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Languages

Is HTML5 the 3rd horse in the race?

Biggest developer survey

We’re thrilled to announce that the Q2 Developer Economics survey we conducted throughout April was the most successful to date, zooming past the 6,000 respondents mark, making it the biggest developer survey globally.

UPDATE: The survey results have now been published – download the free report here.

We broke through the 6,000 developer mark mainly thanks to the help of our 48 Marketing and Regional partners. Together we reached developers from an unprecedented 115 countries, from mature markets, like the US and Western Europe, to emerging markets, like Brazil, Russia, India and China. To reach developers on a global scale, we translated the survey in 10 languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish), aided by our local partners, who helped us reach the local dev communities. Thanks to a partnership with Mobile Monday, we also promoted through over 20 local MoMo chapters in Asia and Oceania.

In the next two months we ‘ll be diving into the results of the survey. The Developer Economics state of the developer nation report will be launched in July, as a free download thanks to the sponsorship by BlackBerry, Mozilla, Intel and Telefonica. This 5th incarnation of the Developer Economics report will feature the latest market trends, including Developer Mindshare and Intentshare, platform selection criteria, revenue models, revenues per app and many more. To whet your appetite until the July launch, you can read the previous editions of the Developer Economics report.

To be the first get the Developer Economics 5th Edition report, sign up for our mailing list!

Sneak peek on Mindshare: Android, iOS duopoly entrenched – with HTML closely behind

Our early results from the Q2 app developer survey are starting to come in – starting with the Developer Mindshare Index 2Q13, i.e. the percentage of mobile developers using each app platform.

As you can see in the graph, the use of Android and iOS is still predominant, with a few percentage points of change for both platforms when compared to our 4Q12 survey. You’ll also notice the continued growth of HMTL as the third horse in the platform race, slowly creeping up on iOS. These trends have been steady over the past year – but what do they mean?

Developer Mindshare Index 2Q13

The continued positioning of Android and iOS as the top two platforms is a no-brainer: Android has the largest installed base and iOS enjoys the highest revenue potential overall – so why does HTML5 continue to grow?

HTML5 grows in popularity as large groups of web developers are leaping over the ever-shrinking chasm from desktop to mobile apps. Moreover, HTML5 allows for the development and deployment of apps that work across different platforms, usually at a lower cost of developing HTML apps, and for most app categories. About two thirds of developers targeting HTML mobile develop web sites or web apps while just under a third are using PhoneGap. Stay tuned for more analysis on the route to market for HTML5 apps in the full report.

HTML5 has wide industry backing across telcos, handset makers and platforms (Firefox OS, BlackBerry WebWorks and Tizen) going for it. At the same time, there are certain key disadvantages, namely access to native platform APIs, as well as the lack of a unified development environment and quality debugging tools.

HTML5 is now challenging the duopoly as a development or deployment platform – with the route to market varying across browsers, hybrid apps (e.g. PhoneGap), JavaScript converters (Appcelerator) and dedicated platform frameworks (BlackBerry WebWorks). We still see a growing diversity in the go-to-market approaches for HTML5 developers, and one which we believe will continue to expand. We‘ll be analyzing the HTML vs. native tradeoffs in a future report, but in the meantime – what’s your take on the HTML vs. native debate?

Sneak peek: Windows 8 and BB 10 are gaining traction

As you can see from the early Developer Mindshare graph, Windows 8 and BlackBerry 10 have already attracted a reasonable amount of developer attention. What’s important here is that BlackBerry developers have been quick to migrate from the old legacy (5,6,7) platforms and adopt the latest, BB10 platform.

BlackBerry Mindshare

What’s interesting to note in the graph above, comparing the use of BB platforms between the two latest surveys (4Q12 vs. 2Q13) is the fact that the BB 5,6,7 platforms are quickly fading into oblivion, with BB10 mushrooming to a substantial 15% mindshare in just 6 months. The mindshare of BB10 is slightly less than that of BB 5,6,7 six months ago, but the platform is still gaining in strength, as our data for the platforms that developers plan to adopt seem to suggest, so there’s room for growth. The extent to which the new BlackBerry platform can grow in Developer Mindshare depends primarily on the volume of devices that BlackBerry will manage to sell in the coming months, given that reach is the primary reason for platform selection.

