Database Develop

Need feedback about my first theme

Hi Guys,
I've made my first theme and popped it on the android market, I made the decision to charge £0.99 for it as I believe it to be worth that and I know if I saw it then I would have no qualms with paying this at all, however since releasing it around 10 hours ago, ive only had 3 downloads all of which were cancelled so im trying to work out reasons why. One possible reason I can think is that they are using the Motorola Droid, where most these don't look particularly good because of the resolution, the second is that they just plain didn't like it! I do find this rather odd though as I have included 2 screenshots.
So if here's the androlib link (http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-nd-android-pandatheme-psimpleblack_5896-pExj.aspx) (screens dont do it much justice), I would appreciate any feedback. If anyone wants to download it for real then for today I will refund anyone from XDA developers who purchases it, just PM me your name after you have done so.
Thanks a lot for any help .

Looks pretty good to me, i take it the fuzziness is just in the screenshots? There's certainly A LOT worse on the market that have quite a few downloads, so I think you just have to give it time.

Yeah the fuzzyness is just the screens, thanks for the comment . Feel free to download if you want to take it for a spin and I'll refund your money making it free.

Anyone else got anything to add? getting a lot of views but little in the way of comments .

jgclifton said:
Anyone else got anything to add? getting a lot of views but little in the way of comments .
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I would suggest making the notification bar black. The white bar does not look quite right. On the other hand, I only theme AOSP ROMS, so this may not be an option for you.
I want you to know that what follows is constructive criticism in the hopes that it will help you. If I offend I apologize, and give you full permission to tell me to piss off.
When I look at the theme, it looks nice, very clean, all the graphics work, but there is nothing that grabs my attention. It seems very "flat" and I personally would refund and get a theme that would draw me in to the screen. Having said that, I think it is really great work, that with a little bit of effort could really sell. I am sorry to say that I can not tell you what it needs, but I suggest making a few mock ups in gimp (or photoshop) and asking people what they think.
Additionally, the theme looks a lot like an iphone, which may be why I do not care for the look as much another may. The idiots on the market are always looking for iphone this and that, and thus I think it could really sell given time.

Thanks, comments noted, very helpful. The black notification bar isn't an option in this sort of theme but I'll definately be looking into ways of jazzing it up for a version 2.0 .

While I love themes like this, the only issue is that every other app installed will have a regular icon. Which unfortunatly takes away from your great work..

Yeah I recognise this, i was thinking of adding extra ones for the most popular apps (facebook, twidroid etc). Maybe this is something I'll look further in to.

jgclifton said:
Yeah I recognise this, i was thinking of adding extra ones for the most popular apps (facebook, twidroid etc). Maybe this is something I'll look further in to.
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That is exactly what I did. There is no way to legally theme and distribute most market apps, so just make an addition icon pack and let people apply via bettercut.

By the way, I showed this to my wife, whom is a professional graphic designer, and asked her opinion. She suggested it is way too flat, and needs more contrast. I realize that you do not want to add color to accomplish this, as it defies the point of your theme, so she suggested to do away with the symmetry. Stagger some icons, give the homescreen a look that carries the eye of the viewer around it.

Thanks cloverdale, will definately take this into account in my future themes. Currently selling ok on the market place after making a few colour variations .

[App] le verge - The Verge news reader

Hey folks,
I recently launched a news reader for The Verge. There isn't much branding but I spent some effort on making it look like a native app and optimization. Give it a try and give me some feedbacks! This is my first app so I would really like to know how I can improve it in the update.
Screenshots:
plus.google.com/photos/111110047704514154176/albums/5692500512694149153/5692500518936231586?authkey=CKqZ-vrorKHsbg
MARKET LINK:
windowsphone.com/en-us/apps/f83a91e5-9222-442c-a378-a70797b466b6
Or just search "le verge" on the marketplace.
Let me know what you guys think!

A very nice app for starting specially because its fast and follows the metro design. There are two suggestion from my side :
1. Option to make text bigger or smaller.
2. Caching of posts for offline reading.
I have done video review to share with my readers you can check here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQwgxA-MsB8

Wow, very nice! It's fast and looks great.
Just a few minor thoughts:
1) Agree with wpxbox about adding a font size setting
2) I'd buy it! Would love to see a paid version without ads offered
Nice app, thanks for posting it in the market!

