App store discoverability is at its lowest, and this is fooling countless app developers and entrepreneurs. As John Dinsmore, mobile app market researcher at Wright State University, explained, many part-time app developers out there simply don’t have the marketing budget to compete, but they trust in what they believe to be a meritocratic marketplace. That is, if your app is good quality and doing something people want, it’ll attain a healthy amount of natural growth and will eventually become a top app. Disappointingly, this simply isn’t the case. As it stands, app stores have three primary pathways of exposure:
- Top charts
- Curated content (e.g. What’s hot)
- Search
You have a better chance of making the NBA than making your app viral
Now, let’s go back to supposing you and your business partner eventually release your app. You’ve had six months of hard graft, fiddling, fixing, and restarting, and you’ve sunk in so much of your spare time and savings that you’re wary of spending more on things like marketing, knowing full well that you can’t really compete with the big bucks. You identify the above three routes for attaining users and consider which of them may work for you. Straight off the bat, you can eliminate the top charts. They’re completely dominated by the largest apps with the largest paid media campaigns on the App Store. So your only hope is to go viral, which, unfortunately, means you’re unlikely to ever find yourselves in the Top 50. As Dinsmore so aptly put it, “A programmer would have a better chance of making an NBA roster than having an app go viral on its own.”
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