sugar rush

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Sugar Rush 1.4 Update

Posted by mike on July 15, 2012
Posted in: Apps, iPhone, Programming, Sugar Rush. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

I’ve submitted a minor update to Sugar Rush which changes the FaceBook SDK to use the latest API so sharing will continue to work. It also adds support for built-in Twitter accounts in iOS 5 or later and updates the Kiip SDK to the latest version.

Sugar Rush Free gets a much bigger update. In addition to those SDK changes, I’ve renamed it to Sugar Rush Lite and added in-app purchase to get rid of the ads & height limit. You can also buy Donuts, which will make it functionally equivalent to Sugar Rush Pro. Both Sugar Rush Lite & Sugar Rush Pro now share the same Game Center leader board & achievements.

A big piracy problem

Posted by mike on May 12, 2011
Posted in: iPhone, Programming. Tagged: . 2 comments

Our early sales for Sugar Rush were very low, despite a big PR push.  We had a problem on the first day when the screen shots disappeared for a few hours after I tried to update the description & screen shots. Second day sales were even worse.

However, I noticed something very interesting: the number of users in Game Center and the number of users reported by Flurry Analytics were at least 3 times the total number of sales reported in iTunes Connect. At first I thought the iTunes reports were delayed, but a google search revealed that there are lots of pirated copies available. If the numbers are accurate, this means there are at least 3 or 4 times as many pirated downloads as we had legal sales.

I’m amazed and disappointed that an app can be that widely pirated after only two days of sales, especially when the legal sales were lackluster.

As a result I’m very unlikely to develop any future iOS apps, since it looks like I can’t make a living on app sales.

UPDATE: according to a source, the illegal copy got 2000 downloads, which is a lot more than 4x the number of legal downloads.