Competing against Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10, new entrants Firefox OS and Tizen are slowly gaining support from a few handset OEMs and network operators. Another open question is whether the HTML5 platform proponents – Tizen, Firefox OS and BlackBerry WebWorks – should band together towards a single HTML5 implementation or keep pursuing independent and conflicting strategies. What’s your take?

Full report available in July

We’ll be stopping our sneak peek here – stay tuned for the full report for more (out in July)! There, you’ll find an in-depth analysis of major trends, such as the shifting balance of power between the top platforms, devices vs. tablets, revenue models, as well as the main factors affecting app monetization. If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to our mailing list to receive word of the report publication.

Until next time,
– Matos (@visionmobile)

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Business

Mobile Advertising versus App Store Promotion: a tale of woes and wins

As an independent developer, I ‘ve had my fair amount of successes and failures – examples of the former are TVPyx (Symbian, Windows Phone, Web) and TubeBusBike (Symbian).

Having developed apps on iOS, Android, WP, Symbian, Bada and Web – my experiences of all stores  has been mixed. As an independent developer it is increasingly difficult to get noticed in the sea of apps that are available on the various stores. I have had a fair amount of trial and error experiences with both advertising and merchandising across those stores. I ‘m here to share my experiences with both.

 There are a number of techniques available to developers that can be used to promote your app and increase downloads. Some of these you will need to pay for, some of which are just down to hard work and slick execution. Of course there is always an element of luck and right place right time usually built upon previous failures, think Rovio. I am going to concentrate on two methods of promotion.

 Advertising  and cross promotion – The method of promoting an app either through paid in-app advertising i.e. in someone else’s app/website or cross promotion through apps developed by the same publisher.

 App store promotion – The practice of promoting an app via app stores. Merchandisers (app store owner staffers) select apps by country/region to appear as featured or promoted apps on the store. Various ‘slots’ have different success rates where ‘featured’ is usually the Holy Grail in terms of maximizing eyeballs and downloads.

Advertising

Advertising using one of the mobile ad networks like Admob or an ad exchange like Inneractive is a paid-for activity i.e. you would pay for a campaign of ad impressions to promote your application in the usual advertising model. While someone like Admob may be excellent in a market like the Germany, they may lack in a specific region like Vietnam. This is where an ad exchange comes in. If you have a truly global application or specific regional needs that no one ad network can provide the required local content, an ad exchange barters on your behalf with local inventory and then serves the ad that gives you the most return.

Not all ad mechanisms are created equal, so you should take care whilst selecting one. While the fill rate may be excellent compared to a single network, the downside is that you may not be getting premium content that would be served by a truly local provider i.e. lower CPM. So while a fixed ad network can provide targeted delivery in terms of locale, an ad exchange can level the playing field especially in those maybe hard to reach areas of the globe. You need to understand your market and choose accordingly.

My personal experience of using paid-for app promotion was very disappointing. For £1000 one of my apps was involved in a campaign that consisted of a carousel with 4 ads shown in succession. The campaign as a whole  garnered 260,000 impressions. My ad was the 4th on the carousel meaning that it would be the 4th ad served once the app the ad was in was invoked. Quite far down the pecking order. From this campaign there were 82 clicks of which it is unclear whether any of these actually resulted in any downloads. No spike, no step change, just noise. The ad was targeted at UK mainly but a few other countries were involved. So quite a high customer acquisition rate!

Anecdotal evidence suggests that in some markets, advertising in apps might even have an adverse effect on downloads, as they use data which comes at a cost to the user.

App Store Promotion

Being a ‘featured’ app on any store will dramatically increase downloads. Naturally being featured in a store is likely the result of one of the following; it’s a great app, it’s a great experience, great PR, a relationship with a journalist on a national newspaper, major marketing budget, lots of hard work and maybe a bit of luck to name a few.

To get noticed by a store owner – especially an OEM – you need to consider what they as the builder of the devices are currently trying to push. For Nokia it may be imaging or mapping i.e. you are more likely to be promoted if you are harnessing one of the strengths of the business, what makes them unique. For Samsung it may be an app that integrates with their TV solutions. Segmentation considerations also work e.g. apps for a demographic that are being targeted by a particular device or devices. Building a relationship with an app store owner is a means to get promoted but this is likely to be the result of an app that meets the needs of a campaign or some quid quo pro between the developer and the likely OEM. A strong relationship or understanding of needs is required regardless of approach. I am privileged enough to have been involved a number of OEM programmes and have some close relationships with a number of OEM’s and platform providers so this approach has very much worked for me.

