In upcoming version 4.1 of my Run 5k app, I’m adding support for exporting data out of the app. I strongly believe that data liberation should exist in all applications and services despite the fact it can require significant amount of time to do properly. In 4.1, you will be able to export complete GPX file for each run you did with Run 5k.

What is GPX

GPX is de-facto standard for exchanging GPS tracks, waypoints, and similar GPS related data between applications and services. It stands for GPS Exchange Format and was created by Topografix. Current version of the specification is 1.1.

Over time, companies like Garmin have added Extensions to the original specification – thus you can include things like heart rate to it. Which all later lead them to create an expanded format called TCX which allows you to transfer many fitness-related bits of information.

The blog post published by Gedeon Maheux and short discussion with Joe Cieplinski on Twitter got me thinking a lot about the state of the App Store. This happens often and for good reason: Apple infamously stomped out all apps that attempted to create their own storefronts thus we are left with just the official app.

The most important issue is searching as research shows most customers find apps that way. The way search works now, it’s best suited for one-off free apps backed by huge marketing push to drive up the downloads, then switch to paid model and just leave it be, with infrequent compatibility updates. There are quite a few apps that did this in the top free and top paid lists.

But improving search is not and should not be enough. That’s why I first lay down some talking points on improving the browsing experience, customer engagement and thus app discoverability.

I have sent enhancement radars about all this and I encourage all developers to do the same. My radars are all marked as duplicates, some of them even years ago.

This is a topic that was done and over with multiple times in the past, but it still creeps back up. The basic rules here are:

1. never, ever interupt the user workflow in any way to ask them to do something for you
2. but make sure you still ask

Break rule 1 and you are almost certain to get low ratings even from people that actually like your app otherwise. As it was said before – you, the developer, is the party that needs the reviews. Your customers don’t need them and the reviews do (almost) nothing for them. Thus if you interupt people while they are using your app, you are making it worse and diminishing all the hard work you put into it.

However, it’s in human nature that we are very vocal and ready to be heard when we feel slighted and rather slow when we need to praise. Hence the rule 2.

The trick is to identify when and where to nudge people to leave the review. Almost all apps have a good place to do it, you just need to be mindful, imagine yourself being the customer and – hope for the best.

A week ago, iOS 8 update of my main app – Run 5k – was approved and released and few hours later was included among the “best new apps” on the US App Store front page. App Store editorial content is updated on Thursday, so this was just-in-time release.
Run 5k was at the last visible slot in the best new apps scroll (16th app in the list). It was listed there until this Mon/Tue (depending on your time zone), when they added Sesame Street Go app outside of normal schedule and this bumped me down to 17th place, which is not immediatelly visible on the iPhone’s App Store app. It’s effectivelly like it’s not even featured.

So, let’s see what a feature like this does for your app.
I believe the analysis below will be most useful to small, barely-known app developers who do not have media contacts and thus no ability to do big launch. While I have been fortunate to have good press reviews of my other apps, I was not that lucky with Run 5k. During the time it was featured, it was its one and only media exposure. There were no reviews on any website, no mentions anywhere that I could see.
Thus this is a good test case of what effect such feature, at that place, has on the number of new downloads of a free app.