One week in the App Store

Last year I was working on a Nine Men's Morris mobile game called Doublemill. My job was to implement a REST-based server back-end on the Google App Engine. You might remember a couple of posts on that. My colleagues were responsible for coding the Android client. Since I'm an iPhone user and I'm not going to switch to Android anytime soon, I decided to port the game to the iPhone/iPod touch platform.

One week ago Doublemill Lite hit the App Store and it has been received very well, according to the download numbers. I'm pretty stunned by the magnitude of more downloads we have compared to the Google Marketplace. It could be that we only have full fledged paid version for Android out there. However, you can refund your money with Google within 24 hours, if you don't like the game, so basically every App is also a Lite version.

I believe in the App Store as a channel of distribution, although only after one week we already see the negative sides of it: user ratings. Doubemill Lite started off pretty good with 3-4 stars the first couple of days, but then rapidly dropped down to 1-2 stars. First, I was pretty bumped about it, but then realized that you are only asked to rate the App when deleting it from your phone. Considering, that less than 3% of people who downloaded the App also rated it, I guess most of the others might still happily play with Doublemill Lite.

We received some feedback, mostly about the controls, which we've already addressed and improved. There should be an update in the next couple of weeks, but at the moment I'm kinda handicapped, because my MacBook Pro died on me and I have to wait for my new one to arrive next week. With the soon to be released update, we've also added iPad compatibility, so you can have a virtual Nine Men's Morris Board sitting on your table.

There's also been progress on the premium version of Doublemill, which will go Beta any-time soon. So if you are interested in testing it, drop me a line and I'll hook you up!