There are a number different areas on a store where you can be promoted; featured, staff picks etc. Some OEM’s have mini stores that usually link to their platform stores like Windows Marketplace or Play. This gives the OEM the ability to merchandise their partner apps without seeking the permission of the platform owner. Nokia has the App Highlights app shipped with all their phones, other OEM’s have their own offering.

My experience of being featured on Windows Marketplace was great for downloads as I suspect being featured would be on other stores. App Highlights worked well until Nokia changed the app due to having to try to promote more apps themselves. This meant my app started to get lost in the sheer number of apps being promoted. The latter being the inherent problem of managing app promotion on store.

Below is a graph of my own experience of being featured on Windows Marketplace and being promoted through App Highlights. There is no halo effect, as soon as the promotion stops the graph returns to the usual run rate. The implication is that you have to continue to promote and market the app to get downloads. As you can see the experience is far more positive than paid-for app advertising. Being featured represented a 1000% increase (800 downloads/day) in downloads whilst being included in App Highlights represented a 200% (160 downloads/day) increase in downloads.

Continuous promotion is crucial

There are other spikes on the graph that are not either Featured or App Highlights. The honest answer is I don’t know what caused them. I only know that my app was featured or highlighted because a) someone told me or b) I happened to know the right people. The other spikes could have been caused by promotion on other parts of the store that I was unaware of or a blog picked up on the app etc. It is usually the case that the developer is not told that their app is being promoted which seems a shame for the developer and the store owner not to be able to capitalize on the promotion.

Conclusion

To get downloads, you need to continuously promote and market your app. I experienced no halo effect, as soon as the promotion stops the graph returns to the usual run rate. For me, getting featured and highlighted was a far more effective solution than paid-for advertising. The key is to build close relationships with multiple OEM’s and platform providers and use it to deeply understand their marketing needs.

Categories
Business Tips

Why You Should Localize from Day 1 (And How to Do it Painlessly)

Continuous Localization

Localization is rarely discussed (and often overlooked by developers), but it is increasingly important in today’s economy where mobile development is a global industry. The United States ranks fourth, behind South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the number of mobile device users per capita. Singapore, Israel and a quartet of European countries round out the top 10.

Localization is certainly worth the effort. A 2007 paper by the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA), for instance, reported that $25 dollars was returned for every $1 invested in localization. And a 2012 publication from Distimo revealed that on average, applications increased their download volumes on the iPhone by greater than 128% the week after introducing the app in the user’s native language.

But localization can also be a huge undertaking.

Localization can be expensive and cumbersome

But it doesn’t have to be.

Currently, there are three approaches to translation: manual, automated, and hybrid. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks:

Manual – Employees, contractors, volunteers, or language vendors serve as translators. Emails, FTP servers, and spreadsheets are the primary tools for workflow management.

  • Benefits: Accurate, aware of brand identity, and sensitive to context, tone and style.
  • Drawbacks: Expensive, cumbersome and slow
  • Examples: Applingua, LocTeam, WordCrafts

Automated – Computer software is used to translate text from one language to another. Also known as “Machine Translation.”

  • Benefits: Fast, efficient, and low cost
  • Drawbacks: Imprecise, lacks keyword recognition, and insensitive to style
  • Examples: Google Translate, Bing Translator, SYSTRAN, SDL Language Weaver

Hybrid – Human translators are paired with a localization platform that helps automate the localization workflow for developers, product/localization managers, and translators. It brings the benefits of the manual and automated approaches and the drawbacks of neither.

  • Benefits: Efficient, accurate, and sensitive to context, style and tone.
  • Drawbacks: Initial learning curve upon startup
  • Examples: Transifex with Gengo, OneSky

After a few years of trying to build super-computers that understand human language like only a human can, the localization industry is now leaning toward the hybrid approach that still brings a great deal of processor power to bear. The difference though, is in the personal touch that only someone with skin on can provide. A machine cannot understand context or tone. A machine cannot understand the difference between “manual” meaning “by hand” or “manual” meaning the skateboard trick. It can’t inject energy into a paragraph with an unexpected word choice. Those are things that only humans can do.

When to localize?