"You sir is a genius!" (read with a quest-like voice from a knight lol)
Thanks very much for this app! Now I can get rid of the mobile web version of their awesome site. Joshua should tweet this and post on their Featured page so it gets the attention it deserves

[game] Armed! - Starcraft style

I do not know if this has been posted before, but Armed has been released about a week ago. I've been playing it like crazy ever since. Has multiplayer, turn based, etc. CPU AI is pretty hard too.
Check it out here.
http://www.armedgame.com/

wow
looks very nice, im gonna test it out. thank you!
xontec

it's imazing

A lot of reviews say it crashes on startup!
be sure to trial it, if possible, before you waste $4.00USD lol.

erebusares said:
A lot of reviews say it crashes on startup!
be sure to trial it, if possible, before you waste $4.00USD lol.
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It still has a few bugs which may result in crashes every now and then. But it's very stable most of the time. At least for me. Its developers are working hard on some updates that address the bugs/crashes and add new features and maps. I for one don't regret spending 4 bucks for this - in my opinion - awesome game.

I haven't played/test it. I mostly just did some research of reviews. Seeing a good many people say it crashes during start up. They can't play the game. So, just a friendly advisory!

Try powering off your phone. It also has issues for region not being in English/US. So if that happens change your region I think. Otherwise, just wait for the fix.
I love the game, and $4 is nothing for this.

Hi guys.
I'm one of the developers of ARMED!
We're first time smartphone developers... we did a little Java phone development in like 2004, but most of our experience is in PC and console games. Try as we might we had some crash bugs... most of them related to non-US regions.
We spent alot of time before release testing the stability of gameplay... we ran thru hundreds of thousands of automated games driven by special stress test AI, but we made some rookie mistakes in other areas... like not testing the game in different locales.
It also doesn't help that it wasn't till yesterday that we got our first stack traces from Microsoft.... that was almost 2 weeks since our game was up on the marketplace. That's way too slow for the pace of moblie development IMO... we've learned our lesson there are have integrated Bugsense (google it... forum won't let me post links) for the next release.
Anyway the 1.1 release just appeared in the marketplace and it addresses all the bugs we knew of as of a week ago. I'm sure we'll find more, but at least the locale and a couple of dumb crash bugs were squashed and should make it playable for everyone.
Thanks for trying ARMED!

i like the graphics and control. Keep up the godo work.

Are the price depends on our country that we are residing or it's in standard USD.I mean for all the apps in the markrtplace.

Question to the developer:
I am an indie developer with Full-time job, and have my own game on Marketplace as well. How do you promote your game, and do you earn something for all hard work you put into the game ? As I see it right now, it would be really hard to make a living from it.
My game is free (with ads) and recently I added non-ads version of the game for people to donate something, or to disable ads.
What I found out is that from ads you earn ~0
Btw. As I said before your game is really an Eye candy

@Ttblondey
The developer has control over pricing in each region individually if they want to set them.
In our case we set the price for the US region and let it automatically set the equivalent price in all other regions.
---------- Post added at 05:12 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:46 PM ----------
dk5055 said:
As I see it right now, it would be really hard to make a living from it.
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I sort of agree... it depends on your app/game. Most of what i see on the marketplace are things one could build in a couple of hours or clones of other apps/games. It is hard to rally users behind you if you don't have a unique and high quality product.
At the current sales/ad rate we could not support our entire company (6 people) with ARMED! sales on WP7 alone. We could support one employee... but not 6.
To me this is a victory and shows the potential of WP7 in the future considering that its only 1%-2% of the smartphone market. With the push MS plans to make over the next few months i expect our revenue to at least double if we can keep the attention of the audience with updates and improvements.
That all said... we are looking at ports to other platforms to maximize revenue from the ARMED! brand and core tech. We're not ready to disclose what platforms those are yet... but it won't be Android.
dk5055 said:
What I found out is that from ads you earn ~0
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We're struggling with our ads as well. It is all new territory for us, so i'm giving it some time before i pass judgement.
Our 1.0 release was missing ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT which seems caused the ad network to not show near as many ads as it could. Still even after fixing this in 1.1 on my personal phone i still don't see ads at times which is really confusing to me. Still i see ad revenue improving, but its barely enough to by coffee for the office.
There is money to be made with ads... people are doing it now. Also WP7 often has a higher revenue on the same amount of impressions... but you have to get impressions.
If your game/app is not attracting users then you won't make money with ads. You need to be seeing 50K to 100K impressions per-day to really support yourself with ads alone. Most developers do this by shipping several high quality apps... not just a single one.

Looks very nice!

better then most of the xbox live games. you, sir, are a hero!

