Promote Pleco to App Review Sites Guidelines?

Dear Mike, and dev team,
Because Pleco is brand new for Android, and the Android Market, I would like to know what you would like us as users to do to get it more exposure.
I would imagine if we had all the people using the Android version to send enough requests to review it, at least one would do it.

I have already put a review on Android Market, and sent a personal request for app review to the following sites.
Android Central
Droid Life
Xda-Developers

A couple others, I can think of to send app review requests to:
Droidforums
Phandroid

I'm sure there are a few other large sites I have missed.

I didn't see Pleco on AppBrain. I'm not sure, how often it syncs with Android Market.

BTW, are you going to release Pleco on Amazon Market, Get Jar, or other alternative markets?
 
thefriendlygeek said:
I have already put a review on Android Market, and sent a personal request for app review to the following sites.

I have also already put up a "review" on the Android Market (Michael), but why can't I see yours?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
thefriendlygeek said:
Because Pleco is brand new for Android, and the Android Market, I would like to know what you would like us as users to do to get it more exposure.
I would imagine if we had all the people using the Android version to send enough requests to review it, at least one would do it.

Thanks! Really nice of you to ask about that.

Review requests would be great - we've got a few pending from various China-related bloggers, but we're always happy to have more. A big goal for the first few weeks is to get lots of free-version downloads, so that we can climb up high in the search results and consequently get more downloads; we're already on the first page of results for "Chinese dictionary," in fact at #18 we're one spot higher than we were until we'd been on iOS for more than a year, so I'm definitely liking Google's search ranking algorithms better than Apple's for our purposes, but more downloads will hopefully get us up in the top 5 (where we join the ranks of of "free apps that people download to play around with when they first get their Android phone"). So any traffic those guys generate would be lovely.

However, targeted traffic is really important for other search ranking stuff - we're currently #4 in Google searches for "Chinese dictionary Android" but we'd like to be #1 (as we are for iPhone). So for that reason I'd say Chinese-specific blogs / forums / etc are at least as high a priority as general-purpose Android ones, even if they have much less traffic. Forum posts / blog comments are a big deal, but with those it's important that you not be so positive as to sound like a shill / fake reviewer - generally it's best to only post in a place in which you already have a reputation / a lot of other posts. If you spot something negative / inaccurate about Pleco in a public discussion forum or blog and it goes unanswered for a few days, I'd appreciate being made aware of it so that I can post a response. I try to keep up on that stuff, but it's tough to keep track of every single place people are discussing Chinese.

Beyond that, just spreading the word in general - in-person word-of-mouth has gotten us even more users than online word-of-mouth, lower volume but higher conversion rates :)

thefriendlygeek said:
I didn't see Pleco on AppBrain. I'm not sure, how often it syncs with Android Market.

Yeah, I've been waiting for it to show up there too (if for no other reason then because their analytics are superior to Google's in some ways) - hopefully soon.

thefriendlygeek said:
BTW, are you going to release Pleco on Amazon Market, Get Jar, or other alternative markets?

Amazon AppStore - probably not; their distribution rules make Apple's look downright friendly by comparison, and they seem to be letting Kindle Fires run non-Amazon apps.
GetJar - not too familiar with them; do they offer in-app purchases? Any idea what their % rates are like? Why in general would someone download an app from GetJar instead of Android Market?

burdenofhope said:
I have also already put up a "review" on the Android Market (Michael), but why can't I see yours?

They seem to lag by a few hours, FWIW.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I should add that we're still very new to Android and my knowledge of Android media / promotion techniques / etc is sketchy at best, so if anybody can suggest anything that we're not doing to promote our app but ought to be, we'd really appreciate it.
 

character

状元
mikelove said:
I should add that we're still very new to Android and my knowledge of Android media / promotion techniques / etc is sketchy at best, so if anybody can suggest anything that we're not doing to promote our app but ought to be, we'd really appreciate it.

This may have a longer term payoff, but didn't you mention the people you were talking with about licensing material from had Android phones? Have you made them aware you're now on Android and offered them a free copy? Let them see that they're missing out by not being in Pleco.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
character said:
This may have a longer term payoff, but didn't you mention the people you were talking with about licensing material from had Android phones? Have you made them aware you're now on Android and offered them a free copy? Let them see that they're missing out by not being in Pleco.

I have indeed done so with a few and am continuing to do so with others - already helped with one new license that I'm hoping will be signed soon (a title which is only exciting to a small portion of Pleco's user base, but for them it'll be pretty much the greatest thing ever to happen to electronic Chinese learning), and it's also helped us possibly crack open a publisher who had been unreceptive to something like 5 years' worth of previous contact attempts.
 
To help promote the ability to leave reviews, could you start posting how to switch over to the market version with each release?

I can't find the other posting here :oops: but if I recall, it required deleting the existing Pleco installation and reinstalling completely?

That's more than I really want to do, considering how slow the internet is here in northern India. But, perhaps it's easier than that?

I'm also concerned to handle my license correctly so it won't get "suspended", etc. if there's a problem with installations, etc.

Last, of course, is getting a correct "backup" of things before making the update.

Thanks
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
stephanhodges said:
To help promote the ability to leave reviews, could you start posting how to switch over to the market version with each release?

I can't find the other posting here :oops: but if I recall, it required deleting the existing Pleco installation and reinstalling completely?

Actually no, you can use the procedure in this post to switch over without reinstalling. But in general you shouldn't even need to keep going back and forth unless we do another round of beta releases - the Market version will work just fine with your non-Market license, Google requires that we offer their payment method as an option but we don't have to support it exclusively and our Market app should work quite happily with your existing purchases.[/quote]

Also, unlike on iOS you don't really have to leave a new review with every new version - Google averages all of the reviews our app has ever received, so a new review would just replace the old one. Hence, the only time you really need to re-review is if there's been a major update and you want to comment on the changes in it.
 
Thanks. I couldn't find the post, although I had looked through a lot of post titles...

The other point was that it might still help to link to those instructions with each new release, in case people want to switch to the market version in order to leave a first review.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
stephanhodges said:
Thanks. I couldn't find the post, although I had looked through a lot of post titles...

The other point was that it might still help to link to those instructions with each new release, in case people want to switch to the market version in order to leave a first review.

Good point, though I'd rather make a better page for it with screenshots and such - one of a dozen or so Things That Really Need Their Own Pages right now :)
 
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