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November 9, 2008 4:35 PM

Should we place our iPhone app in the Education or Games section of the App Store?

My husband and I have created an iPhone app, and we're about ready to put it up on the App Store. It's a math-related puzzle game, and it would fit under Education or Games. We've seen similar games in each category. So... where should we put it? There are far, far more apps in the Games section; thus, way more competition. But do games in the Education category generally sell less? Should we choose the high-traffic, high-competition category? Or the lower-traffic category with more visibility? Apple is so dang secretive about sales volumes -- beyond the most popular games, it's really difficult to know how an app is selling. Any opinions or experience with this would help. Thanks!

posted by changeling to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Are you sure you can't cross-list? I seem to remember finding the same application in two different sections when it made sense in either. I'm not an iPhone owner, but remember this from fiddling with another one.
posted by odinsdream at 5:25 PM on November 9, 2008

If you can't cross list, then I would put it in the Education section but mention it to sites like toucharcade.com that review iPhone games. That should get you some good exposure. The Games section is starting to get unusably crowded, and it will only get worse unless Apple implements a more fine-grained categorization for games (e.g., Action, Racing, Puzzle, Learning, etc).
posted by jedicus at 5:38 PM on November 9, 2008

IMO, you should put it in the category that matches best and trust App Store users to look in the right place. Personally I could see myself buying a math based puzzle game but not if it were listed under education - that just implies that it's not fun enough for adults to sell on its merits as a game.
posted by tomcooke at 5:22 AM on November 10, 2008

When people aren't searching for a particular app, they tend to browse by category, then sort by a 'quality' mechanism, such as number of downloads or ratings. By placing your app in the 'games' section, it's in danger of getting less exposure than you perhaps wanted - this is to do with tougher competition which have already gotten high ratings/downloads. I would place it in the 'education' for the above reason.
posted by dragontail at 11:01 AM on November 10, 2008