Building a Preschool iPhone Game, Part 3

At last, it's available on the App Store!  Frogs and Fireflies was approved and made available on April 2nd.  It's a little bit later than I was aiming for, but the nice thing about being your own boss is that you have no one to disappoint but yourself.  We were experiencing some troubles getting the game to run reliably on 2G and 3G iPhones, and it took some time to iron those issues out.

Now it's on to promoting the app everywhere I can think of.  The game has already been reviewed on wired.com, as well as a few different app blogs.

We already have plans to make a few updates to the game, and make it fully support the iPad.  While the iPad is pretty neat device and shows a lot of potential for applications for children, my motivation is actually a desire to increase the visibility of the iPhone app.  As of now, there are approximately 180 educational games on the iPad App Store.  That is, if they all show in the browse by category function.  There are approximately 4,460 educational games in the iPhone App Store, by the same sampling method.  Of course, there are far fewer iPad devices out in the world than iPhone and iPod Touch devices, but if I can catch the attention of iPad owning parents, that might pull up our sales numbers enough to make us a little more visible in the iPhone App Store.  As many iPhone owners and developers are aware, it's easiest to browse the store by what sells the best, which naturally makes it challenging to reach that distinction in the first place.

In addition to iPad support, the next update should include a practice mode, and levels.  After that, we're moving on to create more games!

For more information on the creation of Frogs and Fireflies, see Part 1 and Part 2 in this series.  To try the game, check it out on the App Store!