Once you select from one of the above solutions, the issue of workflow remains. Decide how your localization will get done, and you will also need to decide when in the development process your app will be translated. Developers traditionally approached localization in one of two ways:

In Development– Some developers opt to add an extra step to the release process after which no strings (also referred to as “segments”) may be added, edited, or deleted. This is sometimes called a string freeze. This gives translators the necessary time to work on and test translations without fear of changes. Following this point, only minor bugs may be addressed – strings cannot be changed.

After the strings are translated, they are returned to the developers for use in the final release. This process is then repeated for the next release of the software. This process slows down the release of the software in all languages quite a bit.

Post-Release – The second approach is to release the software and add translations afterwards. This means some pages will be not translated at all, or for software with a previous release that has been translated in the past, only partially translated. With this approach, companies are unable to do a simultaneous release in multiple languages.

Introducing: Continuous Localization

Using either of these traditional workflows means localization will be performed in large batches, making it incompatible with today’s agile processes. It delays the availability of the software in languages other than the source language. And every delay is a missed opportunity to create new customers and generate more revenue.

A new solution is available that moves at the speed of today’s development teams, without demanding development stoppage. The idea is that as soon as a new piece of content gets generated for your app, it’s made available for translation. As soon as a new piece of content gets translated for your app, it’s made available to your users.

It looks like this:

Continuous Localization

We call it Continuous Localization, and it is really only possible with the use of a Continuous Localization Platform to house and manage the entire localization process in the cloud. These systems, now emerging on the market, harness the power of the cloud and APIs to enable a nuanced human-driven translation at the speed of continuous deployment.

Categories
Tips

Backend-as-a-Service Shootout (the best alternatives to Parse?)

BaaS Shootout - Parse Alternatives

Using a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) can reduce development cost and time-to-market. It’s a simple way of getting a highly scalable backend solution without significant upfront investment. This avoids the technical risks of having to scale your own service to meet demand as your user base grows; in a world where an app that hits the store top charts might gain more than a million new users before you complete your next iteration of development this is worthy of serious consideration. In most cases the tradeoff is giving up control of your backend. This tradeoff was brought into the spotlight recently when the most popular BaaS, Parse, was acquired by Facebook. This created a predominantly negative reaction from developers who went from buying a service from a neutral party to hosting their backend with someone many already distrust that has an interest in mining their app data. So, if you’re looking for a BaaS for new project but don’t want to share your data with Facebook, or want to migrate away from Parse, where do you go? Our last survey asked developers using BaaS offerings to rate their primary tool against a range of criteria – the results could highlight some attractive alternatives.

Splitting out the 8 tools which had more than 10 ratings each, the “other” category is still almost 25% of responses and includes a further 11 tools that developers had selected as their primary BaaS. Our own sector page lists 43 vendors at the time of writing, suggesting that the sector is still very fragmented and likely to see consolidation in future.

BaaS Shootout

Some popular BaaS options tied to other tools

Parse was by far the most popular with almost 2.5 times as many responses as Appcelerator’s Cloud Service as the next most popular. Appcelerator’s service is fairly heavily tied to their popular Cross-platform tool (CPT) much like the Sencha offering, which had a very similar number of responses. However, while Sencha’s BaaS had the highest developer satisfaction in our survey, Appcelerator’s was the lowest of the top eight. This situation is the same as the satisfaction levels for the corresponding CPTs. While sencha.io may look attractive on developer ratings, adopting it implies using (at least some of) the Sencha libraries for cross-platform web development too – although this tool scored highly on cross-platform availability (the web works everywhere) there are no native SDKs.

Applicasa switched focus

Just behind sencha.io for developer satisfaction was Applicasa. However, while our survey was running Applicasa were in the middle of a mini-pivot from a generic BaaS to a “Mobile Game Management Platform”, having recognised that the generic BaaS sector was exceptionally crowded. They haven’t yet come out of beta or announced pricing, although this is likely to reflect their value-adding services for game developers. If you’re looking for a BaaS offering with extra functionality for mobile games then Applicasa may be worth a look.

Open source or specialised

Behind Applicasa comes Parse, closely followed by Deployd and CloudMine. Deployd does not yet have a production hosting solution, so it’s currently just an open source project that you host your own instance of on Heroku or Amazon. That’s also an advantage in that you can modify the code and you’ll always control your own data. Another open source BaaS option like this, Helios, was recently launched by Heroku themselves. If you can take on responsibility for some of the maintenance of the backend in order to maintain control of your backend code and data then this kind of open source option is very attractive. CloudMine on the other hand is focussing on larger corporate clients – they’re targeting enterprises and agencies producing lots of apps. Like Applicasa, they’re specialising to target what they see as a more profitable niche and trying to avoid mass market generic BaaS competition.

