Talked at Geo U in Kansas City

Thanks to my friend and Monster Cache beta tester Steve for inviting me to talk about Monster Cache at his Geocaching University.  I wasn't sure how interested traditional geocachers would be in the app.  There were about 30 people there, and I think 4 or 5 of them installed the app in the next few days, and that's with only Android available.  So I thought that was a pretty good response.

Before the meeting, we had about 15 people on Legend board.  So after a few days we had close to 20, and now we have 21 total.  Still with Android only.  Hoping for a big jump once we launch on iPhone and go to Planet Comicon.

Submission to Apple app store

Finally got the app submitted to the Apple app store.  I'd hope to do it last weekend, but we weren't quite sure that the sounds were working on iPhone.  I was going to get my neighbors as a couple more iPhone testers, but couldn't coordinate our schedules.  Then it seemed like sound was working, so I went ahead and submitted it.  We really didn't have as much iPhone beta testing as we would have liked, but we did get it tested on a few different devices and OS's.  Comparing findings with testers, it seemed that the XCode iOS simulator was a good representation of the devices.  I was able to duplicate problems and I was able to switch devices to try different resolutions.  So I feel good about the submission.

We are now "Waiting for Review", which means we are in the review queue.  They had some stats in iTunes Connect that said that 90% of apps were reviewed in last 5 business days.  Not quite sure if that means the queue is 5 days long, or the whole process takes 5 business days.  I'm just hoping I'll hear something within 2 weeks.  Won't quite hit my hopeful March 1st launch, but close enough.  If I need to fix anything, I should still have time to fix it before.....

Planet Comicon!  Matt found us an event to be our first promotional event.  Looks great!  Cost for a table in Artist Alley is $150 for two days.  They hope to have 10,000 people, and it seems like comic enthusiasts might like our art and games in general, so hopefully its well worth it.  We may even try to sell some artwork to try to make up the money.

Android Launch!

Today we launched MonsterCache on Android.  Very exciting to see it show up in the Play store.  I made a screencast of myself launching it:

Only two new accounts so far, but I guess that's not a big surprise.  Not sure how likely it is that people install it when they've never heard of it, so the two new accounts are friends.  We'll do more of our own promotion once the iPhone version launches. But for now, just excited to have it out there.

Here are a few more details in an email I sent the team:

NOW it's official
We are officially in the Play store!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lanitek.monstercache

Download stats are updated once a day, so we may not have any stats on that until tomorrow.  But we can watch the Legend board for new players too. I'll also be adding the Android button back to the web site home page now that I have the URL.

Also, I noticed that currently a search for MonsterCache brings the app right up but Monster Cache (two words) doesn't.  So I changed the name of the app to Monster Cache, two words.  Looks like changes don't take effect for a couple hours.  But that should help us if someone searches for it as two words, or for all searches with "Monster".  And I put it as one word in the app description so hopefully that will force it to come up for searches when used as one word.  We may have to talk more about one word vs two  later.

But we're up!  And prior to launch, video has 107 views, will be interesting to see how that changes too.