If you have a keen eye you may have noticed by now that all my iPhone apps start with the letter A.  Even Blackjack Card Counter was renamed A Blackjack Card Counter.  I thought that looked a bit weird so I thought about legitimate names that start with A.  When I created my wireless bluetooth retro style space game I called it Attack PRO.  But why?

The best chance of an app being found by iPhone customers is in the iTunes App store.  But it also needs to be visible within the store.  The best place for an app to be found is in the top 100 list.  But how does it get there, a lot of people have to find it and dowbnload it first before it makes it to the top 100.  Well it can be made New and Noteworthy or be on Staff Favourites etc.  But apple decides what gets on those lists, developers have no control over it.  The next best way an app can be found is when users sort by release date.  This list is sorted by day but within each day it's sorted alphabetically.  With over 100,000 apps in the store, naming it something starting with A keeps it at the top of the list longer.  So this is what I was doing.

Eventually however I decided it just looked too weird, having all my apps starting with A.  I'd just created an app that used the new augmented reality feature of the iPhone OS 3.1.  It was a wild west style first person shooter that uses the camera.  I thought it was going to be very popular and I decided it didn't need to start with A.  The name I came up with was "Wanted - Dead or Alive".  When it finally got approved for the app store it landed at about position 80 in the most recent list.  That's page 4.  Who's going to look through 4 pages of new apps?  Not very many people and the debut of my best app yet was very disappointing.

So my next chance for it to get noticed was to do an update and rename it "Augmented - Wanted Dead or Alive".  An update would put it back at the top of the recent releases.  But by the time the update was approved apple had changed the rules.  Now the recent releases would be sorted by the date they were first made not by the date of the update.  My best app yet was destined to lost in the sea of Apps that is known as the crappstore.

I decided not to make the same mistake with my latest app "Amazing Universal Detector".  I plan on making an app called "Aaron's Aardvark Adventures".  I just need to work out what it's going to do.  :-)

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