Great game, amazing graphics
I already posted a short review of the game to support you guys:
http://pockethacks.com/armed-a-sci-fi-turn-based-multiplayer-strategy-game-for-windows-phone-7/

xhirschix said:
better then most of the xbox live games. you, sir, are a hero!
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Thanks xhirschix.
We're trying hard here to build ARMED! into a fantastic game. It really does help our motivation when people praise and especially buy the game.
Win_XP said:
Great game, amazing graphics
I already posted a short review of the game to support you guys:
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We can use all the promotion we can get! Thanks Win_XP!

its nice and amazing

V1.1 work great , wish more and more item will join feture version.

I did the try on this I like this gamethat said I didn't have any issues with it at all. and when I do a try to use if I like it I'll buy it if not I remove it this game has been bought! I had a ball playing this. and didn't get bored at all with it. though It drove me nuts at times...you know when you don't play it well... over all the game is nice and nice work done on it by the Dev team....it's well worth the money....

Looks really sweet. You should consider porting it to tablet enabled Windows 8 computers seeing as the beta goes live in Feb. Then you would be the first indie to have head to head between phone and tablet

Great Place to Order Seafood

So I've been working for this great company called Sizzlefish for the past year. They offer a wide selection of delicous seafood such as salmon, lobster, shrimp, halibut, haddock, scallops, crab, and a whole lot more. I would love for y'all to check out the site and please do not hesitate to suggest improvements, dm me about bugs or even suggest a product. I would strongly recommend any of our smoked salmon selection or the halibut. I've been coming to this site since I was like thirteen or fourteen and I know that there are some very talented developers who stay active on this site with great suggestions for this site. I'm also sure there are some of you out there who would love to know where to find great seafood!
If any of y'all stumble upon something you really like on the site, direct message me on here or request a live chat and I'll probably be able to hook you up with a coupon or something.

[APP] Substratum patched for not requiring TouchWiz addon

This does not work anymore! The substratum team patched the template so there's no possible way to circumvent this anymore. Any requests to pm me or email me will be met with extreme annoyance and anger. It does not work, it will not work, and no I won't make an exception for you!

I was curious about this myself. Who does the $2 go to and why did they have a monopoly on it?

Interceptor777 said:
You may be able to do this legally, but it's kind of a **** move since it's those devs work and you're giving it away for free which ofc you're allowed to but it's just kind of a **** move.
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I agree, but at the same time, I don't have more to say

I love You!
I hate that annoying pop-up so much. You can't even use half working legacy mode for free anymore . And I wanted to buy that sungstratum addon but I couldn't use my paypal with my google play account and ugh. Thanks a lot!

Great work
Unfortunately I already paid for it haha
Substratum is great don't get me wrong but I don't see why Samsung users got the charge? Especially when it's a lot more limited for us. That doesn't make sense to me.
I did question it this was my reply
Edit: sorry for the DPI :laugh:

NEW RELEASE: Mod edit: link removed
Since Sub's dev said this, I had to patch again to make it look like it has TouchWiz addon installed
Now it looks like this:

The app always shows me an error when i try to apply any layer from any theme.
Even Substratum StatusBar Icons for Samsung from XDA.
I've unistalled the 2$ addon and official substratum.
LOGCHAR:
APK could not be signed
Thanks for your work.

_moelle said:
what kinda dumb question is that? that money goes straight to the substratum team, that people who spent a lot of time and work on that theme engine. what do u expect who would get the money of it? its as legit as charging money for a simple theme. why do they have the monopoly of it? maybe because no one else was able to bring up a working theme engine just as feature-rich and system-compatible as substratum is. go ahead, create your own engine and make it even better as subs, then there is no monopoly any more. but in the mean time value developers work! we should be glad to have such a great project like substratum. u guys are just hurting yourself. - what do u guess will happen if everyone would act in such a ungrateful way as u guys just did? passion get lost, people stop developing great projects and we all end on unthemed, stock ui using, aweful looking smartphones. - da **** is going on ya minds? not just pirating that addon ....no u just even create a thread here on xda to spread your cancer....i feel sorry for everyone who uses that much energy just to avoid to pay two ****ing bucks....you guys seem to have a tough life.
this is clear sharing of warez and was already flagged and forwarded by me.
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You just don't understand what warez is then. This is a fork of the get that is published under the gpl3. And is part of open source projects. The issue is that if you have any manufacture but Samsung the app is free. Making it a paid add-on should be a violation on xda itself as it's against the policy. Furthermore it drives down theme purchases as well when you have to purchase the key just to test themes. In app donations vs forced purchase is a better route.
Even making themes for subs is harder because you would have to invest in their app now to contribute to the theme library, but we all are entitled to opinions.
I guess if subs didn't want their work to be forked they would build closed source and become proprietary, I mean he was a contributor to the project itself as well btw so I guess that becomes irrelevant now ey? Oh well..
I support the maintiaing of free open source projects, ask for donations and in app purchases for pro features etc, remove nag messages etc. This was the only way I would support any app imo.

