Kudos on your success and a well written article, but to be very frank, this is incredibly hard to emulate. An analogy would be the Envato network discussing the success of a new sister site and attributing the initial traction to their already well established network. Not that there's anything wrong with that - just that there's not too much for me to learn.

If there's one takeaway, it's that leverage can be a wonderful thing and can make a tremendous difference to the outcome of a startup. There's a superb post on Quora that articulates this really well: http://www.quora.com/Xianhang-Zhang/Disregard-ideas-acquire-...

That said, (and please correct me if I'm wrong) I think this represents minimal value in terms of actionable insight for the reader, so I'm intrigued as to how this hit the top of HN. My theory is a lot of users chose to upvote this post without actually bothering to click through and read the article.

I would speculate that there are some comment bots that simply upvote and comment whatever at the top by chance. Out of 6 comments here 3 seems completely off-topic and coming from relatively new users. There were reports of submission bots around lately too.

After learning the importance of the leverage you mention, the reader can now seek to obtain that leverage. For example, this offers another means for monetizing a free app. If you can write a free app that gets a lot of traction, you can then use it to help launch other apps.

I agree. Not too much new here. I've upvoted it however because I've learnt that:

* You can give away in-app purchases for free. (Wasn't sure if it could be done.)

* They didn't spend any money on advertising. Nothing new there either, but it's another datapoint and it'll help me a bit in the future, when I need to figure out if we should spend money on ads (probably not).

I'm curious how they're giving away in-app purchase content for free. According to Apple's 'About In-App Purchases' article (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4009) in-app purchases cannot be free: "In-App Purchase can be offered in both free and paid apps—no free In-App Purchases are available."

Also the iTunes Connect Developer's Guide (https://itunesconnect.apple.com/docs/iTunesConnect_Developer...) states on page 144 (in the Managing Your In App Purchases section) that, "In app purchases cannot be free."

I suspect they're not really using StoreKit for this and just enabling a feature within the app itself based on tweeting about it.

If you don't already have a few apps to cross promote your app, check out Allify.com - we're building a free cross-promotion platform for iOS (and Android) to enable this kind of distribution boost.

Edit: initial distribution boost; I'm not saying "Join Allify, we'll guarantee 1m downloads in a month!" =)

In their case it's not just having apps to do cross promotion. Is having a pretty popular application in the very same space (photography).

Not enough evidence to suggest that the downloads are not driven by being featured by Apple. Being featured is a big deal in the App Store (the "lottery", and photo apps are all the rage lately.

folks I found out how to do this for android :)

expected hard nose try in a few weeks. Basically its somewhat remembering that on android you get that nice set of google apis because its tied to the cloud at the google profile/gmail entry point.

ah people google has this api that ahem accessing things like gmail, picasa photo services, etc..all accessible from an android application

is the wisdom of the HN crowd that dense?

Your post is vague bordering on incomprehensible. It doesn't seem relevant, from what little I can glean from it. We know that Android has a number of APIs. They're not relevant to this company's app, though.

cool!

good advice... a million here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money

Great piece thanks for sharing! And congrats!

good job, really save me a lot of time, pls keep up the good work!