Yelling Robot was a Mac App that I released at the beginning of the Mac App Store. Thanks to a critical bug, it sunk like the Titanic.
The critical bug was that the files were being saved to the application bundle. At the time, the documentation never explicitly said that this would not work. Rather, it suggested to save in the appropriate location in the Library. It turned out that Mac App Store Apps are a little different than Mac Applications. Have you tried to delete a Mac App Store App? You won’t be able to, because of the permissions. This is essentially what was happening to us. We were trying to save to something that wasn’t able to.
It was interesting to see how fast Yelling Robot sunk. I was documenting the status of the App during the whole day, here were some of my notes:
9:30AM
Yelling Robot #14 on USA
Yelling Robot not on top charts for Canada
10:30AM
Yelling Robot #11 on UK
Yelling Robot #20 on USA
Yelling Robot not on top charts for Canada
11:00AM
Yelling Robot #21 on USA
Yelling Robot #65 on Australia
Yelling Robot #11 on UK
Yelling Robot not on top charts for Canada
12:15PM
Yelling Robot #11 on UK (rated 2 stars, 5 1 star ratings)
Yelling Robot #82 on Canada
Yelling Robot #26 on USA (rated 2 stars, 5 1 star ratings)
Yelling Robot #60 on Australia
1:00PM
Yelling Robot #14 on UK (rated 1.5 stars, 8 1 star ratings)
Yelling Robot #60 on Australia
Yelling Robot #69 on Canada
Yelling Robot #31 on USA (rated 2 stars, 6 1 star ratings)
Here are some observations from the notes:
1) Once again, Canadians never download my Apps. I thought it would be different for Mac App Store Apps, but it wasn’t. It sucks because I make them here in Canada! You would think that people would at least download it… 
2) The UK still seemed to like it even though it didn’t work. Weird!
3) The one-star ratings KILL YOU.
We were able to push an update out before the weekend, so that was really good. This was nice because all of a sudden, you get to see the ratings go up and up and up! As of today (Jan. 28, 2011), we are back to a 4.5 star rating.
We went from a 1 star to 4.5 stars! Woot!
The wind for Yelling Robot has been keeping up for a very long time. With iOS Apps, we usually see it die within three days. Yelling Robot has been going strong for weeks.
I think this is because of a few reasons…
1) We were #1 in Entertainment (Free) for a while
2) It’s a FREE Mac App, not many of those around
For a while, I was wondering how on earth so many people could be downloading Yelling Robot, day after day it never seemed to tail off. “Were there really that many Mac OS 10.6 computers out there, that would want to download Yelling Robot? Wow!” It does turn out that some fireplaces are now currently ranked higher than Yelling Robot in the Free Entertainment, and our downloads are tailing off. Being on the top of the charts evidently does help.
So, the ride of Yelling Robot was pretty good. I would have enjoyed it more if we didn’t have that critical bug. I wonder what would have happened?
To answer a FAQ, “Why is Yelling Robot a 17+ Application?” … it is because to some people it may not seem clear that what you type in the text fields will actually be said, OUT LOUD. We didn’t want any mishaps on that end. There is not any 17+ material in the App itself, it is just a precautionary measure. There is actually a review that demonstrates this:
That’s why we made it 17+. Exactly for the above situation.
Now that we are over the initial hype, what updates would everyone like to see in Yelling Robot? 