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In the last few months we added a third party app analytics solution i.e. Firebase to My Day To-Do  and soon we realised that Firebase may not work every time. Hence we tried to abstract the analytics (decouple/separate) solution from the rest of the app code i.e. the app code can log analytics data without knowing about what analytics solution is in use. In this post I will talk about our analytics solution and provide some code examples for an iOS app with Firebase analytics. The aim of the code is to provide an example of how to abstract the analytics part from the rest of the app. Hence without further a due let's get to it. Background In June 2017, we added a third-party analytics solution i.e.  Firebase analytics to My Day To-Do for tracking app usage i.e. we wanted to know what aspects of our product do people use the most. At this stage I am the only developer at My Day To-Do and it was the first time I had worked with an analytics solution. Anyway I added ...

China is one of the most important markets in the world and one of my goals with My Day To-Do is to generate a solid active user-base in China. Lately I have doubled my my efforts to expand further into that market, that lead to this month when I (we) have had a rather significant and entirely believable spike in downloads from China. In this post I will be talking about some of the things that I (we) have done, am doing and will be doing to keep the momentum. p.s. the spike is not like 10,000 daily downloads or so but a steady stream of downloads from the region, read on to know more about the download numbers. Background  How did China become an important market for me? China wasn't always an important market for me, however that changed when I ran a sale on My Day To-Do last Christmas and as I have mentioned in this post , unexpectedly for me, China was the region with the highest number of downloads during that sale period. Ever since that, I have been thinking...

Bing Ads was something that I signed up for sometime last year (2016) but with paid advertising being a lower priority for my startup last year, meant that I could not make use of it at the time. This year I finally got around using Bing Ads to create an ad to promote My Day To-Do  and in this post I will talk about it. This post will have the following, anatomy of a Bing Ads ad campaign according to me number of Ad campaigns that I ran or My Day To-Do using Bing Ads total amount spent and outcomes of those ad campaigns? whether or not the ad campaigns were worth it? future marketing goals of My Day To-Do Before moving on, I should mention that Bing Ads is easy to use and the Bing Ads team at Microsoft are quite helpful and happy to walk you through creating your first ad campaign over the phone. Background I concluded my previous posts on Facebook marketing ( boosting a post and  page promotion ) by mentioning that my next step for promoting My Day T...

As I have talked about in my previous post , my startup My Day To-Do has grown to the point that I have to consider getting some marketing help (get marketing interns). Now,  App Store Optimisation(ASO)  is a (relatively) new concept and I cannot expect the marketing intern to know about it, therefore I must prepare for the possibility to explain it to them. In this post I will outline my process of explaining ASO to the marketing intern working with me at  My Day To-Do . I will not be explaining what ASO is but rather my four step method of helping someone understand what ASO with the use of some online reading material and real world examples. Background It was only when I released my first mobile (iOS) app that I actually got to know about App Store Optimisation(ASO) and how? well it's a little hard for me to remember exactly what it was? but this app launch guide does shed some light into it. Prior to this, I had heard about this thing called SEO (search engi...

It's new years eve and this is perhaps the last day I am offering My Day To-Do for free on the app store. I started offering My Day To-Do for free as a holiday offer from 24th of Dec, 2016 to 1st of January 2017. Since then I have seen a significant spike in downloads with a majority of the downloads coming from China. This is awesome, as unlike it's free sibling My Day To-Do Lite , My Day To-Do pro version hasn't seen that many downloads, so this is a great way to get it to a wider audience. Why did I offer my app for free? App Analytics in iTunesConnect told me that there were a number of "product page views" for My Day To-Do on the App Store, so I realised that one of the obstacles for people from downloading the app could be the $4.49aud price tag. Hence I decided to remove that obstacle for some time and in doing so I was hoping to get some user feedback or to get people to leave a review on the App Store. What do I think contributed to the download...

My time was occupied by resolving a few personal matters this last month and a half and therefore it's been some time since I had the opportunity to write a new blog post. A few things have been happening on my end and in this post I will provide some brief info on what some of those things are, namely  A recent spike in downloads for My Day To-Do Lite My next app that I am working on The topic of my next technical blog post or what problem do I solve in it App Store Downloads I always knew about the power of ASO  and localised app name but only recently did I experience the power of ASO first hand. I released My Day To-Do Lite towards the end of December 2015 and it wasn't until September 2016 that I saw a spike in the number of downloads for it. To put this into perspective, the number of downloads I have had for the Lite version in September, October and the first half of Nov, 2016 were more than those combined of all the previous months since it's release. H...