We did NOT get 100,000 downloads for our Windows 8 app

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There is an interesting post about how a developer got 100,000 downloads on windows 8. See the discussion at hacker news and the actual article on msdn.

This is the flip side of that equation.  Before I get into details, let me set some context:

  1. I do NOT work for Microsoft or affiliated with Microsoft in any way
  2. I do WANT Windows 8 to succeed (it’s good for you, for me, for Apple and the industry – competition is good for everyone).
  3. I am TIRED of Microsoft disappointing me over and over and over

Our app is called Taskorami, it’s a GTD app for Windows 8 but our goal is to build the best GTD app ever (on any platform).  We released it on day 1 with Windows 8 i.e. 10/26/2012.

The Good News

We have receive some awesome feedback:

Solid Start with tons of Potential
This is clean, quick GTD app. Been looking for this sort of thing for a long time. There are still a bunch of little things that need to be cleaned up to make it better (cloud syncing doesn’t seem to work yet). But when they do, I think it’ll be amazing.
Very nice
Just wish it had an option to set specific time for tasks as well, maybe i’m not seeing it.
Productive apps
User friendly application. Easy to use functions. Can’t wait till it hits Mac.
Overall, our ratings are 4 stars, here is the breakdown:
This is pretty good and we are happy with it.  It doesn’t make it the best GTD app – yet.  But this is just version 1 and we are actively tweaking it.

The Bad News

We did NOT get 100k downloads.  The app is NOT paying for lunch.  So, how many downloads did we get out of the 3+ million Windows 8 users?  See for yourself

Conclusion

We are super excited about the positive feedback.  We are not too thrilled about the downloads but when you consider the fact that we have done ZERO marketing and that this is only version 1, it is not that bad.
Meanwhile, we will keep tweaking and waiting for our hockey-stick chart.
  • http://twitter.com/nathanpc Nathan Campos

    I really thought about getting into Windows 8, sadly Microsoft disappointed me several times. The biggest one was the Windows Phone 8 launch, which made my development device (a HTC Titan) stuck in WP 7.5.

    I’ve been successful on Android, but I really hate the fragmentation.

    I’ve tried BlackBerry development (got a PlayBook to develop on) and after 2 months working on a app using their HTML5 library bbUI.js my app started to misbehave because of a bug on that library. After 2 more weeks trying to correct this problem I couldn’t correct the bug and my problem just became bigger. So I rage quit.

    I’ve been trying a bit of iOS development, but Objective-C is giving me a hard time.

  • http://twitter.com/wcdolphin Cory Dolphin

    I see a Task List/Manager without the words “Task manager” or “Task List” in the description. Searching for “Task” in the store, you are the 80th result when I sort by relevance. It scares me that descriptions might be come the new SEO vector.

  • Mathias Svensson

    Comparing downloads of a game with a GTD apps is not really fair. The market for a GTD app is a lot lower then for a card game. Card games are one of the most popular casual game types. And now in the beginning until there are 1000 of different card games, the card games that are there will get lots of downloads. 

  • http://www.emadibrahim.com eibrahim

    Great observation…  I will tweak my description

  • http://www.emadibrahim.com eibrahim

    I hate objective-c and xcode…  android develpoment is slightly better but Visual Studio is light years ahead of all other IDE – my opinion :)

  • NetscapePizza

    Worth noting that Windows 8 doesn’t ship with any card games either.

  • http://twitter.com/nathanpc Nathan Campos

    Xcode is the best IDE ever invented in my opinion, but Objective-C is so low-level that it doesn’t fit me in terms of debugging. I’m used to languages like Ruby and Java that gives me a descriptive error log when things go wrong. In Objective-C all I get is a little message and the memory address, which makes debugging very hard.

    Eclipse is one of the worst IDEs ever invented, it’s slow, ugly, and limited in terms of U prototyping, but it’s needed for Android development. The only reason I use it is because I need to develop for Android.

    Visual Studio is near Xcode in terms of quality. Great UI, awesome tools, and extremely integrated with the current development target.

  • http://www.emadibrahim.com eibrahim

    xcode is ok… i like vs better. i do like some features in xcode, but i think my hate of it is really because of objective-c and not the IDE itself. objective-c is like the complete opposite of ruby… it is definitely one of the ugliest syntax i have seen in a language.

  • ishaih

    You should try IntelliJ IDEA for Android, they also have an IDE for ios but I haven’t tried it.

    I’ve been playing around with Xamarin which lets you write C# code for ios/android. you do ios with Interface Builder and their own IDE (monodevelop) it’s a pretty good experience. Android apps can be developed with Visual Studio, so that solves the IDE issue