I’ve published my first voice app, now what? How can I get more users?

More than a week ago I’ve published my first voice app: Anime Helper.

Both the frontend, backend and design (voice design!) of the app was fairly complicated because I wanted to learn and understand how should a voice app be built from ground zero.

I’ve learned a lot and it was fun, and being who I am it’s really impossible for me to stay without thinking and thinking and thinking.

So what’s I’m going to develop next:

• A game voice app about geography, it’s almost finished and I just need to test it and translate correctly to English (if you want to be part of the alpha test just drop me a line with your email!)
• An escape room system: the framework to let the user play it and the tool to let the creator design the escape room (hey, we’re looking for content creator so drop me a line if you’re interested!)
• A couple of super-secret projects! With some friends, we’re exploring different fields of application for voice app and we would like to create something really astonishing. So be patient, I can just say that I’m really excited about these projects (and the bags under my eyes can confirm that!)

Anyway, this is not what I wanted to talk about (but if you know me in real life you know that I’m over talker :D).

What should a developer do after publishing a voice app?

I’m old enough to remember the early days developing iOS and Android app when everything was new and app stores were overwhelmed with crappy apps but it was still possible to gain traction of a huge chunk of users. I remember developing a Cinema and TV app to track movies and tv shows and only in Italy I had a huge number of hooked users (more than 10k).

Well, with voice app seems to be the same thing right now. If you look at both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa voice-app store you see a lot of crap. Crap for both content and design.

I would like to list some problem that I’ve identified as a user and as a developer:

• Voice-app stores are poorly managed
• There are no quality checks when an app is published
• There are no tools to promote apps even if you want to pay
• Consumers do not know what you can do with a smart speaker

Voice-app stores are poorly managed

As a user sometimes it’s difficult even for me (and I’m a power user so I can just imagine for people like my friends or my parents) to find the site or the place on my phone where I can install a voice app.

For Alexa, it’s a little bit easier, to be honest, but the app is really really light years behind Google Home for both performance and design. Sometimes I don’t really want something specific, I would like to explore and understand which good apps I could try (like I do with normal smartphone apps). I feel frustrated, I enter the site/voice store and everything is a mess, poor categorized and with a huge pile of the same crappy apps. I feel really discouraged.

There are no quality checks when an app is published

I get it. People like fun and stupid voice apps like Burp (1500 reviews), Meow (850 reviews) or Fart (more than 90000 reviews). I really get it, they are fun and they should be there. But promoting them? Today I opened the Alexa app to listen to the latest news and it was suggesting to me the Cat app. These are the skills you want to promote?

I don’t get if there are still no well designed, good content skill or if Amazon and Google still do not want to promote the quality content.

So here I have some questions:

• Do they really review the content and quality of the skills?
• Do they really care about the quality of the skills published in their stores?
• Do they really care to raise the quality investing in developers like us that would like to create amazing skills but need to gain user’s traction in order to make a living for this (and re-invest again to maintain the skill and create new ones)

There are no tools to promote apps even if you want to pay

Some days ago I was listening to a podcast where the creator of Trivia Hero was talking about he’s an experiment to advertise their apps on Facebook (if I’m not wrong he was a Facebook employee so he knew how to optimize those ads campaign to maximize the result).

He said that the result was really poor. It’s really difficult to convert ads users into app user and I think that’s mainly for these reasons:

• People that see the ads don’t even know that they can install voice-apps on their smart speaker
• People do not have the device with themself (maybe they’re outside or at work) and can’t test it. The cannot install it and test it in that specific moment and they forget about it when they’re home (I think that people even forget what skills they have already installed on the smart speaker)
• I don’t think (but maybe I’m wrong, I’ve not tested it) you can target people that actually own a smart speaker in the target. And even if you could you don’t know if he/she’s the owner or just a user (usually they are shared across family member)

So, what can I do to advertise (and pay) to get users to my skill other than self-promotion in communities, Reddit, Slack, Discord?

Consumers do not know what you can do with a smart speaker

Ask your family, friends, colleagues (so people that are not a voice-app developer). Do you know you can install voice-apps on your smart speaker?

Do you know that you do a lot more than asking for the weather or to shut down the lights?

I’m pretty sure that people that even own third party apps think that those apps are from Google / Amazon and not from external developers.

So, what should I do to promote my apps and gain users?

Anime Helper was a test, an experiment, a workbench to learn how to design an app and how to interact with the user. My next projects would be the real one and I would like to succeed in these fields for both a personal reason but also because I love this job.

And to do that you need to make a huge user base that uses daily your app for a lot of time with a lot of interactions. I don’t want to fail but to be honest I feel a little bit discouraged by this scenario (all those bullet points I’ve listed before).

Do you have suggestions? I’m just overthinking about it? Am I wrong? Share your thoughts!