.Dust

“Your appli­ca­tion is Ready for Sale”

Mobile 3TV — App Store

This was the sub­ject of the mes­sage I received from Apple on Fri­day 4^th. The Mobile 3TV was approved by Apple and was avail­able for down­load from the Ital­ian Apple Store.

This was great news for us. We had announced the future avail­abil­ity of this to our cus­tomer some time ago and every­body was wait­ing for this to be released. Well, it was an instant suc­cess. In less than two days the Mobile 3TV appli­ca­tion was in the first posi­tion in the Top 25 free appli­ca­tion list on the Ital­ian AppStore.

That sounds great, doesn’t it?

Well, as you can imag­ine there were some issues.

I was pretty much sure that we would have had those vol­umes in down­loads and since it is a tv stream­ing appli­ca­tion we were expect­ing high load on our back­end. That was true and the first three days we had issues in deliv­er­ing the ser­vice to our customers.

There was no way to avoid this. Clearly you could have add capac­ity on the back­end to cope with the incred­i­bly high vol­ume of stream­ing ses­sions but would that have made any sense? Frankly I do not think so. After a few days every­thing is run­ning smoothly and every­body is happy with his Mobile 3TV application.

On the other side we received an aver­age two stars review on App­Store because the appli­ca­tion was not able to con­nect in the first few days. Users were frus­trated and I was frus­trated too.

As I said in the first sen­tence Apple just informs you that your appli­ca­tion in on the App­Store. From your side, as a devel­oper, you do not have any mean to limit the down­load of your appli­ca­tion or just decide when it has to made avail­able to your cus­tomers. Also Apple does not say any­thing about approval time… it just hap­pens (or not). Even if you are an oper­a­tor you are treated just like any other one man band devel­oper (btw, I think this is cor­rect). If I had to give a sug­ges­tion to Apple I would intro­duce an addi­tional switch in iTunes con­nect in order to let the devel­oper decide when the appli­ca­tion has to be made avail­able on the AppStore.

I can also add that the descrip­tion of the appli­ca­tion is absolutely crit­i­cal. It is prob­a­bly one of the most impor­tant part of the pub­lish­ing process, apart from get­ting your appli­ca­tion approved obviously.

Being an oper­a­tor we were very lucky in get­ting vis­i­bil­ity on the App­Store. All of our cus­tomers were wait­ing for this appli­ca­tion to be released and so it instantly jumped on top of the charts. I under­stand this is not the case for most developers.

When we designed our appli­ca­tion we tried to keep it as sim­ple as pos­si­ble. We have thought that peo­ple would just want to watch TV on their iPhone with­out any fancy UI stuff around the gor­geous iPhone screen. That was the main prin­ci­ple. Let the user go straight to the chan­nel and watch TV.

On the other side we wanted to find an inno­v­a­tive way to let the user switch channel.

This is what we came out with:

When you touch the screen that small cir­cle fades in, it is cen­tered on the point where you touched the screen and from there you can eas­ily qui zap from chan­nel to chan­nel or read the Elec­tronic Pro­gram Guide.

That’s all the inter­face we pro­vided. Quick and simple.

I have to thank all of my team for this great imple­men­ta­tion and also our great part­ner bee­weeb that has done a great job in the design and imple­men­ta­tion phase. Well, the shakezap­ping fea­ture that allows you to change chan­nel sim­ply shak­ing your iPhone is their idea (kudos Filippo!).

I think we have learnt some­thing from this appli­ca­tion launch.

I have spent a few time read­ing reviews on iTunes store and actu­ally if you are an Apple Devel­oper you know very well that by no mean you can alter or drive reviews. They are just sit­ting there and you can just read them.

I always think that we can­not make every­body happy with our prod­uct and ser­vices but I was a lit­tle bit frus­trated read­ing some reviews. Actu­ally being called a thief in not how I would describe my work in here. I can accept any crit­i­cism, and those who know me know that this is def­i­nitely true, but there is always a proper way to do it.

At the end of the day I would say I am not 100% sat­is­fied with what hap­pened dur­ing the launch but I am quite happy with it.

Oh, and there may a sur­prise any­time soon… stay tuned.

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