Happi Blogs

As you might already know, Happi Papi runs a free App Evaluation Program for Schools with almost 3000 teachers from all over the world participating. Normally, we use the program to let educators test our own and our partners’ iPad apps for free and provide us with valuable feedback on how to improve the apps. [...]

As you all know, standing out from the crowded app scene is extremely hard and absolutely necessary for an app developer. Over the last few months we at Happi Papi have found ourselves letting what might get better media attention rule our decisions to a higher extent. Whether it be the type of apps to [...]

A short while ago we decided to see if we could do more for education in hopes that it would extend the iPad’s reach in schools even further and in the longer run give us a broader platform for selling our apps. As we have written about here on our blog before, we have already [...]

There’s no such thing as a free lunch! You have all heard the expression. However, in the case of Happi Papi’s newly launched free “App Evaluation Program for Schools” we beg to differ. This is actually a free lunch with no strings attached – for teacher anyway.   How Does It Work? Educators (doesn’t have [...]

It’s not always easy to admit it but we have painted ourselves into a corner. Actually, two corners to be more exact. Let me explain. When we launched Happi Papi almost a year ago we made two pledges: Our games were always going to be easy enough to understand for children to be able to [...]

Several months ago we released a version of our first game, Happi Reads, for Android Market. This was more of an experiment than something we actually thought would make us any money. At the end of September we released Happi Reads also on the Amazon App Store. Again with no expectation it would sell much [...]

When I woke up on October 20 I found an email from my partner in Sweden with the subject heading: Yeees!! Naturally it peaked my curiosity a little extra. The email, as it turned out, had no text – just a picture. The picture was a screen dump of Apple USA’s New & Noteworthy section [...]

When an app developer launches a new app he needs to get the word out in order for sales to take off. An app won’t sell itself in the presence (read clutter) of 500K+ other apps. If your company is called Rovio, Tapulous or EA it is not much of a problem to let people [...]

After successfully implementing our “Many a Mickle…” strategy by releasing our first game “Happi Reads” in six different languages and markets, we were getting ready for the last two of our committed languages, German and Spanish. Judge by our surprise when our German app “Happi liest” was rejected. It had been in “Waiting for Review” [...]

About a month after its release our first game “Lära läsa HD” had made it to the top of its App Store category (Educational Games). We were, of course, very proud and started to envision world dominance. After another month had passed with us still topping our category in Sweden and almost doing the same [...]

We started by making an iPad app. Most developers probably start with either an iPhone app or a universal app. Starting with an iPhone app makes the most sense since that device has a larger user base. Nevertheless, we had the iPad in mind when we designed our first game so for us it was [...]

This is the first in a (hopefully) long series of blog posts about the trials and tribulations of a small, newly created app development initiative. We will write our posts in a chronological order describing strategies, thoughts, insights, pitfalls, lessons learned etc in an honest and unbiased way. Feel free to come along for the [...]