Further acquisitions likely – select with care

The remaining popular BaaS options in our survey scored below the average for “others” on developer satisfaction. However, just by looking at the top handful we can see some trends for the still immature sector emerging. The generic BaaS space is all about scale. The remaining vendors fighting for this market are likely to get acquired by a larger company, or run out of cash trying to compete. It was implied that there were multiple parties interested in acquiring Parse who are presumably still in the market for a similar solution. If the acquiror of your chosen BaaS is a PaaS vendor then the service should continue to evolve and developers’ data remain private. The large PaaS vendors are likely to build or buy a more complete BaaS solution – we already see this with Helios and Windows Azure Mobile Services. Other companies interested in buying a BaaS vendor might want to integrate with their own analytics (as with Flurry buying Trestle) or other developer services, secure a key supplier or just get a closer relationship with mobile developers. There may also be large enterprises that snap up a small BaaS vendor for their own internal use. Other BaaS vendors will specialise towards specific developer segments.

If, like most developers, you’re still experimenting in the market and not yet building your own services with a long term view then a BaaS that’s specialised to your app category might be a great option. For those looking to select a common backend architecture that they’ll re-use across multiple products, or platform to build on top of for the longer term, the open source frameworks look like the safest option in the current market.

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Business Community Tips

Test Early, Test Often, Test on Everything?

Bugs Everywhere

Testing any mobile app presents a wide range of challenges. The often repeated but rarely followed software best practice of test early, test often is harder to adhere to than usual due to the fragmentation of the target environment and the relative maturity of tools. The increased acceptance of apps by mainstream consumers and intense competition have raised the bars for user experience and quality. There is more to test than ever, yet often very limited budget for doing so. Fortunately every challenge presents an opportunity and a vast array of tools vendors are racing to fill the gaps.

What to test?

Much of the traditional software testing literature focuses on various forms of functional testing – ensuring the system does what it’s meant to do. With a strong trend towards simpler, single purpose apps, this is often the easiest thing to verify in a mobile app project. There is now a much stronger focus on the user experience and this requires testing of an entirely different nature. The most effective way to test that an app is easy (or even fun) to use is to get feedback from real users. Doing that and finding major issues after the app has been built is a very expensive mistake to make, so most developers and designers will want to create mock-ups or prototypes for early feedback. There’s a wide range of tools to help with this task from simple wireframing through to full interactive prototyping. Given the importance of animations within mobile apps to enable users to discover interface interactions and learn to navigate, more complete prototypes are becoming increasingly desirable. As users become more sophisticated and specialist tools reduce the time and effort required to create interactive prototypes this trend is likely to continue.

With the majority of app store revenues coming through in-app purchases, another more specialized form of testing the design of an app is becoming increasingly important – split testing. On the desktop web, tools for trying out design and copy variants to optimize sites for specific user behaviours are very mature and the best of them can be used by staff with no development skills. In the mobile world most of the tools in this space are still very immature and developer-focussed. The responsive design trend on the web and the more restricted deployment options for native apps make this a more challenging problem for mobile devices but we expect the tools in this sector to mature rapidly.

[sectors slugs=’prototyping-mockup’]

When to test?

The earlier you find problems with software, the cheaper it is to fix them. As such, it makes sense to start testing as early as possible. How about testing the idea for the app via a mobile market research service before you even create your first wireframes? It’s worth considering – if you can’t generate interest in your app idea with a simple pitch it’s not going to be easy to get people to download it from the store either.

For most apps (particularly native apps) it’ll be worth using one of the mock-up or prototyping tools mentioned above and test the design before you start coding the real app. It’s much cheaper to iterate a simple design prototype than a native app. However, you’ll still want to try out the actual app with real users before you launch it. To help with that there’s a range of beta testing services that can help you distribute your beta app and find and/or manage testers. There are also services to help you get feedback from your users before and after the app launches. Providing a highly accessible feedback channel for users in the app is your best hope for preventing the inevitable disgruntled few from leaving bad reviews.

Ideally an app will be developed and tested iteratively with functional testing of new features and full regression tests for the existing functionality run for each iteration. This level of testing can get extremely expensive and time consuming unless it is automated. Fortunately there are several tools, open source frameworks and third party services that can help out there too.

