In this #longread blog post, we’ll walk you through preparing your app for distribution, offering your app on your website and in app marketplaces for sale, as well as first steps to marketing your app.

When designing a commercial app for sale, an important thing you need to consider is how you will get the app to people who buy it.

Packaging Your App for Distribution

Desktop and mobile apps will need to be distributed, whereas a web app usually requires the user set up a log in and sign up for a subscription and is not distributed separately.

Mobile Apps

To package your iOS app you’ll need an Apple Developer account to generate the certificates and provisioning profiles required by Apple. After that is set up, go to the iOS Build Settings and turn on the switch for Build For App Store and Build your app. This creates a special ipa file that can be submitted to the App Store using App Connect. You can read the steps in more detail here: Submitting to the App Store

You can also read this earlier post on how deploy iOS apps to your devices without an Apple Developer Membership.

Desktop Installers

You’ll definitely want to use an installer to distribute your Windows apps. We’ve previously blogged before about free and paid options for Windows installers in detail.

On macOS, many apps are distributed as simple ZIP files that you can create from the Finder. Or you can use Disk Utility (or another utility such as DMG Canvas) to create a DMG (disk image). If you need an installer on macOS, which is not often the case, try Packages or PackageMaker (included with Xcode).

On Linux, you can also distribute your apps as ZIP files or you can take the more complicated route of creating a specific distribution file (deb or rpm) for the versions of Linux you target.

Demo Mode or Limited Free Trial

People like to download and try out software before purchasing. We highly recommend that you offer some features of your app for free or for a limited free trial to entice people to give your app a shot.

For iOS apps, the App Store does not have great support for demo or trial apps. One option is to make two versions of your app: one that is a free demo and one that is a paid app. Another option is to make your app a free download and to use in-app purchase to unlock the full version.

Desktop and web apps offer more options regarding demos and trials so think about what will work best for your app. Do you want a free demo version? Will you limit the demo by time (14 and 30 days are common) or by number of uses (4 free uses)? Another common option is to limit the app to running with some feature limitations if no license key is entered. You can even combine the two so that a trial reverts to a demo after the trial expires.

Regardless of what you choose, you’ll need to make sure this is all designed into your app before you release it.

License Keys & Serial Numbers

Often, an essential part of commercial software is generating license keys or serial numbers. When a customer purchases your app, you can provide a license key to unlock the full features of your app or stop the timer on a time-limited trial. You can build your own license key generation and verification functions into your app. This is relatively simple to do by creating a web service with a Xojo web app. Two solutions that can help you get started are AquaticPrime and RegCode.

If you are need to save time, look into developed solutions offered in the Xojo Add-Ons Store such as the GuancheMOS Plugin, a cross-platform serial number creation and validation engine, for Windows check out Quick License Manager for licensing trials for perpetual or subscription licenses.

Selling Your App

Once you have your app packaged to distribute, you’ll need places to sell it and ways to get paid.

Selling on your Website

You should definitely have a Web site with a specific landing page that talks about the product and shows the price.  This makes is easier for your page to be found when searching the web. A landing page is a stand-alone page that includes highlights of what your app offers, your demo video and a call to action. (Learn more about landing pages.) Make the page’s focus your “call to action”, whether that is to watch the demo video, download or purchase the app, or to create an account.

Even if you only have an iOS app that is sold via the App Store, a landing page is useful, some say essential, making it easier for people to find your app and for you to share it on social media.

Selling at a Marketplace

In addition to selling on your website, you may want to investigate getting your app into an appropriate app store. App stores are often where people look first for apps, plus most app stores make it really simple for users to install and upgrade apps. And they make getting paid a lot simpler. However, App Stores can take a percentage of the sale (commonly 30%) and may have significant restrictions and a lengthy approval process before your app can be ready for sale.

If you are selling a macOS app, you might want to make it available in the Apple’s Mac Store. Here are some examples of Xojo apps in the Mac Store. For iOS apps the only option is the App Store and we’ve blogged about how to get your Xojo iOS apps in the App Store.

To sell something in either the App Store or Mac App Store you need to be a member of the $99 Apple Developer Program. You also have give Apple 30% of each sale, wait for them to approve your app for sale and wait for approvals for any app updates. The App Wrapper tool can help make it easier to package your Mac apps to sell in the Mac App Store.

Of course there is the Windows Store for your Windows apps. If you use Advanced Installer, the Desktop Bridge Setup Converter can be used to convert an installer to one that is compatible with the Windows Store. More information is available in this article: Build an AppX Installer for Microsoft Store with Xojo.

