When Someone "Hearts" Your Design

General
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Hi all. I would like to spawn a light conversation about favorites and syncs for a watch face, how they are collected and what they really mean. I additionally want to discuss free versus pro developer accounts.

  1. Favorites. Is there a way we can display them and collect them in any meaningful manner? It could be helpful to see if the number of favorites aligns with syncs on a given day or weekly basis. Stats, baby, stats.

  2. How are syncs counted? Can users favorite an unpublished face? I ask this because I released a watch face a few days ago and somehow, it shows from over a week prior to that release. Is it reflecting my test syncs? If so, why? Those should not count if the designer syncs his or her own creation. I do not want to falsely inflate my numbers.

  3. How many syncs per face may I expect in a month as a new developer to this platform? Is ten, twenty, fifty a reasonable expectation? Is there a point in which I should consider pulling a face off publication if it garners few if any syncs?

To note, my first face published on Facer has less than 80 syncs in a month. In contrast, over on the Samsung Store, it has almost two thousand downloads two weeks. As far as I can tell, they are pretty much the same required user action, since a new sync forces the user to use the downloaded face. I can conjure two plausible explanations: a) the face on here is a premium but is free on Samsung, and b) there are far more faces to choose from on Facer.

In relation to the first explanation, I had to release the face as a Facer premium because it was designed to have app buttons. Over on the Samsung Store, there was no such requirement so I published it for free. Honestly, I have my doubts this accounts for such a stark difference.

Regarding the second explanation, I do believe the vast number of faces to choose from here on Facer outnumbers those on the other store. One reason I can see is that there is no real curation or process on Facer in the way the other store does it. This allows, for better or worse, a huge number of quickly designed faces that end up pushing all new releases off the page sometimes in mere hours. Over on the other store, most new releases stay up for a few days due to the curation process.

Honestly, if I can be candid here, I do not feel that the culprit is the paywall between free and premium designs, but more so the paywall between free Creator app and the Pro version. One thing I have noted to be a significant difference between Facer and the other store is that most developers on the other store combine the different colors and backgrounds for a given face in a single publication, where on Facer, users of the free designer are forced to publish these as individual faces. This only serves to clutter a nested listing of new faces and as I said earlier, pushes all new faces off the page too quickly.

I am not dissing Facer for trying to make money by offering an advanced product to developers. I think I may have just hit the nail on the head. The free Creator is more for designers, those persons who wish to create based mostly on visuals. The Pro version is more for developers, those person who create usable interfaces. I don’t think either instance is proprietary, but it does make sense at how the different versions of the Creator app are primarily used. I am not sure what to suggest for any type of solution, or even suggest a solution is needed. Any restrictions on the number of published faces per day, as an example, may turn away new designers.

Sorry for the wall o’text. Hope to hear back from you all. Have great day.

2 Likes
2

Hello,
I started designing faces exactly a month ago, so my experience is rather limited and surely there will be more experienced people who will be able to give you more detailed and concrete answers, I can only talk to you about my numbers of this first month so that you can make a comparison with a newbie.
Having said that, what I can tell you is that, precisely, the excessive number of new faces means that even the best faces are quickly dispersed in the mass.
For this reason, when you begin to draw faces and you have no followers the only way to have a good number of syncs is to get featured in home.
This happens weekly, from Thursday to the following Wednesday.
The way the faces are featured I think it is based on an automatic algorithm.
It is therefore necessary to be lucky.
When some of your faces are in the home they are much more visible and consequently there will be many more people to use them and gradually they will start to follow you more and more people.
As your followers grow, your faces also become more popular and as a result you will receive a good number of syncs even without being featured.
Speaking of numbers, I personally have several faces with less than 5 syncs, although I think they are better than others that, having been featured, have more than 200.
When you have few followers then the only way to have syncs is to be featured or get in top 100.
The maximum number of syncs I have on a face that has never been featured is 30 syncs.
In this month I had 5 featured faces.
For featured faces I collect about 100 to 250 syncs per week, so my face with more syncs has around 250 syncs having been featured last week.
In total i have about 950 syncs.
Speaking of followers in the first 3 weeks I collected about 20, while in the last week about 60, so now I have about 80.
Now that I have about 80 followers, even the faces that are not the featured ones start to have some syncs.
That’s my experience for this first month.

1 Like
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Well, you can be famous without being featured but featuring helps a lot.

At the beginning i had some faces with about 50-100 syncs but after i got more experience i made better faces and they sometimes got thousands of syncs (some of them not even featured).

I was working at this time with the free version without any interactive options.

What i try to say: You don‘t have to be premium to get famous. It will help a lot for sure but first of all it‘s the quality of your faces and the acceptance of the users.

You cannot compare the samsung store to facer, they are very different in a lot of ways.

I hope this will help a little bit - if you have some questions you are free to ask.

Greetings, GAUSS.

1 Like
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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to complain. It isn’t about being famous or popular. I am mostly digging around in a fact-finding mission. I find the dramatic difference between the respective platforms to be a noteworthy item to discuss. Perhaps the larger number on the other store is a fluke.

I’m not the kind of person who will publish multiple items in a short amount of time. I am fine with a slow buildup.

Anyway, there were other items I mentioned, but I guess those are for another day…