[sectors slugs=’beta-testing,feedback-helpdesk,automated-app-testing’]

Where to test?

Another major problem for mobile developers is the scale and fragmentation of the market they’re trying to serve. Collecting a full library of test devices with major firmware variants is way beyond the budget of most developers, let alone the effort that would be required to test manually on all of them. Automated testing solutions can help here also and some services provide access to a large set of devices for remote testing too. However, it’s simply not feasible for most developers to test every version of their apps on all the device and firmware combinations they support. This limitation means some bugs are almost guaranteed to escape into the wild; the important thing then becomes how quickly you discover and fix them. For this reason, crash analytics and bug tracking tools are becoming increasingly important. Another useful weapon in this battle is your usage analytics data – it can enable you to focus testing on the devices which are most popular amongst your user base and also spot changes in use on particular device models that might signal a non-fatal error that’s causing users to abandon the app.

Finally, for some apps, where they are tested geographically may also be important. Do you know what the performance of your app is like for users who are far from your servers? If you use SMS, do you know how long it takes to get to users on different networks around the world (or if it even gets there). Have the localisations for your app been tested by native speakers? Our automated testing and app certification sectors include companies that can crowdsource beta testers or provide access software testing professionals almost anywhere in the world to help you scale globally without leaving your desk.

[sectors slugs=’crash-analytics-bug-tracking,user-analytics,automated-app-testing,app-certification’]

Categories
Business

Usage Analytics Shootout

Usage Analytics

Usage Analytics tools help developers understand their users and the way they interact with their apps. Measuring app usage in this way and using the data to help target improvements to the app can significantly improve revenues. We’ve already highlighted the duopoly in this tools sector, with Google and Flurry dominating. Our survey showed that 74% of developers made use of Google Analytics while 41% used Flurry. Clearly there’s some overlap here with developers using both and in fact less than 7.5% of developers who use this type of tool don’t use either Google or Flurry at all. However, lots of developers work on apps across multiple platforms for multiple clients and they may not always be able to use their first choice analytics tool. We asked developers to rate their primary analytics tool across a range of criteria. This data tells us which are developers’ first choice tools and how they compare.

Analytics Shootout

 

[box type=”alert”]The infogram service is currently experiencing some technical difficulties. We’ll bring back the interactive chart asap. In the meanwhile, you an find the filtered results mentioned in the article here.[/box]

Looking at all responses for developers primary tools Google and Flurry still dominate the market with Flurry slightly closer to Google and more than twice as popular as all of the other vendors combined. All of the tools show very high levels of developer satisfaction with Google slightly ahead overall. Outside of the top five selection criteria the only areas where other tools show significant advantages over Google or Flurry are custom views of the data and real-time analytics. If you have requirements on those areas it may be worth looking at the competition in more detail but for everyone else we can focus on the shootout between the top two.

Google beats Flurry in a head to head comparison

To try to get a more accurate comparison between Google & Flurry we filtered the data down to those developers who use both tools (and possibly others as well) such that they were in a position to make a direct comparison. This produces some interesting results; first, amongst developers that use both, Flurry is the primary tool for a majority of developers (53.1% vs 39.4%); second, on average, developers that use both tools rate Google higher on every single selection criteria, sometimes significantly so. The ratings gap between the two tools is magnified if we weight the criteria by the relative importance developers assigned in the survey. For the most important criteria, ease of integration, Flurry scores higher than Google when all responses are considered but the result is reversed when looking at only those who can make a direct comparison.

The future?

It seems Google has a slightly better tool but Flurry is still holding onto a majority of the developers that have tried both. The explanation for this slightly conflicting result appears to be that Flurry established itself as a leader in iOS analytics early and there is higher adoption of analytics amongst iOS developers in general. So, while Google’s analytics product may have the edge, it’s not sufficiently superior to justify switching for most existing users. Android ports or web apps may use Google analytics but the iOS app sticks with Flurry. This suggests that unless Flurry can improve their offering we may see their market share decline in future surveys as more developers adopt usage analytics. Given developer’s emphasis on ease of integration, the most likely disruption of the duopoly in this market would be an integrated offering – usage analytics combined with crash analytics and maybe also marketing analytics (install/referral tracking) in a single SDK.

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Business

Prototyping: needless effort or driver of perfection?