If you are selling a Xojo-related tool, library or plugin, another option is to sell it in the Xojo Store in the Add-On Product section. There is no charge for this and you get to keep 70% of the sale. Contact us if you are interested.

Getting Paid

With apps sold in the app stores you’ll get paid by the store guidelines, usually once a month for the previous month’s sales, though some store may set a minimum payment before they pay up.

For desktop apps or web apps that have subscriptions you’ll need a way to handle payments. Rather than setting up your own merchant account and dealing with that, it’s increasingly common to use an existing payment processing service like PayPal or FastSpring.

If you are not already familiar with how PayPal works, you can learn more here. FastSpring lets you create a “store” with your products, pricing, a shopping cart, currency conversion and will take payments from credit cards and other means. FastSpring takes 8.9% per transaction with a minimum order fee of $0.75 or 5.9% + $0.95 per transaction; PayPal is 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (rates from July 2018).

Regardless of the service you use, you will need to hook it up to an account to receive payment. Typically you hook it up to a checking account or PayPal. Other services you might want to check out include: Gumroad, Stripe, Paddle, and 2CheckOut.

Marketing Your App

Now your app is packaged and available for sale on your website and an app marketplace or two. How do you get the word out? Here are 3 musts when it comes to app marketing:

Press Release

You’ll need a Press Release that announces your app, explains what your app does and why people should buy it – here’s a template and example.

For a small fee, services like PR Newswire will send out your press release to a wide variety of websites for you. We also want to help promote your #XojoMade app! Email your press release to pr@xojo.com and we’ll post it on the Announcements channel in the forum and share it on Twitter.

Demo Video

Yes, you should definitely have a demo video! Either more of a traditional software demonstration, a commercial that lists your app’s top selling points or some combination of the two. Keep it short and sweet – feel free to follow up with a longer, more in-depth video, but to grab perspective users you’ll want something less than a minute. Video is much more digestible and easy to share than the written word and you can create a good one on your own.

Outside Listings & Reviews

Get your product listed on app download services, such as MacUpdate or Download.com. Once listed, you’ll want reviews because one of the most trusted forms of marketing is word of mouth. You believe the word of a colleague over that of a commercial, right? Ask your users to post honest reviews of your app in app marketplaces and on third party sites. If your app is new, or just needs the reviews, think about offering a discount or swag for a review.

Now What? More Marketing Tips from Dana and Alyssa

Here are some great posts to explore simple and often free options for marketing your apps:

I’d like to introduce you to Ohanaware’s latest Made With Xojo application we’ve created for us Xojo developers. It’s called “Iconographer” and it is designed to simplify the process of creating stunning and platform-consistent icons for Mac, Windows & iOS.

The idea behind Iconographer, is to be able to take the same set of elements and produce app icons, document icons, folder icons, disk icons and web icons that are all consistent with their intended target, while retaining the application identity.

Here we have our Iconographer icon in the Iconographer editor, a quick look at the interface and you’ll notice that we have an “Icon” selector, a “Target” selector, a “Style” selector, Layers and then layer properties.

I’m not going to show you how I made the Iconographer icon, instead I’ll demonstrate how to take this fine work of art and create all the other icons that we may need.

Before we begin, I just want to see what the icon will look like in the Mac App Store, to do that, I’ll select “Mac App Store” from the “Preview Icon in” menu, from the “Preview” button in the bottom right hand corner of the editor. Note: The preview pulls the other application icons from your applications folder, so this also doubles as a way of comparing with existing apps.

Clicking on the “Windows” target will change the editor to the Windows application icon. From here I chose the “Windows Tile” style, but it doesn’t look anything that I might like. Note: part of this is how I chose to build the Iconographer icon.

There’s only two layers for this icon, I need to import the rest. Simply clicking on the “+ Layer” button, I can select and add in the shared graphics and the shared label.

Now you can see that the layers list has more layers and all the elements are loaded, but it looks like a mess. I’ll start by re-arranging the layers to get a more pleasing layout.

That’s a bit more like it, now the layout looks more pleasing, I’ve tweaked the font & size of
the text, also enabled “All Caps” so it automatically displays in capital letters. Still one problem…

Much better; Windows 10 icons are white silhouettes on a plain colored background. Iconographer features a really nifty “Color” function where it will replace the colors of an icon with either a chosen solid color or a gradient. In this case we’re using the Badge color. Iconographer uses shared colors (as well as shared graphics and shared labels), when you adjust a color in one icon, it updates all your icons. If I set the “Badge Color” to be orange, all the elements using the Badge color get updated.

Clicking on the “Preview” button again (the one in the bottom right hand corner), and selecting “Contact Sheet”, will show a contact sheet with the various sizes that a Windows icon can feature.

