Why Developers Fail on Alternative App Stores & How to Succeed

uh we're going to talk about why developers fail on alternative app stores um message from catapult i'm i'm butchering your name now i'm always struggling with that particular first name my my bad all right can you hear me that's better yeah you know it's okay good so it wasn't too far off not as far as offered i hope still butchered it but anyway so great stuff um lovely to have you here and uh please tell us all about why developers fail on alternative capsules and houses succeed thank you so let me share my screen real quickly and thank you uh uh for having me here and i would like to talk about uh basically the topic of today is why developers fail on alternative app stores and what we need to do to success uh before

start is just self introduction i am uh currently vp of the aptoide and catapult i used to be head of um partnership at samsung galaxy store uh samsung shell and um first it's actually the major question is we should ask ourselves why should i work with all the alternative stores and well the answer is it's it's really hard for for the developers right now to get more exposure on the google play there's almost 3.5 million applications and there's almost 800 000 uh publisher there so if we are let's imagine you are a small developer in the developer and trying to publish a game without a budget the chances are that you are going to get the visibilities almost none so it you you need to start thinking how i can get more audience to to see to see my apps my games my application so what we usually uh recommend the developers is

that yes you still need to work in with google play and ios um if you are talking about the wide and broad audience but if you want to target a bit more specific audience niche market you know this is the place you want to work xiaomi oppo vivo huawei optoid you know uh softonic uh uh cafe bazaar and so many other stores that are out there and if you actually combine all the stores together and the total uh traffic you can get it's in hundreds of millions of users so a lot of developers actually trying to to think about how should i work with the alternative stores but they have the limitation they stop and this is the major reason why because because of the extra traffic and just to give some uh numbers just for aptoide the the sword that we are we are um working at only supercell two games has over 100 million downloads so you know of course this is a huge uh developer this is

the top downloaded games but he has that potential and it's it's every every every quarter has a couple million downloads uh extra on top of whatever else they they're getting and this is just up to it imagine that you are publishing your game on 20 alternative stores all together it can it can be a pretty much of um additional percentage to to your entire uh portfolio of new users so uh that's those are three major reasons number one it's it's actually much easier to get the features on those stores just ask them it's as easy as you know going to the to the stores going to let's say uh xiaomi uh team and say guys i have a new game or have a major update or we are playing to do some special event could you give us some feature yeah we can give you icon we can give you banner if you have a banner to throw it to us it's easy all you have to do is develop that uh relationship with them

and just just ask because they need content and without content those those stores are not able to grow um two years back those alternative stores almost had zero traffic but now it's starting to really climb up and if you're doing it well you can expect about 25 additional revenue uh to your title within two years that's that's the long-term uh strategic thinking if i spend more time on those app stores put in my games application what to expect five to twenty five and the more time you spend the the higher the uh the percentage that you can get lastly hundreds of millions of dollars of the new users imagine just huawei that it's not currently cooperating with google all the hundreds of millions of power users are not able to uh using google play so to to access their data you need to start working with huawei or the publisher that can help you publish the game on the

huawei platform so that's just an a few major reasons why you should work with the alternative stores but then the major challenges developers always uh thinking like oh it's so much work but what's what are the real challenges for the for the developers and basically it's the it's too much work like every time i talk to the developer this part it's already devastating i have to go to every single store and open an account with them i need to go with every store sign contract i have to involve my legal team billing team uh accounting team uh operation team just for every single store on top of that once we got this stuff running we have that account there you know i need to integrate sdk and the building is the game for every store and that's a lot of work well after this you still need to upload and whenever you have a

updates to your apk or you want to do some events your business development team or your marketing team operation team need to communicate with the source uh over and over again hey guys we have a new update could you please uh publish it on time you know as you can see that's a lot of work and this doesn't guarantee any results yet so right now right here a lot of developers already dropping they they feel like it's it's it's difficult and i could talk about more challenges that developers facing for example attribution for example like a paid user acquisition but unfortunately there's not much time for that so i'll just go talk about those are the biggest challenges it's usually technical side and the uh you know communication side so so how to actually become successful in those alternative source how to uh manage it well think about what if you only have a google play and what if you only have ios

how would you success there you will create a business plan for them for the next year two years three years you will have a road map for your product for your marketing team for your operation team and then you prepare uh presentation and give it to google play that you prepared to invest that much money could you give the features some time you have updates of this and this so why don't you do it with the uh third party source just repeat it just think about those stores are right now very successful making you a big potential uh outcome just repeat it and then within next couple months you will start to see the fruit of your labor so let's talk first about the integration because this is a major showstopper to to most of the developers and it doesn't have to be there are many solutions for um for the developer to choose you know i of course i'm from catapult so i'll i'll talk about how to put more but you know there are also other companies that offer similar services that we do

