July 9th, 2013
CallSnap Hits 50,000 Downloads!
So it’s been over a month now, and CallSnap on Google Play has gone over 50,000 downloads at about an average of 1,000/day. Care to know what we’ve been up to with the app?
Launch
The CallSnap launch at the CTIA International 2013 went great. We were able to talk to media, potential partners, and show-goers about what they thought about the app. The overwhelming theme we heard was that an app that lets you reply to an incoming call by sending a photo was a great idea that many people were surprised they “hadn’t already thought of”. We like to hear that, to us owning something obvious = mainstream!
We made the choice on Day 1 of CTIA to make CallSnap entirely FREE “for a limited time” to establish a solid user base as the top priority. Also at the show, we released an updated version that fixed an issue for select phones.
Also via the CTIA show and our visibility as an exhibitor, we have had a few discussions about potential CallSnap partnerships in regards to advertising/marketing possibilities and with adding feature-rich functionality to enhance things like the photo.
Post-Launch – Review Time!
In the first few weeks after launch, CallSnap received numerous web reviews which can mostly be found on our Press page. Not only were the web reviews positive, but also our reviews in the Google Play store have been solid, yielding us a 4.5/5 rating. In fact, we have listened to our reviewers and we have responded.
We added translation of the app a couple weeks after launch. The next step will be to include images and frames that are also set to the language on one’s device (in other words, as of now those are all still in English).
We are getting a fair amount of downloads in India. In fact, we finished the month of June the # 16th ranked app in India in the category Social, more than a dozen spots ahead of the powerhouse app Snapchat! We have received good feedback from this region though, too. Unlike in the U.S. where unlimited SMS and data are the norm, not everyone has a plan to SMS for free. So even though someone could use a 3rdparty app to send their photo for free, the SMS message was still costing some users money. Even though our one-star reviewers who critiqued us for this will probably not remember to change their ratings, we have listened and reacted to our users by making the outgoing SMS an option.
What’s Next?
As CallSnap matures at the six week and 50,000 download mark, we are working on implementing the “roadmap” for the app.
The first $.99 in-app purchase we are going to roll-out is to respond to a phone call with an audio photo, aka a “Voicesnap”. We’re looking at throwing in one or two other small upgrades with this, but have not yet made a final decision.
Also, we’ve had part of our team hard at work on an iPhone-jailbreak version of CallSnap that will be available to the iPhone-jailbreak community. This will broaden the reach beyond “all Android” and be a strong proof of concept for us to lobby Apple to open up developer access to the phone call so we can develop CallSnap on iOS for the App Store.
Also coming down the pike later this summer will be the in-app purchase “CallClip”, which lets you respond to a phone call with a 5 second video. As our app reach and media reviews and coverage around the app increase, we think CallSnap will gain steam. Nonetheless, please help us spread the CallSnap word to your fellow Android users!
Josh Eidenberg — TIP Chief Creative Officer
