A Berry busy day

March 01, 2012   admin   9 Comments

Earlier today this blog and my app, Solar Explorer were both posted to CrackBerry.com, causing a spike in Playbook app sales (over 120 so far) and a big surge in traffic to this site.

Normally I’d see about 75 visitors a day, but in the last 11 hours there’s been nearly 1,000!

As a result I’ve been playing with the caching settings on the site because the it’s managed to chew through about 20% of a normal month’s bandwidth allocation.

It’s got a fairly big buffer, but it’s almost midnight here in Australia and I don’t want to wake up to a dead site.

If you’ve seen any strange behaviour in the past hour, don’t worry, it’s just me breaking stuff.

It should be working again now and I promise I’ll leave it alone for a bit.

Thanks to everyone involved, today has been a lot of fun :)

I’ll see what I can do about getting more Shiva devs to bring their native apps to the Playbook as well.

I know a few others are in the same boat I am, waiting for a Playbook to arrive to use for testing more apps.

Posted in: Development, Solar Explorer   Tags: , , ,
  • http://twitter.com/CrazyHammer_Mok Martin

    We BB users are a loyal bunch. Treat us right and we will do the same in return. If you could please advise what sort of sales are running now compared to Android. Like total sales over last few months? The more info on how good app world sales are compared to Android the more devs we can hopefully get supporting the PB. Again thanks for the support!

    • http://apps.burlock.org Neil B

      It’s too early to be able to give an accurate average for daily sales. Before the CrackBerry effect caused a huge boost today I was seeing about 10 Playbook sales a day versus 20 to 30 on Android market.

      My app has only been on Playbook for two weeks, it’s still moving up the charts (now the 31st most popular educational app and still rising!) and I recently switched it’s category. It needs time to settle down so I can make some accurate comparisons.

      What I can say at this stage is that any Android developer with a decent app (no fart apps please!) should do themselves a favour and release a Playbook version ASAP.

  • jasoncar

    “I know a few others are in the same boat I am, waiting for a Playbook to arrive to use for testing more apps.”

    I know the feeling…

    Cheers!

  • jess

    Sorry about that.. i kind of made a few threads about your app and people noticed..

    • http://apps.burlock.org Neil B

      Thanks :)

  • padamssm

    I saw the review of Solar Explorer for the PlayBook on CrackBerry.com and purchased your app. Solar Explorer is really beautiful and informative! I second the idea from a previous commenter that BlackBerry owners are a loyal bunch and support developers with good apps. I bought the PlayBook last April knowing that App World was growing, not mature, but loving the PlayBook for what it is and does and what it will become. RIM has vision, and good developers will ensure that more people are attracted to the PlayBook and will learn what a great tablet it is. I will continue to look for good developers who support the PlayBook.

    • http://apps.burlock.org Neil B

      The Playbook certainly does seem to have a large population of enthusiasts. I think I’m turning into one as well :)

  • jess
    • http://apps.burlock.org Neil B

      I’m famous! :)