Thanks Guys ! As I've said in the post, it's a pleasure for me to share after all I read on hackers news and others places. if you have questions don't hesitate to ask.
Your app looks great, but your QA may need to be stepped up a notch.
Overall, although your app seems great (purchased it recently), there is at least one serious and extremely obvious bug. The spelling quiz feature relies on a voice synthesizer. The British accent (haven't tested the others) version fails totally on the first word (easiest) spelling list, and the short words produced are unintelligible. It would seemingly be easy to have tested this, and I'm surprised this wasn't picked up.
I'm not picking on you, and I'm glad I purchased your app for my child. However, this bug made me wary of buying your other app.
Yes in word wizard the UK voice is not great as the US one. I rely on an expensive library for voice synthesis (acapela) and I can't do a lot things to fix it. However there are others UK voices available I have to check- so thanks for the feedback.
I Mainly target US market and thats why the QA is better for the US but I will take care of UK in next versions
Glad to hear that. It should be noted that the UK voice will also probably be chosen by parents in other Commonwealth countries besides the UK because of the way the letter "Z" is pronounced "Zed", not "Zee".
decx, if you want to check others voice (you can do it online) you can mail me at pierre@lescapadou.com. Thanks
I really love to make it better for UK people. This is small market compared to the US but as you can see in my post, small market (like France) can be profitable as well. By the way, I've also have a lot of request to use a UK voice for Montessori Crosswords and that's something I want to do as well (in this app it is a recorded voice)
I noticed that you're aiming a couple of your projects at kids.
What are your thoughts about EDU platforms like SmarTots? Other than expanding the reach of your app are there any sorts of features such as click analytics, reporting for parents or achievements that are appealing to you?
xiaoma, I was really interested in smart tots sdk and really want to implemented in my app but I was really having difficulty in trying to find out what the sdk does. I created an account, downloaded the sdk, looked around and I couldn't figure out what it does or how some of the stuff will show up in my app. Because of that I didn't follow thru.
Right now the documentation is definitely lagging the features a bit.
This is what we offer end customers (i.e. parents): reporting on how much their kids play which apps, breakdown by subject, feedback on how their children are doing (if implemented by the developer), organization of educational apps by subject and age level, and finally recommendations for subsequent app purchases.
What developers get is the following: parents who buy more apps than the average customer, a sales channel via parents looking for their next SmarTots app, usage data of their app broken down by demographic, and a free evaluation of their app by a qualified educator.
We're also offering a few more things on a beta-basis: a system for developers add achievements for children to earn and "anti-achievements" that we call areas for improvement. Parents have been very positive about this kind of reporting. We've also the option of sharing the achievements on FB, which can serve as another marketing channel for app-makers. Also in the pike is the tracking of user data. This will be useful for app-makers in much the same way as analytics are useful for website creators. If you can test what actions users are making, you'll have more data to help you refine and improve the app.
One thing I can offer is help getting the app integrated if you want to give it a try. Either way, thank you for the feedback!
it's something I have to look seriously but unfortunately my time is limited. I wanted to do this myself but a framework could be interesting. I imagine also there are some opportunities for cross-marketing.
Brilliant info! I'm gradually getting to where you're at, I really hope i can do as well as you :)
Thanks especially for the marketing/promotions information. That's my biggest struggle to be honest, so any information in that area is gold for me.
My current strategy is to have an app-promotion website, with a big green link to the app store, and using adwords to bring people to that site. Below you can see a site for one of my 'coming soon' apps, do you think i'm on the right track?
I really don't know. The issue is for people to find your site - so it is SEO. In addition, I've never found very good data about how people find apps (I've seen some generic data but of course I'm looking for data about parents looking for apps for their kids). Do people look for apps on google ? You should also look at your keywords on the app store (of course)
