First of all, the title of this post is a joke. This is by no means a secret, and it will in no way guarantee the success of your app. However, I get asked this question so much that I’m slowly going to build up this post with some tips and suggestions that may or may not be obvious, but are important enough that you can’t afford to not know them. I don’t really have time to do the full post now, but I’ll add to it over time.

The first tip which I can not emphasize strongly enough: listen to all your users, and respond to their concerns (if they are legitimate). I know this is a major shortfall of the AppStore, in that it is tough to go back and forth with your users. Developers can not add a comment to a review? Seriously? A third of the one star reviews on StickWars are people too dumb to press the giant options button before complaining about ‘not being able to turn off the music’ or some other issue I fixed long ago. A one sentence reply by me would help them, and they would raise the review of my game, helping me.

That being said, you must create your own forums for users to ask you questions and receive answers. And no, don’t you dare add in a generic ‘contact us’ form and call that your support feedback. You are not some spineless, monolithic company who can afford to treat their customers like crap because you are too big to have any real competitors. Create a forum where people can post questions and you can answer them, and other people can see those answers without having to ask themselves. For every person who asked a question, there are probably 10 more who typed the same thing into google looking for an answer but was too lazy to ask the question themselves.

Best of all, these forums can be a valuable tool to get ideas how to improve your product. I’m not exaggerating when I say that 70% of the enhancements I push out with every update started as user suggestions.It’s not that I do what every user asks, but I consider every suggestion even if I initially considered the issue and decided against it. For many of the features in StickWars, there were features I really did not want to add, but many people asked for them, and after I took the trouble to add them in, the response was overwhelmingly positive. If you didn’t get the important point so far, I’ll keep it simple…listen to your customers. Separate the stupid input (example: ‘hey can you plz ad zombies, ufos, monkies, nukes, rifles, cows….’) from legitimate feedback and suggestions and weigh all of it carefully when deciding what to add to your application.

I’ve read every single review posted on the AppStore about StickWars and StickWars Lite, for all versions. In case you don’t realize how many there are, right now the number stands at about 2000+ combined. I’ve found that iTunes does some really bizarre caching of them, so I use my iPhone to read reviews each day until I read one I recognize. It’s not the best system, but it works. I don’t know whether or not most developers already do this, but either way, you should. Oftentimes I’d read 100 retarded reviews to find one guy who had a truly original and easy-to-add idea to add to StickWars. Twenty-five minutes later, I finish adding this feature that I later get hundreds of ‘awesome idea!’ reviews for. Seriously, this type of stuff happens, and with all these people offering feedback (even if 95% is ridiculous), you need to read all of it.

I’ve started using a fantastic service from www.appfigures.com that allows you to read reviews of your application from every worldwide app store. I went through and read every non-US review that was in english, and found for some bizzare reason, like 30 people all outside of the US asked where to find a link to my forums. Nobody in the US had ever asked this question, but I realized it might be a good idea to manually throw it in there (as the generic iTunes “StickWars Support” link isn’t really informative to the user).

That’s it for now…later on I’ll be adding some more comments about some of my App Store lessons learned.