You Doodle Update 2018

Greetings traveler! It’s been quite a while since I posted a You Doodle update. With iOS 10 and 11, Apple made many changes to the app store and app store search algorithms. The big apps that can spend tons of money on ads seem to be winning for the most part. I can’t do this as I don’t use subscriptions or recurring in-app purchases. I make less than two cents for every download on average. Also, because I don’t have enough keywords or title space to put in all the features that You Doodle can do, You Doodle has dropped tremendously in search rankings. Clearly Apple wants very specialized apps that do one thing, which I guess makes sense because it increases the number of apps in the app store, which they love to tout.

I’ve tried to “fix” the You Doodle search ranking for about a year now, but so far no luck. It appears that Apple chooses to rank other apps ahead of You Doodle despite me updating the app constantly for 5 years. I am not sure why apps that are hardly ever updated rank higher, but that is the way it goes.

As such, I have been looking at supporting the family with Unity assets and other ventures. I’ll continue to update You Doodle with small updates, bug fixes and iOS compatibility updates of course. It’s been a fun ride with the app, but clearly it is time to move on to something else. In the mobile space, 5 years is a long, long time.