Nice Teeth! (from Nick)
Since iStrip was released to the App Store a few weeks ago, many of our 45,000+ users have sent us their favourite screenshots of iStrip used with their own photos and textures.
Today we have published a few of our favourites in the new iStrip Fun sections on our site. These are some fun examples of how creative people get with iStrip.
Send your favourite screenshots to iStrip@rockcottageindustries.com and we may publish them on the site!
If you follow us on Twitter, you will know by now that iStrip has really taken off in some countries when we made it free just over a week ago. In fact, iStrip has even reached a Number 1 spot in Lebanon. The app has not received any coverage by anyone, except for an article on KRAPPS.com (thanks!), despite our best efforts. After the “iFart affair”, nobody wants to touch it and the name turns many people off.
We find it all this data very interesting and wanted to share some of it with other developers and interested folks. Here is a list of countries where iStrip is doing exceptionally well (as of today) in the charts.
| Country | Entertainment | Top 100 Free |
|---|---|---|
| Lebanon | 1 | 1 |
| New Zealand | 2 | 6 |
| Hungary | 3 | 14 |
| Australia | 4 | 10 |
| Finland | 9 | 26 |
| Canada | 17 | 74 |
Of course, some of these countries are pretty small. Tiny in fact. It does not take a lot to get to number one in Lebanon. But Australia and Canada are a slightly different story.
One thing that really surprised us is how similar the growth curves in all of these countries were. No matter how big or small they are, our most important learning is:
Let’s look at some details (charts from AppViz)
Growth was fast and steep
An almost perfect curve
At least 10x of New Zealand, but also explosive growth
These are some of the positive examples of how an app can shoot to the top, if only it gets enough exposure in the App Store. Making it into the Top 100 of your category is the most important step to this. If you don’t get there, no chance. Here is what happens…
Despite big initial numbers, never made it into Category Top 100
The US market is very big. We think at least as big as all the other markets combined. iStrip didn’t quite make it into the Entertainment Top 100 in the first couple of days and so it remained mostly obscure.
So what are the inflection points that give your app more exposure in the App Store (excluding being featured in some way by Apple, which is only ever going to happen for a handful of apps)?
| Level | Description |
|---|---|
| Category Top 100 | This is the first level to get any long term exposure in the store |
| Category Top 75 | Gets you to the 3rd page on the iPhone App Store |
| Category Top 50 | Gets you to the 2nd page on the iPhone App Store |
| Category Top 25 | Gets you to the 1st page on the iPhone App Store in your category |
| Category Top 20 | Puts you on the front page of your category in iTunes |
| Top 100 Free or Paid | Now you are getting into the big league: permanent two click access from the iTunes front page to your app. |
| Top 50 Free or Paid | Now people can find you from the iPhone App Store app on the Top 25 tab, by choosing “Load Top 50″ |
| Top 25 Free or Paid | Now people can find you from the iPhone App Store app on the Top 25 tab |
| Category Number 1 | Now your app’s icon is displayed on the category home page! |
| Top 10 Free or Paid | Jackpot, you are now featured on the App Store home page, and depending on the country, also on the iTunes front page! |
| Number 1 Free or Paid | Your app’s icon is featured on the iTunes homepage, the App Store homepage |
There you have it, what fun it is to be making iPhone apps. We will post some more as we gather more data.
It is very satisfying that after waiting over 6 months for Apple’s approval, iStrip is finally succeeding. We made the app free recently and since then it has climbed up the App Store charts in many countries. It is already one of the Top 100 Free applications in Australia, New Zealand, Hungary and Finland. Strong momentum in Canada, the UK, Italy and Germany make us hopeful that it will go even further.
Thank you everybody for downloading the app. Get it for free from the App Store today.
Obscene and offensive!
UPDATE (Feb 12): The Competition is now closed. No More iTunes vouchers will be given away.
iStrip has been rejected for inclusion in the App Store several times on the grounds that it contains potentially obscene and offensive material. It never did.
Now you can find out for youself, because we are making the original photo of our vintage model available for all iStrip fans!
iStrip allows you to add custom “bathing suit fabrics” from your photo library. Of course, they don’t need to be fabrics. You could add drawings or photographs. Anything you like, really.
Simply email us a screenshot of iStrip using your favourite “fabric” and we will send you the original bikini model photo. You can then import this to your photo library on the iPhone and use iStrip as it was always intended to work.
Send your favourite iStrip screenshot to istrip@rockcottageindustries.com and we will reply with the full size image of our vintage iStrip model. You can now download the original image from the iStrip page on this site.
We will publish the best screenshots we receive on this website. Let us know in your email if you want your name to be listed along with your image.
To our favourite entries we will award $10 gift vouchers for the US iTunes store. (The competition is now CLOSED) BUT So keep those screenshots coming.
(Btw, we will not publish anything offensive)
Today the very first application we ever wrote for the iPhone has finally been approved! It’s original name was iStrip and we submitted it in August of 2007 for review. iStrip was a virtual stripper pen, a gimmick that boys used to play with when we were young in the 1970s.
iStrip was quickly rejected, because apparently it lacked “utility for the wider iPhone user community” (despite it being submitted to the ‘Entertainment’ category).
Offensive material?
In December we made another attempt to get it published by adding a bit more ‘utility’ to it: a clock. This time we were told very directly that the app contained “offensive material”. This material was a woman in a bikini on the vintage 1960s photograph we used for our background. This version is the one you can see in the iStrip video on YouTube and AppTheater.
So we thought, let’s made the bikini bigger. At some point it has to stop being offensive, right? To make it more fun, we actually added the ability to choose bathing suit styles. Who could be offended by this? But no luck iStrip Clock did not get approved.
So in our final attempt we changed the name to “Novelty App”, changed the icon a bit and submitted the application as a game, stating that it contains ‘mild mature themes’. And guess what, this time it worked! Novelty App is now available in the App Store.
One great feature of Novelty App is that it allows you to pick one of your own photos as the bathing suit pattern. This opens up a few interesting possibilities :)
We learned today that the very first verion of Tokyo Time was “reviewed” (ok, mentioned) on Gizmodo back in September. And we had no idea! Still, exciting news.
You can get the much, much improved version of Tokyo Time 2.1.5 from the App Store. Jetzt auch auf Deutsch!
