ambience
Ambience
Mon, Mar 9, 2015
I have just launched my second app, Ambience. It’s free. You should download it.
Ambience is a simple app – a very simple app. There are about a dozen audio files that you can play simultaneously, at differing volumes. From a programming lens, it’s incredibly trivial – I spent approximately as much time actually coding the app as I did preparing it for submission (taking screenshots, developing the app icon, writing up the description.)
Ambience is also not a particularly unique app – as I’m writing this (which is around two days after it officially hit the App Store) – it’s not even in the top ten results for the word “ambience”, which should give you some indication of how saturated this market is.
As far as I can tell, mine has a couple competitive advantages:
- It’s new, and Apple weighs recently released/updated apps slightly higher.
- It doesn’t look ugly as sin (granted, it doesn’t look like much of anything at all, but it’s at least got the iOS 7⁄8 paradigm on lock.)
So my hopes for Ambience being a blockbuster success aren’t particularly high, but that’s not why I built it. I built it for a couple reasons:
- To regain some of the muscle memory of actually duct-taping something together and shipping it. Barback, the only other app I’ve got going on right now, has been stuck in a little bit of a development rut: some of the syncing mechanisms I was working on aren’t as glorious as I’d hoped, and writing and submitting a simple app like this kind of felt like a nice jog around the block after not running for a couple months.
- To mess around with new monetization paradigms 1. I’ll probably convert Barback to Free+IAP at some point, and this was a simple way to see how that works. Plus, with the much smaller surface area of the app, I’ll get to easily practice on normally non-trivial things like localization and A/B experimentation.
- I wanted another app to my name. It’s nice to have another iOS channel to flip to every once and a while, you know?
- Because why the fuck not
If it brings in Chipotle money – as of today it has 27 users and 3 conversions, which should net me at least two scoops of guac – I’ll be pleased. Otherwise, I’ll get to mess with ASO and stuff with a codebase that I’m not particularly invested in.
And, again – you should totally download Ambience. It’s free!
- The fact that I unironically and subconsciously typed “monetization paradigms” instead of IAP makes me scared for my future. [return]
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