is there a benefit to
removing apps from the App Store? Do you see any benefit to it?
Because for me, once it's done - and plus I've invested the money in it
and there's still the hope that it might take off - once it's done, I see no reason
to remove them. So anyway, that's it for today, I'll talk to you guys tomorrow!
you