FreeAppADay.com is an app promotion service that's used by many large and small app developers, but something seems fishy about their operation. For starters the company has absolutely zero information about itself on its website except for a contact form. It doesn't seem to be run very professionally considering the amount of business it's doing. Also, it appears that FAAD is much more popular with developers than it is with users. The company behind FAAD (ICS Mobile) has released several apps that allow users to keep up with their promotions, but the highest ranked one is 618 in Games (see http://www.appannie.com/company/ics-mobile-inc/ ). This is a giant red flag to me. I expected their app to be far more popular. Their facebook and twitter pages also show little activity. When we emailed them, they could not provide provide any numbers regarding how much traffic they directly drive, claiming not to have any analytics. This is very unusual and unprofessional for a company whose business depends on advertising promotions. For me, it just doesn't add up. Developers seem to think their promotions are effective, but I don't see how that's possible when nobody is using their app. I suppose it could be a front for a bot farm?
You can say everything about FAAD being effective or not..they are no scam and they dont use bots. They exist on the App Store since a long time and collected quite a lot of followers during that time.
I had my game Alien Space Retro once on FAAD, and it definitely gets tons of downloads and shot me way up in the charts.
The question is wether the initial spike is legit downloads or bot generated, and if it is legit, how much of it was generated because of FAAD, not just because the app was set free or other promotions. Based on the chart rankings of their apps, FAAD has very little traction with actual app users, so I find it all very suspicious.
I once read an article about services such as FAAD and most of the time your app will get to at least the top 100 and stay there for quite sometime. I'll see if I can find the link (doubt it )
I went free once without it, and while it also created a spike, the FAAD spike was much bigger. Also, since my game has IAP, I could also see a spike in IAP revenue... so at least some of those were real customers. The publicity from FAAD was enough to push my game up the free and grossing charts, which itself then generates downloads and sales. I think the main thing is that in order to get the most from FAAD you need a game with IAPs. The spike in downloads will continue a bit after the free promotion, but it wont be that big. You need to be able to make money from the tens, or hundreds, of thousands who download the game while it's free... which would be about 4 - 7 days, as they recommend.
Someone I know recently spent $5k with freeappaday and said it wasn't worth it. The traffic/downloads generated by them have been declining consistently month after month.
It still is worth it sometimes. Those that get into and stay in the top 25, with a good monetization plan for during or after the promotion will find it worth it. Others will not. Re: Bots or real people. They certainly are real people (or a large percentage of them are at least). Every time we've gone free we've gotten hundreds more written reviews for our games and thousands more star ratings. Plus, the last time we had a bug that went unnoticed for some time, and we then had dozens of support calls to fix it.
I experienced with both FreeAppAday and OpenFeint's Free App alot last year. To be honest, I can't find any better free promotion server looks any better than FAAD now, but the performance is really not 100% depending on the service itself, I would say that it's 80% depending on your app, even we bring to the front of iPhone users something that they're totally not interesting of, it's still pretty hard to convince them a download. However, I saw that App-o-day (a new service maybe), do this kind of promoting very well, but at the same time, app or game that they do the promotion is very selective though. Hope it help you something.
We dealt with app-o-day last promotion. They are a new service but it seems like they have some big contracts with Gameevil and others... The day of our promotion we saw 2x the downloads we did with FAAD and almost 3x the installs over the full length of the promotion. However, to get a bit of a discount, they required us to add a SDK to track downloads and app usage. This SDK was buggy and caused a LOT of crashing. 80% of our 1 star reviews are because of that. If you go with them, pay the full price instead of using that PoC.
You might be interested in reading these blog posts about a new service called AppRewardsClub.com that actually cares about developers: http://www.mindjuice.net/2012/07/30/introducing-apprewardsclub-com/ http://www.bitwit.ca/blog/app-rewards-club/ Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of AppRewardsClub.com.
Most of this services doesn't even bother in contact you if they don't see any potential in your app.
If they contact you its definitely just some spam form letter. You should contact them. All of the better free promo sites will ask for a demo of your app. No problem! Always glad to help out the community
