This didn't exactly tell me how to get my app noticed, but how other apps of mine may help get my other apps noticed. However, they need to get noticed first first that..
We have built appbrain and launched a bunch of apps with more than 100M+ installs: http://www.appbrain.com/dev/AppTornado
Our experience is that you need to generate at least a couple of thousand (better, tens of thousands) of installs by yourself before Google's discovery mechanisms kick in and allow your app to be discovered withing Google Play.
Cross promotion is a good tool for that, but if you don't have apps yet, then you have to find other ways (paid cost-per-install promotion is a commonly used tactic).
I haven't gotten to 100 million installs, but I have a few Play apps and one got to 7 million installs. This post is most right on that I've seen here. Back in 2011-2012 you could have a hit without generating your own installs to it. With more competition nowadays, that happening would be much rarer.
You need to generate your own installs at first. Google will look at your uninstall ratio, and perhaps other factors. If those factors are good, Google will start pushing you up the keyword and then category rankings in various countries. Then people will start ranking your app, and that will factor in. Google has made some public announcements about what they take into account, and there are many outside accounts out there with guesses, some good, some not, at what helps.
Making an app people want helps. Having a clear, simple icon and clear app name helps. If the app does offline maps, call it Offline Maps. If several reviews and e-mails suggest adding a feature, consider adding the feature. And so on.
I have not found cross-promotion helpful In the mannernthe article says. If you run ads, and get one cent for every ten ads shown on average, then you're losing a cent every ten times you show your ad. It might be cheaper to advertise it in other venues. In some circumstances cross-promotion makes sense. You can set a minimum bid for your ad network, and show your ads when the ad network can't make that bid. Also, for new apps, I often put the first ad in as a cross-promotion ad. I see how the app does, and how much it refers. If all is well and the app is taking off and doing referrals, I put an ad network ad in the app.
I agree, this seems like a very unhelpful low-effort post. "Want to get users to use your apps? Put ads for your apps in your other apps!" is basically it. As well as putting all your apps on the same developer account (seems like that's the norm though right). It basically boils down to "Get people to use your apps and then you can get people to use another one of your apps! Simple!"
Especially irrelevant for apps which take privacy as serious as possible and don't run tracking, analytics etc. Thus adverts will definitely not be happening.
Getting an app "noticed" isn't particularly hard. Just make a thread for it over at XDA, Reddit, here,...
That will get you your 5 minutes^H^H^H^H seconds of internetfame already. However, it will only create a short popularity spike and you constantly have to invest in promotions to keep that up.
The blogpost doesn't tell you to put ads for your other apps into your apps (that would be stupid!), but to think of ways in which they can complement each other. That way you get effortless crosspromotion, can touch vastly different traffic sources and channel users to your main app.
You are thinking in the wrong direction. You are focusing on that "one app that will make you rich". The post tells you to think in terms of network effects: instead of asking "how can I get installs for my main app?", you should ask "how can I leverage the work I already invested in my other projects into boosting my latest project?"
Yes, there is a bit of a chicken/egg here, but getting _some_ installs for an app really is not that difficult.
> You are thinking in the wrong direction. You are focusing on that "one app that will make you rich". The post tells you to think in terms of network effects: instead of asking "how can I get installs for my main app?"
Not really, I'm focusing on the title and intro to the blog post and expecting the post to follow the questions laid out in that.
Or a different title for this article because it assumes a lot of legwork has already been done. "How to get your app noticed when you already have a different app that has a userbase" would be more accurate.
This current title makes it seem like it's tips for getting the word around about your app (xda, reddit, HN, whatever) and leveraging that, giving away paid versions for free to a specific community etc. At least that's what I'd expect from a post titled like this.