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The End of an App, The Beginning of 2 new Apps, And it is not a Joke 😂

Chyster, the first app we developed in reached the top visibility in the jokes niche in Spanish and English at Google Play. Suddenly it lost presence “thanks” to a ranking change produced by the algorithm of the search engine giant. After some years of resignation, we decided to launch 2 new apps, and this is the story I wanted to share with you in this IH post

With my friend Martin, during 2014 we developed a jokes app called Chyster, after finishing a free online Android development training at the University of Maryland via Coursera.

We decided to dedicate part of our free time (after our day job) to develop a first app as a side project, and thus tried our luck in the promising world of app development. After all we only needed to spend $25 ($12.5 each of us) to publish the app and get it seen in almost all the countries.

We born in 1970s, so we grew in a world without internet, and we found this new project was a fantastic opportunity of doing something global and different.

Being both of us Electrical Engineers working for a big company, another thing we found interesting was to complement our professional experience with a creative activity doing things in a free and unstructured manner.

After the MVP was ready (we used native android that was what we learned), we started to promote the application.
Our marketing strategy was to share the app via Twitter and some few investments in ads.

In Twitter we managed to get a big audience. For example the accounts @chysterjaimito and @chysterpicante, have more than 40K followers and were the main channels to reach early adopters.
While working on this social network, we were able to get the first feedback from customers, and so we could manage to correct the bugs and enhance the usability of the app.

Once we got a good product and with the help of an ASO expert from Spain, we managed to get in the top ranking and have organic downloads, reaching more than 200K total downloads and more than 9K total reviews with an average of 4.7 stars. We were proud we managed to create the most valued jokes app by the date. It was not fantastic but was not bad for a side project.

The following images show how was the app presence in the store and two example of user comments.

Everything was going great, until something unexpected happened😕
Suddenly, after an update of the app description, we realized that the app, that was in the top results when looking by “jokes”, that day did not ever appeared in any of the 200 search results that Google Play shows.

In the following graphs, obtained from the developer console, you can see how the healthy app, being at its highest level of daily organic downloads, one day of April 2016, suddenly, started to lower the download rate. Almost 90% of organic downloads were lost at once.

Despite trying to get a response from Google via a bot-like support portal, we failed to get a convincing explanation about the reason of the unlucky event.
Finally, after having made several attempts to revive the application (paying ads, changing back the description, etc.), with resignation we chose to abandon the development of the app.
Chyster is still active today, but having no visibility so its value is hidden in the ether.

Unfortunately, there is no graphical record of the app's ranking in Google Play searches in 2016. However, a curious fact we still see is that Chyster continues to appear in the top search result, when one looks for "best jokes app" in the browser from an Android device. This happens both in English and in Spanish (this is a proof that the penalty in Google Play search, not necessarily means the same penalty must be present in mobile web search).

Back to the road.
After having abandoned the development of the Chyster application, we continued developing other applications (for Music and Retail niches), and learning other technologies (like Python back-end, REACT front-end, and Flutter for Android/iOS shared code), and after 3 years, we decided to give another chance to jokes and humor.
After all, the app we had was well valued by our users, why not to retry with a new strategy?

That way, at the end of 2019 we launched a new version of the app, now using a new developer account.
The name of the new app is “The Joker” for the English market and “Chistes Para Todos” for Spanish market.
Unlike Chyster, which was designed for an adult audience (no filtered jokes), the content this time was curated for all ages. Apart from a few new functionalities the user interface is the same as the one we have in Chyster.

This time the first things we did were:
✔ An investment of $100 in Google ads
✔ Promotion of the app in Instagram

(believe it or not, we got users by reaching them randomly via DMs and asking them to install the app)

And the results were good🎉
Considering that there are hundreds of similar apps present in the store, “The Joker” is nowadays number 1 in the Spanish and in top 15 in English search result.

But we wanted to start something different
So just when the pandemic started in our country, Uruguay, in March 2020 we decided to start a third consumer app.

I leave the link of this new Android and iOS app here if you want to give it a try, but later I will write a separate post share our experience creating and marketing it.

For all of you who faced a similar issue I would love to read your story.

For those who did not live this, don't forget that the most important thing for any creator is resilience.
Joust keep trying and never give up.

Did you have any bad experience with Google Play algorithm
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  3. I do not have apps published in Google Play
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