What kind of deployment to the Play/Apple stores?

Hi Guys and Gals.

Im developing an app for quite a niche market. I started this project by identifying a problem in a particular market and developing the app as a possible fix, but wasn't sure if it would even work.

Development costs are quite high because I have outsourced most of the work (The ground work was far beyond my abilities) but has been designed by myself and the amazing team I outsourced to with expansion and ease of future development in mind........its getting much easier.

Im now close to a stage where i can start pushing the app publicly and am trying to set myself up as a business to get the bureaucratic paperwork out the way first.

For those of you that have gone through this process will know the section in the Business plan called 'Financial' ....

Yeah my biggest question that worries me most right now is how to deploy the app to the end user on the App stores.

Im currently thinking of a Free to play demo - my reason for this is that the app relies on speech recognition and most people especially with apps are still wary of how good/bad Speech recognition is and the free demo gives users the ability to test and reassure themselves that it really does work before laying down their hard earned dollars. This would contain a small number of ads so I get some kind of revenue from each download.

Then I would use a credits system to 'unlock' the rest of the app. (which would remove all ads by default anyway)

What is people opinion of the micro-transaction formula? Does a game/app where you literally pay for every item/level put you off? Do you like it like that because you only spend what you use?

I would do this by just having people buy X number of credits for Y price and spend the credits on levels or however they wish.

Alternatively, would you prefer to have a demo then pay one bigger price to unlock the whole product in one go?

Personally im old school and would rather pay one fee and know im getting the whole thing (or the obvious parts/every level for example) But im unsure with the new age micro-transaction market if this thinking still holds up?

Anyone got any advice or experiences with how to ultimately charge customers for your apps? Did you price too low or to high and had to adjust accordingly? How much custom do you think you may have lost? Did people actually notice you adjusted your prices after deployment?

Kind Regards,
John

 

Most of these questions you should be asking your target market (which you haven't really described) instead of other developers, unless your target market is Unity game developers.

 

Nope not unity Devs but General Aviation Pilots.

Unless im completely missing something, how do you get that information.

Im an engraver by trade, so I can rattle off an engraving on an item and show people 'How much would you pay for this?' with apps thats more difficult and while I will get this information from a testing group they need to really see the app in action to give a fair reflection on what they would pay.....but the app is still under development and not quite at that point....In havent got the engraved item to show so to speak.....

I guess I could rephrase the question and say something like

As a developer what is your experience with micro transactions where individual levels/items unlocked instead of a Freeplay then one off payment model?

Regards,
John