Back in February of 2010 I was coding in the offices of our customer – a semi-big Finnish company. It was interesting from a technical perspective, but the project had changed directions about half a dozen times in the past 6 months. I guess it lacked someone with some backbone to lead it according to one vision. Instead they were bending over to anyone with an opinion and we had a veritable software Frankenstein on our hands. Despite being a neat programming challenge the product itself was a mismanaged collection of random features in which my own faith was close to zero. It’s at times like these you start looking elsewhere for something that would bear more meaning.

I’ve done my own random software projects now and then and the last few years my interest had shifted to products that could make some dough. I had often taken ideas to the implementation stage, but most of these projects ended up fizzling out due to lack of motivation, becoming cute tech demos in the corner of my hard drive or in a forgotten code repository. In spite of that I was getting that urge to create something of my own again.

A MOBILE FUTURE NOT TOO DISTANT

I had read about the fortunes some lucky developers had managed to make on the AppStore, but the real gold rush seemed mostly over. On the other hand the Android platform was gaining traction and it had a serious lack of fart applications; and I reckoned those fart applications needed developers. I had a crappy old Symbian based Nokia phone and thought it might be time to get one of those new fangled smarty phones. The iPhone was only available from one operator (not mine), and developing for it required a Mac, which was an even steeper investment. This made me hop on the Android bandwagon. I ended up scouring an auctioning site for an HTC Hero and on the 28:th of February 2010, I had the winning bid on a white HTC Hero. In the beginning of March a package of used mobile electronics had arrived much to the glee of a new owner.

The horse sticker wasn't included. I had to accessorize it myself.

Soon even your grandma will be ruled by a smart phone overlord

I played around with the Hero – and compared to my Nokia it was night and day. I came to the conclusion that these smart phones were going to be our overlords very soon. We’d be fiddling with these buggers updating our tweetbooks, fouring our facesquare, reading, chatting and playing on the go. In fact I concluded the gold rush was far from over, it was merely beginning. It wouldn’t be over until most people were conducting most of their online time on their phones. I don’t know where we’re now, but if we’re not there yet I think it’s pretty safe to say we’re getting closer.
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Google has enabled more detailed statistics for all android applications.

There’s a Statistics link just below the download and active installs numbers which will open up a more detailed statistics view.

Seems like they started collecting data after mid-december because that’s how far back the statistics for Theseus goes.

Behold! An amazing video tutorial for Theseus on the Android:

It occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea to create a link to this directly from the app.
Since I think nearly all Android phones have a Youtube app, just dispatching a “youtube intent” with the url should open this video in the native youtube player.

Maybe in the next update.

So I’ve had Google Analytics enabled on Theseus for a month now and I’ve got some stats now I can react to, and I have.

This graph show the amount visits per day since I installed analytics:

The spikes there occur when I update the game. I usually update in a weeks interval so I can get the game into the “Just In” list. Update more often than that and your app will simply just not show up there.

So now that I have some data I started to mine. I can see stuff like which is the most replayed (i.e. most difficult) level for old players (recurring visitors) and new players (new visitors). Good stuff; but I know that some levels are going to be harder than other.

I started digging into the stats and turned up with this:

The segment is new visitors and it measures how long they spend inside the game. While the average time spent in the game was something like 20minutes, over 44% left it under 10 seconds. Yikes!

Now some people may just start up a game and quit to try it out later, but hardly 44%. I’m doing something wrong here.
My reaction was to create a big “Start Playing!” button on the title screen which takes you directly to the first unsolved level. Tutorial 1 for new players.

I released it a couple of days ago and here are the same stats for the last couple of days:

Down to 37%. I’m not a statistics guy but I guess that’s outside the margin of error.
I guess that it’ll get even lower for regular days when the game hasn’t been in the “Just In” list.

This way of improving your product is a whole lot more effective than speculating what to do next. Feedback loops are important.

My last update for the lite version included analytics support and now I have some interesting statistics about usage.

For each loaded level and activity startup I made it track a page view.
For each menu button press it tracks a event.

Here’s a screenshot of my Theseus Lite Google Analytics dashboard:

To setup it in your app check out the documentation.

I read a blog post which had a video from the Angry Birds creators on the Google blog the other day and it had some effect on me.

The thing that struck me most was the word Retention. They said they keep updating the game to keep players coming back. I’ve kept updating Theseus too, but not for the same reason. I updated to keep the game on the “just in” lists. I’ve been scrambling to figure out new features to develop and other ways to improve the game to get reasons to update. These Angry Birds guys just add a few levels now and then.

Why am I not doing this instead?

That keeps old players updating and coming back, and old customers are your best way to new customers. As long as they keep playing and keep active they’re more likely to spread the word.

Retention baby, retention!

At about 8k+ downloads now for Theseus Lite so I can taste that 10k milestone.

The latest update tried to address some user complaints and then my own complaints about lack of sales.

Lately the #1 comment seems to be the fast increasing difficulty, so I added 10 new super easy levels. Well they’re super easy for me but I’ve played this game quite a bit. I guess new users really need a nice soft landing into the more challenging levels.

The lack of sales issue I tried address by revamping the in-game ad for the full version, lowering the price to $2.55 and linking straight to the games detail page instead of a market search page (I didn’t know this was possible before).

Lastly I added admob ads into the level selection screen. Hopefully this will generate some much needed income (I already made like a dollar, wohoo) and drive more ppl to buy the full version to get rid of it.