May the source be with you
I am the founder of the app Arcade Plaza. This is Flutter based application currently published exclusively on Play Store. My app was running very successfully some months before I started messing with it. Although I had experience of running a app over 500k active users but this was a disaster 🤐.
Now I have open sourced it here
So, lets start it from the beginning ..
😶🌫️ What does this app do ?
This app let us play free online arcade games at one stop. Conventionally users have to go to the different websites across the internet to find out the suitable game for themselves. Also, there are few websites which are just spam and contains harmful content or low quality games. Obviously it is very inconvenient to go to chrome and play your favorite game(s).
We keep list of handpicked games from the web and let users play them or mark them as their favorite to play later. Games are of high quality indeed such as Stacky Run, Ludo, Cut the Rope and many other games developed by major gaming companies.
Quality is my first priority ✌️
Download our free app to know more
🧠 How this idea came to my mind ?
I was just scrolling through the play store and I thought there is no proper app where I can play whichever game that I desire to play (which satisfies my mood 🌹) without downloading the various games on my mobile as it turns out they make functioning of mobile slow and occupies large disk space ( My game is only of 7 M.B. )
So I thought to make this app where we can find more than 75 games at one place.
💹 App at its peak
To be very honest with you, I started this as a joke🥲. I made a separate developer account as I was not very serious with it and didn't want to destroy my existing account, but to my amaze it turned out to be very successful. On the first day it receives 10 downloads on the next day 257 downloads.(Note that I have not spent even a single penny for its marketing or advertisement).So within the the week I had 900+ users.
💲 Earnings
As you might be already knowing that its against the policy of the Facebook Ads to share the official earnings. Still, you can easily estimate the earnings 😏 There was a banner ad with average of 970 impressions daily...
📉 Downfall and reason of open sourcing
I was very happy with my app's performance but I added some necessary like a favorite button on the each game tile. A friend of mine suggested me to partner with a company named "Gamezop", which was the biggest mistake ! (I still hate that friend 🙄)
I added games of Gamezop and the ads which users will see, I will receive 50 percent of the revenue produced by those games. In my greed I placed them on the top instead of those existing better games. Gamezop games are average but there are ton of ads. Even playing a single level can frustrate user and as they were on the top so users were not able to scroll more to find other games. In frustration people started uninstalling in great numbers. It is now reached to a state where I am getting 6-7 installs and 11 uninstalls monthly. It is shrank to 60 users only. So I need a community of developers to help a novice like me...
⭐ Response and Reviews
Touchwood all of the reviews are of 5 stars and with a positive response till date. You can see it for yourself people at play store are loving it 💝. This also played a major role in the initial success of it too because Play Store's algorithm promotes the app with positive responses.
🤔 How open source is going up to now
Its too early to comment on it but there are no response except mine. Although there are few stars on the repo. Sadly my friend's repo is very cool (yeah, the same friend).I thought that the moment I will upload it I will get PR's(Pull Requests) but reality hits hard 🥲
So, this was my first tech blog. I request you to like and spread so that I will be motivated to write more. Tell me or ask me something in the comments section 😊.
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