Microsoft fuelling Danish app fairytale in Asia

Just like the fairytales of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, there might be a happy ever after for tiny Danish game app producer Copenhagen Creators.

After 9 months in App Store and Google Play without anything really happening for their 10,000-dollar app ‘How old do I look?’, the producers suddenly received an unexpected boost from one of the world’s biggest companies.
At a conference on Thursday, Microsoft launched a new web-service, which can automatically determine a person’s age by scanning an uploaded photo on a site with the similar-sounding name howold.net.

The Microsoft stunt fuelled the Danish app like a rocket and within a few hours, the app shot to the top in App Store worldwide. By the end of Saturday, ‘How old do I look?’ topped App Store lists in a number of countries, including Indonesia, Hong Kong, Canada, Lao, Thailand and even Mongolia. In the categories Trivia Games and Family Games, the app went number one in most countries, including the US.

And when the Danes woke up on Wednesday morning, the app was number 1 in China App Store as the most downloaded iphone app overall.

With the Danish app, you upload a selfie and let random people guess your age as part of a game, resulting in an average age score.

The success of the app has put the small company under pressure.

“It felt like a cyberattack. We had the capacity to answer 300 requests per second. But that was no longer enough, so we worked night and day to boost our capacity,” says Kristian Mortensen, Chief Programmer at Copenhagen Creators.
After three tough days and a heavy upgrade the app is running smooth.

While Copenhagen Creators acknowledge the lucky timing, the success of the app does not surprise Director Leif Kvalvik:
“We knew that this app had potential. Unlike most other apps, it continued to perform with a relatively small amount of downloads. But it was steady, so we had already decided to make improvements when this happened. Now, we will definitely continue on that track.”

On Wednesday morning, ‘How old do I look’ had passed 2 million downloads from App Store and the fairytale continues…