Monthly Bits #008 is here! Amazon status and app updates

Welcome to the Monthly Bits #008! How about that? We have some very exciting news for you in this edition, so stay tuned!

In this edition we aim to talk about what happened with our partnership with Amazon and also share some information about our apps’ latest updates.

We have awesome new content coming up for both Roller and Pocket Targets so let’s get to it, shall we?

Pocket Targets – New content

Our latest game pocket targets is getting some awesome new updates! Last week we added a gun fire effect and rebalanced the game’s score system, and we have much more planned ahead!

You can download it here, it’s available for Android on the Google Play Store.

Starting with the 1.0.5 update, we will be improving graphics, adding new weapons, new themes, and much more! We plan to greatly expand the game over the next months. As a matter of fact, we are even accepting feature requests now! That’s right, just head over to our contact page and fill in the info! We will be sure to let you know what we think of your feature request. Although we are sure it’s incredible.

End of our partnership with Amazon

So last month we got word of the so called Amazon App Store, which is basically the Play Store for Amazon tablets. It took us by surprise, because we had never heard of it before. But it sounded like a good opportunity to expand our target audience by adding a tablet focused userbase. However, that didn’t last long, and here’s why.

We were interested in why was Amazon’s App Store so behind their competitors Google and Apple. They have a much smaller marketshare compared to their competitors’ massive mobile app stores. We found out why very quickly.

The problem

Turns out their store is very unfriendly towards developers. Their main page is very confusing, and so is their developer dashboard. But that didn’t affect us much, and neither did the very small amount of downloads we got initially. What really threw us off was that their testing phase is… laughable at best.

You see not only did they take ages to test our app, which is very weird considering they run a very small store, but they apparently found out problems with our app saying it failed 13/19 devices, which is incredibly high! The issue with that is we tested the app thoroughly to make sure there were no problems in the first place.

But okay, maybe we missed something critical, which we didn’t. But it could happen and we accept that. So we went to the dashboard to check, and their “test” said the app failed, but didn’t say how. There was no issue found. There were no screenshots, no explanation, no steps to reproduce, nothing. It simply stated the app failed.

Conclusion

We contacted them, describing how it was impossible to fix a problem only they found, and with no steps to reproduce or any evidence that there was a problem at all. They took over 12 days to reply. What is the reply? An automated response asking if the issue was resolved. No proper response. We took it personally.

We aim to be as polite and professional as possible, but when we are neglected like that, it’s hard to continue. Specially when they were the only ones to treat us like that. You’d think they would try their best to be nice with the publishers they need so much. Instead, they reject our app for no reason and refuse to contact us. You might just argue they did it on purpose. Just like that, we asked for our apps to be pulled from their store. We will no longer be updating them or adding new apps.

Roller Roulette – The 1.9.X updates!

The latest update for Roller has already been sent to Google and we expect it to go live soon! You can dowload it here. The update comes with some bug fixes, better tutorial animations, and support for 3 new languages!

The game is now fully translated to Chinese (Simplified), Indonesian, and Turkish! With that we greatly expand our target audience. And we will be adding support to even more languages soon!

But that’s not everything there is to the 1.9.X updates. We are almost to 2.0.0, so we will be putting a lot of effort into the updates now. More than we already do! Expect more themes, visual overhauls, and more!

What’s more

We will be reducing our overall activity for a bit now. Focusing on app updates is more important at the moment. But that doesn’t mean we won’t release any new products, so stay tuned!

Excited with Monthly Bits #008? Don’t forget to share this blog post! We’ll see you in the next edition!