The IAA Network.
Marketing is the key to success for an app. Exposure to the public thru advertisement let people know about the cool features of your app, incentivising them to buy your work. There's no doubt. If you create a mind blowing app and nobody knows about it, it is as it never existed.
Problem: advertisements and targeted reviews cost money. This is not really a problem if you are Electronic Arts, but it might be if you are just "John Anderson".
Solution: As indie developers, often we cannot spend for costly marketing expenses, but we can gather together and advertise each other, in a fair free system. This system is called the IAA Network.
Basic Principles
The IAA Network gives indie developers a way to receive exposure of their apps while giving exposure to other IAA Network members' apps, in a fair way. A little icon with the IAA logo (or a label saying "more apps") is added to an app's main menu or subview and whenever an user touches it a list of apps from other members of the network appears. From there, users can scroll the list, browse categories, touch an app for additional details and eventually (and hopefully) buy it.
The network has a crucial task to accomplish, which is guaranteeing that apps are shown in the list in a "fair way". We don't want the predominance of top-selling apps over the less known ones, but at the same time we don't want the formers to be rated the same way as the latters. If an app has a lot of users (and therefore gives big exposure to the network) it should be rewarded. But even smaller, less known apps deserve the right to appear in the network, with a smaller and proportional frequency.
A description of how the network calculates exposure and decides which apps are put on top of the list is available here. To quickly explain it: the more exposure you give to other apps in the network, the more exposure from other apps you will get. You give to the network, the network gives you.
This means that it is in your interest to place the icon that gives users access to the IAA network in your app in a visible place. If you hide the icon in some remote area of your app just because you want to meet the requirements, you will not give exposure to the network, and therefore the network will not give exposure to you.
A standalone version of the IAA Network is also freely distributed on the App Store. Click here to check it out.
We also provide day-per-day statistics so that members can keep track of the results given by the IAA Network!
Technical implementation
The latest version of the IAA Network can be implemented following the instructions provided here. Keep in mind that even though we've been testing the network for a while, minor issues might still be present. Please report any issue in our forum.
Every member accepted into the IAA Network has to incorporate the IAA Network APIs once his/her app has been approved. This is mandatory, not optional. Failure to implement the IAA Network will result into the expulsion of the member from the Alliance. The reason for this is that we want to create a strong, quality network of indie apps and we need the collaboration of everybody.
