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Thomas Taschauer edited this page Jan 16, 2021 · 3 revisions

January 16, 2021

Wow, it's been a year since the last progress update already!? What a year... Let's recap what happened in the craziest of all years:

  • Hired a company (appradar.com) to look at our ASO. After tweaking the title and keywords we haven't seen a significant increase in installs, but got a good outside view on our store performance. For example, they noticed that an increase in crashes (oops) caused an increase in bad ratings (obviously), which caused a quite substantial decrease in installs overall.
  • The same company moved on to A/B test a new set of screenshots which performed quite well (up to +7% CTR) and is now working on a new icon and feature graphic.
  • More recently we have improved our CI setup with a GitHub Action that runs some actual integration tests, powered by fastlane.
  • I have finally gotten around to fix the awful internal cache management, which triggered a broader refactor that also makes the "open with" and "share" feature much more robust. The said update is rolling out as of right now. Fingers crossed!
  • We have launched a paid version of our app on Android and a free version on iOS! Both perform better than expected and did not hurt store performance of the existing apps so far. It is very, very clear though that iOS users are more likely to pay for an app than Android users.

January 25, 2020

Only two weeks passed since the last progress report, but - oh my - a lot happened in those two weeks:

  • We're confident that the new C++ port of the underlying ODF parsing library is ready for prime time now and are slowly rolling it out to users right now. No problems reported so far!
  • Our friend Vilius seems to have found a way to avoid sleeping at all and finished porting of a library that allows us to DOC files files offline and he finished his previous work on porrting a library that supports parsing of PDF files. Both are going to be rolled out to users over the next few days.
  • One expected drawback of our increased focus on supporting other file formats too is a significant increase of app size. We are already much bigger now compared to the tiny 2MB of older app versions and expect another increase with the addition of the above libraries. We're looking into ways to mitigate this, such as binary compression: https://upx.github.io/
  • The app costs 0.50€ on the Apple App Store now to accommodate to the iOS market. While paid apps are very unpopular on the Google Play Store (thus free + ads instead), users are okay with paying for apps on the Apple App Store. We're monitoring growth and will adapt as necessary.
  • Switching from free to paid caused downloads to drop significantly to a tenth of what it was before. This was to be expected and we are pleased with the result so far.
  • Apple decided to feature our app for one day in the App Store for the Czech Republic: 10x increase in downloads. A pleasant surprise! Looking into ways to make this happen more often...

January 10, 2020

Last year was a great year for OpenDocument Reader:

  • We have officially founded a company in order to legally back the success of the app.
  • The app offers a good-enough offline experience for a huge range of file types, including video, audio and images! OH MY!
  • App Store Optimization shot us up to rank #1 on iOS and rank #2 on Android when searching for "LibreOffice" in most countries.
  • Did I mention that we've launched an iOS app? Yeah we did, and it's doing great with thousands of downloads and good ratings from day 1.
  • We've decided to invest some of the revenue generated through the app (on Android) by hiring freelancers to support different development activities. Right now we have each one C++, Mobile and DevOps developer supporting us occasionally.
  • Andi went out of his way and keeps improving our shiny new C++ version of the core engine. Because ODF is only one huge, complicated and messy standard to deal with, he decided to start working on support for OOXML (Microsoft Office) too. Alright!
  • We're close to launching much improved PDF support using an external open source library.

Last but not least, we're trying to get used to posting updates about our work every now and then online. Let's see how long this keeps going :)

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