first is the flexion and flexion is actually our partner because they also publish uh flexion games on the aptoide store which belongs to catapult so flexion works like a publisher you basically send them apk and they help you publish your game on all the alternative store or at least major stores so well there's a revenue share but of course they do most of the work for you then you have a catapult which is us and we have a pro predatory technology that automate entire process basically all we need to do is you give us google play link osms apk and the automatic integration automatic submission uh will happen uh whenever you give us the link and if you have an update on google play it will automatically update to all the major stores that's how cool it is but because we're also offering co-publishing services our business marketing team will communicate with the stores and say okay this these games have a new update can we do some feature can we hear some uh marketing uh material and

there is the udp unity distribution portal and it's more like subs distribution they help you do all the technical stuff into one sdk but everything else like for example account setting marketing communication with the source building you have to still have to do by yourself those are your choices so if you're a developer thinking about the third party source you know you can choose somebody do it for you get the flexibility or you do everything by yourself um but those are your choices so it doesn't have to be showstopper for technical part so what's next well your attitude i think that's that's the most important you know thing when we're talking about the alternative stores a lot of people don't have a good attitude to them they and why because they the expectations are too high and unfortunately there's no magic way and imagine imagine you publish a game on google play and you put zero effort there you just

put it there you know and no marketing costs no user acquisition you don't even tell the google play the gaming game is there do you expect the game with success and that's a straight strong question and of course no most likely you're not going to get any users you know you might get few organic but it's not going to go anywhere so why do would you think that alternative stores are the same they're not going to work for you you still have to um maintain and build a relationship so what do you do right now with the google play you maintain the relationship with them you tell them you're working with them on the long term planning to attract the users to to create the promotion to ask them for some features and then you're doing the user acquisition media by influencer center optimization video optimization ios icon optimization title optimization so on and so forth and you know you know in your heart that if you don't do these efforts you're not going to success but what you should be doing with the

alternative stores is that you should actually maintain the relationship with them they might not be good big right now for example let's say xiaomi or oppo they're not that big yet but they could be you know they have uh they're like number four number fifth largest brand oem brand in the world they could be big if you're not maintaining relationship right now later it might be too late later they might be just sorry guys we don't have time for you you know it's it's just how the business work so you need to sit down and talk with your team and say okay we need to prepare establish long-term expectation what we can expect can we achieve let's say 15 of the increase of revenue from those stores if you imagine that if you pull the application now and tomorrow you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars you will you'll be disappointed but if you focusing on this uh long-term planning you actually can achieve really really big uh and good results and um inquire stores if they actually have a pay user acquisitions

because a lot of stores actually they offer to and you are getting the traffic you buying the traffic directly from the source you know there's no middleman for example facebook is a middleman often you know uh you don't have to pay it you get in directly from the oem phone that means the prices could be quite low you know if you target the users correctly and you know this is the main difference i think here in google play you know without effort you want success but in alternative stores you you kind of expect to success uh without much effort but actually it doesn't work that way so those are like the major differences that you will you expect now how how to improve it you know and this is how the catapult work and this is actually i would recommend for most of the developers to to the same way you know create a special promotion for the stores like let's say you put the game on the app and let's say oh we we prepared the welcome package

for the users just for up to users and because of that because you make something like this aptoide for instance will be very happy to and willing to actually find influencers to promote it give you features and often they pay for it and offer to even can pay for the promotion expenses i've been something before before we were offering like uh discounts or like uh rebates you know it wasn't a developer who paid for it it was samsung who paid for it whenever we did like 10 000 usdr's giveaways or like a free phones it was always the source uh doing this but we need to have a willing content provider who actually allow us to this kind of events then work closely with the stores just make the most important part even if you don't have the time to talk to them you know update your app on time just you know if you send into google play like on monday and then two weeks later you

sending update to the stores you know often the user will switch to google play and those stores lose incentive to promote you don't make it happen don't make the source lose incentive you know that's the reason we want to give them update on time um because it protects them from losing the users and sometimes fuel some traffic to alternative stores often you have on the website for example download google play download the ios what stops you from saying download on samsung download and xiaomi you know fuel some traffic this is the the market could actually uh become more and more uh richer because of that and i have three minutes so i just want to go over uh some case studies and then we go to q a so we have a few case studies like uh with a ig lord's mobile so so basically what they will achieve

