So, in February Yandex forcibly moved all Yandex.Subscriptions users to the Yandex.News service. Without warning, and the whole thing turned out pretty badly. The web version became unavailable. But the API kept working, and the Yandex folks only said that it would continue working. They kept quiet about deadlines and plans. First, new RSS entries stopped being pulled in and the API gave access only to old entries, and then they sent everyone emails saying that on March 31, 2015 they would shut down the API too. Which is what happened. So I removed the iPodpiski app from the App Store and want to sum up some results for myself and for the record.
I wrote the app in spring 2014 in about a week, coding in the evenings. It appeared in the App Store on April 17, 2014, which I happily wrote about on my site and in a post on Habr. The post got a +15 rating and brought some downloads and feature requests. The app fell 17 days short of its first birthday :)
Over that year there were:
1321 downloads of the app and only 496 updates when I released new versions. Not much, but then this is not a mass-market app. RSS is generally considered a technology for robots and geeks. The overwhelming majority of users were from Russia. In 2nd and 3rd place were the US and Ukraine, tied. Record: 77 installs in one day.
1431.42 rubles of revenue from in-app purchases. Initially the app was free, but with ads and a paid option to disable them. Of my 4 apps in the App Store, this is the worst result. On the other hand, getting some money for learning, gaining experience, and solving one of your own problems is not bad either :)
Most of the time the app was in the Top 200 in its category (News) in Russia. The screenshot above shows the highest positions it managed to crawl to in the charts.
Ratings were not great. I never asked people to rate the app anywhere, so ratings were left either by enthusiasts and friends, or by dissatisfied users. Unfortunately, I missed a very annoying bug. When the app launched in portrait mode, the «All Subscriptions» button simply did not appear. As a result, the user saw only the welcome screen and the paid «remove ads» button :) Sad and funny at the same time. I myself constantly used the app in landscape mode and simply did not notice this problem, but I got reviews like «only the ads work».
Most of the requested features I never managed to implement because of lack of time. When you spend the whole day doing web development, it is hard to switch to mobile in the evening, especially when you are tired after work.
The app shows ads from AdMob. Over the year there were only 71135 ad impressions, which brought in $23.87. In other words, the in-app purchase to disable ads brought in more money than the ads themselves :)
So those are the modest results.