Team DevDigitel said:
You just don't understand what warez is then. This is a fork of the get that is published under the gpl3. And is part of open source projects. The issue is that if you have any manufacture but Samsung the app is free. Making it a paid add-on should be a violation on xda itself as it's against the policy. Furthermore it drives down theme purchases as well when you have to purchase the key just to test themes. In app donations vs forced purchase is a better route.
Even making themes for subs is harder because you would have to invest in their app now to contribute to the theme library, but we all are entitled to opinions.
I guess if subs didn't want their work to be forked they would build closed source and become proprietary, I mean he was a contributor to the project itself as well btw so I guess that becomes irrelevant now ey? Oh well..
I support the maintiaing of free open source projects, ask for donations and in app purchases for pro features etc, remove nag messages etc. This was the only way I would support any app imo.
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Completely agree!!
Thank you for your input

it is a little unfair for the 2.00 Samsung only charge but I'm told its a lot more time and work the theme the Samsung skins. not sure if that's true but if it is indeed a fact, i understand the extra charge for Samsung only. i paid the 2.00 because for its worth it due to the lack of mods you can do on a newer Samsung device. yes we have root but the cons outweigh the pros for me anymore to do root. Not trying to start a war and I'm not against this thread or anything, just saying we don't know the reasoning behind the 2 dollar charge

black96ss said:
it is a little unfair for the 2.00 Samsung only charge but I'm told its a lot more time and work the theme the Samsung skins. not sure if that's true but
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Pretty much all of the samsung substratum themes are paid for, The 2 .00 addon charge will NOT go to these people adding Samsung support to there themes, it will go to Substratum devs, the ones that give it to everyone else for free just not to Samsung users
IMO the only reason for this secondary app is to charge people for an app they made the mistake of making free and open source. As you can see it works fine without it.

already paid
it was silly of them to require that other app even though i'm rooted

this doesnt work
it always shows errors in installtion themes.

So sad a dev can't make a little money from his hard work because entitled butt hurt children disagree. I have many free things on xda and charge for my themes. I work hard on getting it updated yet it gets patched free too I feel it's stealing from developers hard work. You don't want to use it..root and use custom Rom. Get a phone that can. Be a team player but that's just me.
DJ
Team BlackOut

djdarkknight96 said:
So sad a dev can't make a little money from his hard work because entitled butt hurt children disagree. I have many free things on xda and charge for my themes. I work hard on getting it updated yet it gets patched free too I feel it's stealing from developers hard work. You don't want to use it..root and use custom Rom. Get a phone that can. Be a team player but that's just me.
DJ
Team BlackOut
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dude it's required even though you are rooted. why i was forced to buy it
i bought many substratum themes. all the good ones are bought, it's not like i couldn't pirate them i chose not to
why are you talking out of your b....

TheUndertaker21 said:
dude it's required even though you are rooted. why i was forced to buy it
i bought many substratum themes. all the good ones are bought, it's not like i couldn't pirate them i chose not to
why are you talking out of your b....
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Stealing is never justified no matter how you think it is. You're a thief! HANDS DOWN!

USA-RedDragon said:
So, everybody who wants to use substratum on touchwiz is required to buy an addon from the google play store for two dollars. I don't like that. The themers don't benefit from it, nor was samsung support a huge problem to get going. I patched out the requirement for it, and am uploading the apk for it.
Now before people get all up in arms about this, I'm legally able to do this. The code is released under GNU GPLv3, and I can make modifications all I'd like as long as I share the source. (Here, for reference)
You'll need to uninstall the default substratum app and replace it with mine, other than that, it's the same app. As Substratum updates, I will too.
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People like u are the reason open source development isn't as popular it should be; do something unique and u get your work stolen with a technicality. You're not doing this for yourself but you're actively trying hurt the only "livelihood" of Substratum developers because you're used to stealing software, movies, MP3s and stuff, am I right?
U have 700-800$ phone, and complain for a full theme engine for 2$.

It's one thing to take GPL-licensed work and remove the requirement for the add-on app. It's entirely another to make it look like it's an "official" release so as to try and get support from the substratum team, when they specifically said they won't support modified builds.
Thread closed.
Please do not contact the OP regarding the patched version, as he will not be distributing it.