Moving towards mobile MVP
While I am a strong believer in releasing early and relying on future updates for product improvement, I do believe that the MVP needed to release on mobile has to be substantially better than what can be released on web. My reasoning being:
- App store ratings App store ratings is a major factor in the store discoverability of your app, and while the Apple App Store gives you a fresh start for app ratings every time you release a new version. It's likely that your overall rating influences your discoverability.
I therefore want to ensure that the game has the expected features, performs well on old devices and is bug free before releasing to mobile app stores. - Update cycle Releasing an update to an online app is instant - releasing to app stores not so much - with the approval process sometimes taking weeks. It's therefore, once again, very important that the first version released is practically bug free.
- Release process similarly to update cycle, the process of packaging and pushing your app to app stores takes substantially more time than uploading a web version, makes fixing bugs and releasing features a much more cumbersome experience.
To ensure I get the most out of my time, I therefore expect to only push major releases to app stores. I also hope to build a toolchain that makes as much as this process as possible automated.
Holding off the mobile release also allows me to build organic returning users to the game. I hope to be able to convert at-least some of these users to app users, bootstrapping the mobile version and ratings.
Getting Solitaire FRVR in mobile app stores is a major goal of mine and to help ensure I have the right focus towards this goal, I therefore maintain a before I can work on mobile releases todo list containing tasks that I must complete before starting work on the mobile version and tool chain.
This weekend I released version 2.1.0 of Solitaire FRVR which allowed me to check off some major tasks on this list.
- Game modes The game now has support for Draw 1 and Draw 3 game modes. Allowing the user to switch between these using a simple toggle in the sidebar.
- Saved state The game state is now saved automatically, allowing users to return to their previous game at any time. Making the game feel much more like an app.
- Bugs and performance I fixed a bunch of bugs and did minor updates to performance.
Left on my before I can work on mobile releases todo list is still 9 major items. However I hope to have these completed by Sunday this week.