Lemme try to help too! I'll try and sum up ^^ and add some more things
1) Try to use idols from the same group on the front row
2) If you have girls with no Stage Appeal, they should be in the back instead of the front row
3) Your "My Idol" shouldn't be in the front, or so everyone keeps saying...
4) Being in the center/next to center lane guarantees more notes hit than on the side lanes, so put your best girls there
5) Try to replace your remaining N-idols with R-idols
6) Try to have idols with High Tension (or Heat Up, which is even rarer to find...) and put them on the front row
Steps:
1) For now, you should probably fish for some Rs.
You do this by performing lives (recommended: Normal or Hard), and performing well (recommended: S or SS rank)
At the end, you sometimes get idols, some which are Rs, so that's good. Sometimes can also get Friend Points.
Use the friend points to fish for more Rares (100 friend points = 1 idol in the Friend Gacha, so try and rack up 1,000 and use the 10x Friend Gacha, because I never pull Rs in a 1x gacha, so I always do 10x and almost always atleast 1 R girl in a batch of Ns, possibly 2 maybe even 3. I've gotten 5 / 10 to be rares on occasion
)
2) When you got the Rs and made a team, you should focus on leveling their skills. You do this through training.
You basically fuse your idol with other idols that have the same skill as the idol you want to train.
Take the idol you want to train, and pick 10 other idols to be sacrifice for the idol empowerment ritual (yes i'm making terms up, shhh)
Those 10 idols should have atleast 1 of the 2 of their skills (Stage Appeal and or Unit Skill) to be the same so that you have a CHANCE of raising your chosen idol's skill level.
If they dont, don't bother...
You sacrifice Ns and Rs for your Rs.
You sacrifice your Ns to your Rs only if they have a Stage Appeal that's the same to the R, aside from that you cant really use them...
You sacrifice your Rs to your Rs if they have the same Stage Appeal, or the same Unit Skill, or both (in which case it'd be a clone and you'd be performing LIMIT BREAK)
Limit Break is basically a way to increase your idol's max level. You do this by sacrificing an exact clone of the card to that card (may be performed up to 5 times, any other time it wont increase the max level anymore, but can still be used to increase your idol's skill)
3)...I guess when you've got the hang of Rs you should get your SR's and SSRs skilled up, which is the exact same method for Rs except you can no longer use Ns for them (Ns and SRs/SSRs dont have similar skills at all...iirc)
Ok, that's the best I can do...i'm still learning myself, esp. this whole group formation thing.
^ I play when I can. My max is 164, so usually if i'm full, I just play 3 lives on Hard on a 50 and thats 600 points, that's like around 5~8 minutes of playing time. Then I wait 2.5 hours and if i'm in school i'm probably at a break by then, or if i'm at home i'll break from homework/whatever i'm doing and play another around of 600, and etc. the process goes on.
Also, I went a bit hard core (if it could be considered that) and set my phone's alarm for 2.5 hrs later every time I finish playing 3 lives so that I can remind myself when my life's replenished lol
I always have my phone with me so I never miss it when the alarm goes off. I take like a 5 minute break on whatever im doing and just play 3 lives and there goes another 600.
As you can see, I dont do much of anything else, and it's been awhile since I've been hooked on any game, so this is "the game" to focus on for me atm haha
Edit: I think the IOS finally has their update, I just checked the update log when I played on the Android and it has an update for 3/11/2015 with the description having "(ios)" on it