we are achieving the alternatives or almost 100 million u.s round rate you know nobody would assume that but here it is is the the revenues are going up and after joining the temporary source the downloads increased by 250 and that's great it's uh you know the expectation on the title is 20 to 25 increase on revenues within 24 months that was the expectation and here's the the proof less than one minute all this transaction their life and their daily revenues another case study that i could offer to you is basically a mobile legend so a mobile legend in the first month 250 000 dau how just just asking all the major channels to promote doing major event at the same time so i'm not sure if you can see it but this is like article was seen by almost 15 million views you know stuff like that it's basically going back to the original question you know

ask them they will help you find a way and they will help you hundreds of influencers also was created uh within the first few months to promote the title you know so this is something that those stores are willing to do over and over again then we have a much older uh game like uh clash of kings which is more like classic they don't really promote much on the google play anymore or mainly organically because the game is like very very old but it still managed to increase the revenue by 10 within the eight months of the promotion and actually those uh third party stores triple the number of users that you are the the developer is getting compared to uh uh google play because again uh the developer is not buying traffic anymore so so it's organic so compared to organic users who are featuring cpi ads and global influencers they actually manage to to triple their uh monthly installs and the proof of

concept developer say okay we want to give you all the games uh so that's the biggest uh success case that uh that any source can have and lastly i have a one minute left smaller games just to give you idea that it's not only big games that can go big in terms of the z day um it's ahead of five by uh four months of the schedule so it's not really low and that's actually should be your expectation when you start it it's not gonna be like super quick right away but over time the revenue grows and for legacy of discord again from use of 15 growth in revenue within the first year so again mainly the expectation and the reality and communicating with the source will be the key for for you um uh to success thank you peter thank you so much oh sorry matt i'm looking i

shouldn't i shouldn't be looking at email when i'm listening to somebody at the same time great great talk and i think you're right this this is an area that i think is going to become increasingly important as well um and i think you know the the highway you know right away oh wait i can never say it right um example of app stores which aren't being supported by google is a good example of that as well i think increasingly the way that we're now seeing steam versus epic store is also another one i think you know as we move forward we'll probably see more and more stores taking you know coming out of game companies themselves as well so i think i think there's lots of areas of opportunity and we've got a few questions here um so let's let's kick off with um does ua and mmp attribution work in alternatives stools um yes if you go to like for example apps fire or adjust and you type it for like a turn uh how to get the attribution third party stores if you google it they will have a

page uh showing you an instruction how to do it so you you can set up the attribution there yeah i mean i think it's it's pretty straightforward it's just uh because people are you know a lot of game developers aren't ua people yes and so you know they've often been able to just you know defer all that work to somebody else uh whether it's the publisher or whether it may be the ad platform and you know yeah let's say we just stick you into ads in or whatever the pl hey i used to wear this i'm going to say that by default um but you know you you you see how that's easy and it's done but when you started to talk about you know getting someone to install on the third party platform sometimes the steps to do that are a lot bit a lot more complicated we say um i think particularly where we again maybe the default is you end up finding ourselves using facebook ads a lot because we can target we can get you to go directly we've got the facebook pixel in job done we're there um anyway can you this is actually i

think the same it's kind of the same question can we use admob facebook and others via iron balls ad mediation in other alternative stores is that the same answer not unless it's not 100 the same answer this is uh require a little bit of trick um yeah right now facebook send like you can you can put the app and ask you do you want to send to ios or google play but it doesn't have the other source unfortunately and i know that some major players already negotiating facebook to offer this uh possibility right now what we can only do is basically uh send uh send the traffic as a website link so instead of sending the traffic as an install send traffic is a website link so it's a little bit different uh way to to target the users no no it makes sense another question uh do we use different or the same bundle ids for alternative stores i

think that but i'd love to know what you think uh yes uh yes if we are talking about the package name uh it should be it should be the same it's actually most of the major stores will not accept a package them that is different than google play because a lot of those oem stores they still following the google protect and if they notice that for example package name is different they would say something wrong with this with this game you know and you will need to have a special permission from the stores to actually enable it it also comes with the signature it's better it's best if the developer signed the uh sunday on the package but for sometimes you could actually use the different package name but you would just create a bit more trouble you have to like uh it's like actually one two extra steps it's possible but it's not recommended no no i think it makes a lot of sense i mean one of the things that also occurs