Sort out the iOS icon. Clicking on the “iOS” target icon in the left hand column, shows me the following icon. I should point out that your default will vary, mine is very weird because of the elements I’ve used to create the Iconographer icon.

Again, once all the layers have been added, like it was done for Windows, it starts to resemble more of what we’d like.

Getting there, rearranging the layers, colorizing some and fixing the text, gives a far more pleasing result.

Now if we check out the “Preview” menu, we can even see what it will look like on the home screen of an iPhone or iPad and the App Store.

Next, I simply select “Build all selected icons…” from the “Build Icon” button in the bottom left hand corner, choose a folder and let Iconographer do its job. It’s important to note that each icon can be customized as to what elements are included and some targets even have a file format option.

Wait… That’s not all Iconographer can do…

By selecting “Document” from the icon selector in the top left, there’s a perfect document file icon just waiting for me to export. If I change to Windows, there’s one there too and the Windows one is automatically using the Windows icon we adapted earlier.

If you study the screenshot, you’ll notice an option on the Label called “Increase readability”, we use a number of different options to make the text more readable as it gets smaller. It doesn’t work in all cases, but it is perfect for the label on a document file icon.

One more thing…
Clicking on the “Web icon” from the Icon selector, will allow you to create “Favicon.ico”, PNG versions and the Apple Touch variations.

I want to make the favicon.ico similar to the Windows icon as I think that will work better at smaller sizes. First; I go to the Windows application icon and select “Copy” from the “Edit” menu, then I go back to the Favicon target under the “Web Icon” and select “Paste icon style” from the “Editor menu. Since the favicon is tiny, I’ll also select “Overview” from the “View” menu, then click on the action icon in the “Overview” section and choose “16 x 16”.

After some tweaking of the sizes, changing the elements to use “Doc Label” color instead of “Badge Color” and even removing some layers, I’m happy with this icon as my favIcon. Very simple and clean.

For the Apple Touch Icon, I’m going to wimp out and cheat. I select the third style and choose “iOS” as the icon. That’s right, I’ve remapped it to use the iOS icon, any changes I make to the iOS icon will also get updated here.

Select “Safari” from the preview icon in the bottom right hand corner, and there we go, we get a Safari preview where you can see the favicon and the Apple Touch Icons in action.

To export these icons, simply select “Build all selected icons…” from the “Build icons” button.

There you have it, a quick walkthrough on how we took our Mac Iconographer icon and not only converted the icon for other targets, but we also made document icons and more in just a few minutes.

Give it a try yourself, get the trial version.

Do you like to meet other Xojo users and go to conferences? Well, you are in luck! In 2017 there is a conference being organized by Monkeybread Software. Xojo developers from all over the world will meet the first week in May 2017 in metropolitan Berlin, Germany. In the center of western Berlin at the Ellington hotel, next to the nearby Kurfürstendamm, the Zoo and KaDeWe. We selected this central location in Europe for easy traveling for developers from east and west.

Beside the two conference days, we have an accompanying social programme with dinner events and an optional two training days. For the evenings we have casual get-togethers in the hotel bar and beer garden.

We are happy to welcome Xojo’s Founder & CEO Geoff Perlman, Xojo engineer Travis Hill as well Xojo’s Stéphane Pinel from France will be present to talk about Xojo. Jens Boschulte, our PDF specialist and creator of the DynaPDF library will be available for questions.

All Xojo conferences are a great places to learn about Xojo, see what is new for Xojo IDE itself as well as for third-party products. You can meet other developers and get a lot of new contacts.  Ask questions and discuss how you solve problems, learn from others and discover new techniques. Feel free to present yourself and your projects, so others can give you tips and learn from you. As you depend on Xojo for your business, please use this to talk to the Xojo people about what you need from them in the future.

The schedule:

May 3rd: Xojo Training in English

May 4th: Conference, first day with dinner event

May 5th: Conference, second day

May 6th: Xojo Training in German

In the evenings we meet for dinner so you can meet other attendees. Registration is available and we already have people coming from six countries.

The early bird offer available till 4th December is just 299 Euro plus VAT. Attending the conference costs regularly 499 Euro plus VAT, including food and beverage in the Ellington Hotel as well as an accompanying social program.

Sessions are to be held in English. Our conference is conceived as a networking event for the Xojo community. The conference is an ideal opportunity for sharing your thoughts and your own development experience with fellow users and developers. If you like to give a presentation, please contact us as soon as possible. Speakers receive discounted tickets.

Registration and more Information.

Training days in German and English.

For any questions, please contact Monkeybread Software directly.