eBall Goes Live
We've been too busy (okay, we admit it, lazy) over the holidays to update the news, so we've got some catching up to do. The big story is that Apple approved eBall for sale.
Running the AAA Gauntlet
The Internet blogs are full of horror stories about the Apple application approval (“AAA”) process, so we entered into it with a fair amount of trepidation. There are many reports of random rejections, or of applications ending up in “limbo” — not approved, but not rejected either. Electroball being our first application we've submitted, we had no idea what to expect.
As we reported last time, the applications were uploaded to Apple, and went into review much faster than we had anticipated. Almost exactly one week later, we had our answers back. The full version of ElectroBall was accepted (yay!), but the free version had some technical issues with the descriptive copy to be placed on the AppStore. A few word changes (the program itself wasn't changed), and it too was accepted (one week after our update). The whole process was really quite straightforward, and a pleasant surprise (kudos to Apple).
We decided to do some further in-house testing before releasing the applications, so they didn't hit the store until today (1/5/10). You can read our press release to learn more about that.
Is There Anybody Out There?
So now the question is, does anybody like the thing? Does anybody buy the thing? Can anybody even find the thing! With so many applications on the store (and a huge number of new ones being released every day), standing out from the crowd isn't very likely. Here, too, the Internet is filled with complaints. The iTunes store is structured in such a way that only two kinds of applications get primary storefront space:
- Top sellers/downloaders in various categories
- Applications selected by Apple to be featured
A new application obviously can't be a top seller yet — and if you're not a top seller, nobody will find your application to buy it, meaning it never becomes a top seller. And Apple seems likely to feature applications that already have a track record of success, hoping to build an even greater success.
Sound like a Catch-22? Well, it is. But the situation's not all that different than most marketing situations. Shoes, clothes, food, you name it — the rules are quite similar; the successful brands can affort major advertising, and that makes them more successful. Sure, product quality plays a role (hopefully a big one), but just because you have a great product, if nobody knows about it, it's going nowhere.
Bottom Line
That means that despite all of the effort we've put into Electroball and this website, and the high quality (we hope) of our application, the chances for success are probably slim to none. We've locked Slim up in our basement hoping he can't get out of town, but even that may not help.
Of course, if you're reading this, you've probably at least found, if not downloaded, the ElectroBall application, or you'd never have even found our website! So, maybe there's hope yet.
Or maybe that just means nobody's reading this ... (sigh) ... ;-)