to me um is just how important regionality is so so for example you know this mindset makes absolute sense in china but in china we've got to use you know a chinese-based partner to do that process yes um and obviously there were some there had been some many periods of time when that was slightly complicated particularly with certification and stuff like that i think it's a little easier now but not sure it's that much easier um and i know that there was lots of um old school and you know until not that long ago where there were still regions where you know even java games still existed of all of things and i think in particular there are some areas i think particularly in south america um where there are still you know regional app stores or even in some cases operator app stores or even you know other you know bespoke handset app stores i mean how far and why does this go and you know what does it mean for i mean like you say this approach you guys are talking about makes hopefully makes all

that simpler but how how much culturalization how much localization should we be putting into our mindset when we're looking at this kind of alternative app store approach um well it depends for example one of our partner store is kafe bazar and basically uh in iran there will be a lot of restriction you cannot show too much body parts you know so icon will need to be revised some screenshot would not be uh allowed you know some basic stuff like for example tick tock will be not allowed there because of the religion you know uh those stuff uh we we pay attention to but actually most of the store like i would say 95 of the major stores they closing their eye to it because they need content at this moment unless under somebody like a government uh report that or we we cannot we can't have that uh for for instance recently like india had a lot of uh

uh problems with the chinese apps but those apps are will still be available to some stores not all but some so it really depends like uh on the on the mindset of the stores mindset of the developers you know uh uh samsung something i show you with china as you mentioned uh we could for example if the developer doesn't have the isbn for china they can still somehow run the game but it's not going to be on the official channels it will be on the non-official channels some developers do it uh do i recommend it not necessary i would wouldn't recommend it but there are some invite you on the bottom later isn't it yes exactly yeah i mean the thing in china in particular is this sheer volume of stores that you could go to but i remember i think last time i looked it was like you know more than 140 or something stores that you could change exactly actually yeah i mean i think there were

additional ones but there were like 100 so that were they're very shitty yes they are very often like like there's one one thing it used to be billy billy they used to only focus on rpg type of uh content and now they grow it one of the biggest platforms in china uh something with the tap that used to focus on um on like uh top west games that are not available in china i became like the biggest platform in in uh uh user uh generated content yeah so they always start with the niche for example clash of kings uh sorry clash of clans from supercell is successful actually on the very small store that focus on strategy games only in intense and store in qq store you would not even see in the top 100 yeah no no exactly and i think you know yeah obviously a lot of the big kind of chat platforms the huevos and all this kind of stuff have their own kind of app stores and obviously vincent you know all these

bigger organizations and we i think when i was working in china it was like 2008's a long time ago they were you could at least go to the sort of 10 pop ones but i think that that's not the case anymore i think it's become just like you say there are these in fact you could argue it was essentially what google originally seemed to say when android first started that anyone could have their own store and this was a this is a logical conclusion where stores become you know around the audience for the store and therefore the games can be found that you go to the store you want to find those games i i think that's a good thing but i think there's a consequence to it which is that we're not going to see the same return across the board from alternative app sources we might see on an apple or an android store or even steam you know arguably how do you how do you help people set people's expectations so that they know over crosstalk by covering the whole range of stores

you're going to have a significant increase but any particular store might not deliver that increase how do you set the expectation of developers on that correctly uh i have to look at the at the top of the game that we are working with and then the first question asked me does the stores have any incentive to promote this game if the game is like for example hyper casual casual game uh usually the stores don't earn any revenue because all the revenue coming from the advertising so what's the incentive for the sources promoted by by cpi you know just just do your basic roi if it's getting cheaper ads than you are communicating with the uh um retention you are in the profit zone but what if you have a like med core hardcore or type of games that actually have you can do some revenues to the source is there enough incentive for the source to promote if there is you could expect 25 percent uh increasing the revenues if you are

talking everything except china we're not talking about china around just all the global stores if but this is something that it's i would say in the floor 25 floor two years you know yeah what happened two years later i hope that you know we're not going to have a uh duopoly in the market maybe there will be another major sword that actually become very very big then the the the whole holster will change you know yeah well i mean i still think that the you know there are so many opportunities for you know webgl based uh well whatever the next i forgot next web gpu is now the next one you know where this kind of technology starts to change accessibility but we'll still need some way of finding content so i i still think that we're going to see more stores not fewer um i think you know so this approach you guys taking i think very smart and i think you know more developers that look to deal with cross app stores are going to be incredibly important moving forward as well but it's also

really about understanding where your audience is and targeting that and i think the smarter we can be in choosing the right channels for our game to be effective and localizing that appropriately and culturalizing that appropriately i think that's where we're going to see the best success from this kind of approach thank you thank you so much for that that was great talk and uh everybody