Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps. Now, this week I
wanna talk about "Why you should continually update your app".
Okay, so it's been a big week in terms of Apple. And apple, you know the iOS 10 came
out. We had a lot of trouble this week with uploading new builds because we
use Corona SDK framework and there were some issues with Corona SDK and some
changes that iTunes have done, but they fixed it and it's a nice thing about
using a good framework is they'll fix it right away. And so we have that
those issues, and also we had something where Apple has gone through and just
removed a bunch of my apps just like this morning. Literally just a few
hours ago. So if you have a look at my screen here, you see this is what I woke up to
this morning. So I had lots of emails from Apple, from the iTunes
store and I had the first one saying Arabic Bubble Bath is ready for
sale, so yeah it was an update we did. And then you know a bunch of more
the app does not comply with the app review guidelines and they're going to
go ahead and remove it. So you can see here, "Your app bababa..."
"Your app, Read Racer..." A bunch of other ones here, and these apps are
really really old, like to be honest with you, I forgot they were there and
when released these, It must have been 2013....early 2013,
right? and you can see here this is the early days when my whole plan was
release one for each language, so rather than use the localization
options within iTunes and Google Play and within the apps, I just
wanted to release one for each version. I always code base, it's all over the place
and all these app store entries, and they were getting approved
but it was just a nightmare. I mean some people have asked about that. Should I do
one for the Chinese market and one for this market and one for that market? So I said
No! just use the localization features within the app and what that does is
it allows you to have one version of the app. If somebody goes through and changes
the language on the phone like say the Chinese Mandarin, it will show up in
Chinese Mandarin as long as you have those strings within the app to
display or you know you might have different images and stuff like that, but
I've done videos on that. I've done a few on localization but you know in the
early days I was releasing one for each language which is again another downside
is that it really doesn't help with marketing in ASO cause you have like all
these different entities out there.
So like if somebody leaves a review on the Arabic version of the game,
that's not gonna help the English version or the Chinese version
or the other versions. So yeah that was it. So anyway, some of
these are really really old and I had no plans to go ahead and update them but
they did go ahead and remove them and sure enough when I went into the iTunes
Connect console here, you can see that all these red number ones, all
these ones here at the bottom of the list were moved up to the top because
they've been updated now. And so you can see here if I just go into one of these
Secret Agent Arabic and you can see what it says is on October 1st 2016, they
said we're going to go through and start removing outdated and... apps that are outdated
and no longer function as intended and it basically gives you the
reasons "We noticed that your app has not been updated in a significant amount of time."
which it hasn't.
I mean I haven't really done anything with it. However, the reason I want to
bring this up is... it's always a good practice to update your apps from time
to time, right? Even if you're not ... even if you don't have any changes put
in. It shows Apple and Google that you're actively maintaining the app.
With Apple and through iTunes, if you want to change keywords and try out
new keywords or new screenshots you have to release a new app anyway or a new
build. And let me just show you here my Google Play Console, you get this kind of thing
with Google Play as well. You see here Bubble Bath Typing Free,
yeah it's got the yellow triangle. Every so often, we end up with yellow triangles
all over the place because libraries have changed, you know Android updates
all the time. iOS updates all the time and they try to phase out the old
stuff that uses the old libraries and old code, and you know it
helps to go through and recompile every so often. Now I know some of you out
there, you might not be a developer yourself but you might have higher
developers and things like that, so releasing a new build every a few
months or at least once a year might not be easy for you or you might not
have any changes to make and what I like to say is....
it's a good idea to learn how to get that code and compile it yourself. I mean you
don't have to learn how to code it but to learn how to just load it into Xcode,
load it into with whichever coding platform you used.
Load it into Android Studio, compile it, release it and then just put new
versions out there every so often. You know sometimes especially with Android
Studio, with the greater builds it will go through and update those libraries
and stuff in the background, if you have coded it right and
that just helps keep everything up to date. So you know the adages, if it's
not broken don't fix it. With apps it's different. I mean it helps to release
new versions from time to time,
not only does it shows Apple and Google that you're maintaining the app
but it also shows users who are gonna download your app that your app is
actually fairly new. So you know, it's been going through changes and like say
if you were gonna look at... say if you were looking at 5 apps related to
bread-making, I guess, and you see that one of them was released the last
version was released 2 weeks ago and the other one was released in
like 2014, you know which one would you go with? First, you
look at the reviews but then you might look at the last, if
the reviews were constant then you would go with the one that was updated most
recently. The downside with Apple of course is that when you release a new
version, the reviews kinda they disappear and you have to click on that
you know previous versions kind of thing to see the reviews from before.
I wish they hadn't made that change but it does help in terms of keeping things up
to date. Now the other thing that Apple changed just recently with the last few
weeks is they announced that they no longer can allow like to put the names
as long as you want. So they limit it to 50 characters now. So Google Play has
always been limited, the title has always been limited to 30 characters, Apple is now
50. So and the reason they say is that people were trying to stuff too many
keywords into the title, they were doing too many things like
that, they're trying to rank better with the title. And I tell you what, I'm very
much guilty of this and I think in a few videos in the past I've talked about
how you should put as many keywords in the title as you can. So like if I
show you this Arabic Bubble Bath. The Pro version here it's like Arabic Bubble
Bath: Learn Arabic, Pop Bubbles and Have Fun (Full Version) Now that's a long
title and I try to get as many things in that title as I could and sometimes you
know I would go through it and just try to see how much
I can actually get in there before it gets rejected. It's a funny thing
with Apple like at first when you start getting rejected you're like... you know
it breaks your heart. "Oh man I have to submit that thing again!" but then
after a while you start thinking "You know, let's see what I can get away with" you
just sort of just rolls off your back. So you know this is something that in a
past video I think I've recommended doing it.
I mean Apple, actually app stores change all the time. You have to keep
up-to-date with it. If you read a book from like 2013 or 2012 on app marketing
it's out of date, right? So if I show you the new one, we released the new version
of Arabic Bubble Bath this week the free version and basically I was able to put
Arabic Bubble Bath: Learn Arabic which is a bit redundant, I suppose. I wanted the
keyword "learn" in there and that was the only way I could think of to get in
there but that went through just fine. So you still have a little bit of room to
play with there. So that's it for this week. So the 2 topics... make
sure you update your apps from time to time and also the Apple keywords
you know that the title is a lot shorter, just to go back and what I've
said in previous videos. So that's it for this week. I hope it's been helpful.
I'll talk to you next week! Okay, so I was gonna record a new outro this week,
you know for the longest time for like a year I've had the same outro which is
the one me saying "Hey! I hope you liked that video and if you like it say Gnarley
and if you don't like say Bogus" and all that kind of stuff. I plan on doing a new
one this week but I haven't done yet so I'm just gonna hit the main points here.
Please like and subscribe to the channel. Leave a comment, it's
great to hear what you have to say. We're still on Snapchat, so every day we put up...
every day I put out stuff on Snapchat so things that we learned throughout the
week and you know some people emailed and say how helpful it actually
is and are able to learn a bit there, so if you're on Snapchat, please give us
a follow-up with the snapcode appear on the screen. If you're not on Snapchat
check it out, it's actually pretty interesting. So and finally, if
you happen to be on the App Store, check out some of our apps. Download them.
Leave a review, it really helps. If you want us to do the same for you just
drop it in and we'll have a look. And and that's it. I hope you have a good
week. I'll talk to you next week!