Reflections on 2011

It’s been an amazing year at Room 12 Studios.

A little over a year ago, we released our first app into the App Store: iPredict Lite Fortune Teller. It went through a few name changes and saw a number of updates to add fortunes, new features, and even squash a bug here and there. It was an incredible learning experience for us, but it was a lot of fun, too. I mean, here was something that we created from nothing and it was out there for all the world to see.

Well, the iOS world, anyway.

Fast forward to October of 2011: iPredict Plus is finally finished. From the very moment we released iPredict Lite, we knew it was never meant to be the end-all, be-all of fortune telling apps. We had so many ideas on how we could improve it. Coincidentally, as we were putting the final touches on iPredict Plus, its older sibling was rocketing to the top of the charts in Australia. We were completely caught off guard. We put this app out there just to say, “Hey, we can do this cool thing, and it’ll be a lot of fun,” and suddenly an entire continent of iOS users had started to download it.

As soon as iPredict Plus became available, we started working hard on updates to both versions of the app, adding new fortunes and features. iOS 5 allowed us to add a feature that many users were already doing on their own: sharing fortunes easily. We added in Twitter support and the option to save fortunes to the camera roll so they could be shared via Instagram. Check out the #iPredict hashtags on both Twitter and Instagram if you want to see just how many users out there love to tell their friends their fortunes.

And the exciting news kept on coming. In the month of December, both iPredict Plus and Lite climbed high up the charts in the US. We were quite excited to wake up one early December morning and see just how popular we had become. And that’s all thanks to you. We truly appreciate the word-of-mouth promotion and the constant fortune submissions we’ve seen from so many of you. You’ve helped make this small company that was “just having fun” into a success that we can be proud of and share with the world.

But, we’re not resting on our laurels. We have a number of projects that have been on the back burner while we work on our penultimate iPredict updates. We hope to share more information about them very, very soon. Be sure to follow us on Twitter or the blog to stay up-to-date on all the Room 12 goodness we have to share.

And please be nice to the crystal ball. She has a dark side, and when you say bad things about her, she takes it out on us. Honestly, I may never get all the blood out of my clothes…

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