Pokemon Go - a more complex version of Monster Cache

This week Niantic (aka Google) released Pokemon Go.  The new game uses location-based augmented reality to allow players to find and catch Pokemon (which is short for Pocket Monsters) at locations that players must physically travel to.  You can then train/upgrade the Pokemon, then use those Pokemon to battle other trainers.  The first part of that sequence -- using a location-based model to find and catch monsters -- is exactly the concept of Monster Cache, our application that was released a few years ago.  Of course, Pokemon cartoons and other games existed way before Monster Cache did, so I'm not at all saying that Pokemon Go copied Monster Cache.  And I know that Pokemon Go will be more fun for a lot of people who are already familiar with Pokemon and the monsters and the battling.  Its just disappointing to be an independent developer with an application and then see a partnership of two huge companies like Google and Nintendo release something so similar.

I still believe that there's a place for Monster Cache alongside of Pokemon Go.  Not everyone is into Pokemon, and so lots of people won't care about the particular monsters.  And many people are only interested in the finding monsters and not so much in the training and battling of the monsters.  So Monster Cache will live on!

2015 Recap

Unfortunately, 2015 was fairly frustrating year for Monster Cache, mostly from a development standpoint.  

At the very end of 2014, I released an almost completely rewritten Android version that no longer uses PhoneGap.  I did that because Android was requiring a change to how In-App Purchasing worked, and Phone Gap didn't have a plug-in for the new method.  I thought rewriting the app in Java might not be too hard since only the phone/client code was changing, not the server, and I had all the logic completed so it was just a translation.  Well, it was way harder than I thought it would be.  There were some bugs initially, and of course there have been some Android OS updates over the year that caused minor problems.  So there was a lot of Android bug fixing that I did all through 2015.  The good news is things are stable and working well on Android.

Apple keeps upgrading iOS too.  And their last upgrade broke our registration form.  To fix it, I need to buy a new Mac, since Apple requires newer Macs to develop for their newer iOS versions.  I've been putting off that computer purchase for a long time since there weren't any major problems, but I may finally have to make that purchase soon since the current bug is more critical.  In the meantime, if a person with a new iOS version downloads and can't register and emails me, then I direct them to a temporary web-based registration form I built for that purpose.

I did run a Facebook ad for a few weeks last June.  It brought in some new users and purchases, but as usual, not as many purchases as the ad costs.  I thought I'd run another ad this spring, maybe try Twitter, but then the new iOS registration bug happened.  So now another ad is postponed until I fix Apple version.

I guess its good news that there is still a slow trickle of registrations and purchases.  But its pretty much only a couple purchases a month.  Here's a sad but funny Apple story.  They charge $3.50 to transfer money to my account (Google charges nothing).  If I only get $2.00 worth of Apple purchases in a month, then they transfer the $2.00 to me and charge me $3.50 for it.  (Apple is not nearly as developer friendly as Google.  They also charge $99/year to keep your developer account open.  Again, Google charges nothing)

Other good news is we still get the occasional nice piece of fan mail or good review. This from an email from someone in the Netherlands: "This app is the best!!!. Me and my brother go outside almost every evening to catch some monsters. this app is just fantastic!"  And a 5-star review from Germany, translated as: "That's fun".  47 ratings on Google and average rating is: 3.7 stars, which I consider respectable.  Munzee, a similar app, has an average of 3.5.  Ingress, another similar app by a big studio, has an average of 4.5.