[trajan]

My team has a game that's doing well on the quality side (~100 reviews and 4.74 average rating), but the marketing is pretty tough. We've got a near-perfect substitute for a massively popular game that's missing from Android - if we could only put it in front of the casual gamers who only look at the featured and top ranked list, I'm sure it would be a bigger hit than most of the games currently featured. I'm hopeful that the great feedback and very good sales relative to our position that we receive will eventually catch someone at Google's notice, but until then we'll just keep making the game better.

On a down note, the recent rating reorganization seems to make it tougher for newer apps in our position to move up the list - a lot of poorly rated and abandoned junk from early in the Android platform's life is above us again now that the ranking algorithm seems to value raw sales above all else.

Still, things are worlds better than they were 6 months ago. We'll continue to bet on Android for the future.

[dpcan]

We are on the same page. Our second app was a puzzle game that (we feel) is WAY better than some of the games they have featured right now. It's entertaining, endlessly playable, and has multiple levels of difficulty. It's a new puzzle game that nobody has really played before, but we're losing to games of much lower quality.

Plus, our downloads are very low, but I blame this on the fact that there's a single "Brain & Puzzle Game" category for EVERYTHING!

I could scroll for an hour and probably never see my game.

The "Just In" category was all that I had, now, I don't even see a way to get noticed at all after getting pushed out of there (which I did by someone who posted about 50 different crossword puzzle apps in one day)

Very frustrating, but I too am sticking with Android for the long haul.

I was thinking about trying to advertise with AdMob maybe - so our paid game shows up at the top of some other free games.

[metachris]

> after getting pushed out of there (which I did by someone who posted about 50 different crossword puzzle apps in one day)

This is a real problem on the Android market; I experienced that myself. In almost all categories there are people pushing 10 or 20 (mostly poor) apps in one day, driving all others out of the first pages... Maybe a submission timeout would help.

This is problem is avoided pretty well by Apple's approach, although I prefer the open market of Android.

[trajan]

FWIW - every roughly 2 weeks, an update to your app pushes you to the top of the Just In list.

[edawerd]

Just curious, but how did you come up with 4.74 rating? Is there some place that I'm not looking to get that info?

[trajan]

Google doesn't make it officially available, but http://www.androlib.com tracks it for each app. This is also how we read our international comments.

[dminor]

> but the marketing is pretty tough

Especially when you don't mention the name of you app!

[trajan]

I didn't want the point to be overshadowed by seeming like I was just talking up our app. If you're curious, it's aTilt.