Mobile apps are becoming more and more sophisticated every day. They evolve together with mobile devices, giving us even more pleasant, intriguing and unique experiences. Design, usability, functionality accompanied by various touch interactions, animations, and transitions are integral components of apps.

Building an app is not easy. It involves various stages in a long development life cycle. Apps require time to build, time to test, and time to iterate for improvements. Iterations are not easy especially when extensive code changes are required and that’s where usually things get messy.

There is one solution to avoid the trap that lies ahead when developing apps: prototyping. A prototype is an early sample or model built to test a concept or process, or to act as an object to be replicated or learned from. The prototyping step is often skipped due to the extra cost and effort it adds to the lifecycle of a project. However, it is widely accepted in the development world today, that undermining this vital part of the design and build process may lead to miscommunication between developers and clients, pitfalls, over budgeting, and bad quality products. Prototyping allows developers to conduct proper user trials, iterate before coding and send the app to production only when it is perfected.

Graphic designers, user experience designers, usability experts, interaction designers, and developers use different ways and tools to create prototypes. The most popular methods used for prototyping apps are paper prototyping, presentation software, mobile apps (usually for tablets) designed to allow people to prototype mobile applications on actual mobile devices, source code and prototyping applications and tools either web (offered as SaaS) or desktop apps.

In the following section I will briefly describe the prototype tools vendor landscape and the main needs that these tools serve.

Vendor landscape

If we ignore for a moment the paper prototyping and source code, where no specific tool is used, then we are down to three main types of prototyping tools: presentation software, mobile apps and mobile prototyping applications.

prototyping-tools-landscape

Presentation software like Keynote or Powerpoint, are in the market for decades and peeple are well trained to use them in different ways. The way people use them for prototyping, is by linking sketches, or design comps together in a presentation since such tools support animations and screen transitions. Some UI libraries like Keynotopia have UI components of popular mobile operating systems like iOS and Android, designed for presentation software. Presentation software are built for an entire different purpose and they are limited in prototyping functionality but are still valid in some user cases. Diagramming software like Omingraffle and Gliffy are sometimes also used for prototyping.

Mobile apps for iPad and Android tablets designed for mobile prototyping allow real device testing which is their main advantage. Some of these apps provide UI libraries of major mobile UI components like App Cooker and Interface HD. Others, like Popapp allow taking photos of sketches and linking them together. Most of these apps are limited to single device prototyping and usually lack sharing and collaboration tools but are very useful when it comes to quickly validating an idea.

Mobile prototyping applications are web or desktop applications designed specifically for mobile prototyping. These applications vary from simple traditional wireframe applications (including mockups) to advanced prototyping tools that are able to provide a varying degree of mobile-specific functionality such as touch events and gestures, interactions, screen transitions. Most importantly these tools provide the ability to preview a prototype on the actual device.

There are three different types of such mobile prototyping applications:

  1. Hotspot apps are usually web apps that allow you to upload your mobile design comps and link them together usually with a single event (click or touch) without (or at best simple) transition effects. These apps are useful especially for collaboration as most of them allow comments and annotations. Although some of these tools make real device preview possible (i.e. preview on the actual device that the app is built for), they are not really eligible for proper user trials as they do not allow multiple interactions such as touch gestures and other important mobile specific features. Applications in this category are Fieldtest app, Invisionapp, Popap and are usually web apps offered as Software As A Service or mobile apps for tablets and Smartphones.
  2. Wireframe or Mockup tools are tools that allow the development of still wireframes or mockups. Usually these tools have a large number of UI components libraries available. Some of these tools have been in the market for years as they were designed for website mockups or wireframes, but many of them have been changed in an attempt to embrace needs specific to mobile apps. Many of these tools are very advanced in functionality and features, offering a range of useful companion tools for collaboration and more. Most of these tools are limited to single tap interaction (or mouse interactions, as they are designed for web sites) and no or limited animations and transitions. Tools that fall under this category include Balsamiq, MockingBird, UXpin, Pidoco and others and they can be found as web apps available on a subscription basis or as desktop apps.
  3. Prototyping tools are web applications or desktop software designed from the ground up and specifically for mobile (or web) prototyping. These applications go beyond traditional wireframe or mockup applications, to provide functionality for mobile touch events and gestures, interactions, screen transitions and most importantly provide the ability to preview a prototype on the actual device. Many of them come with UI libraries for iOS, Android, Windows mobile and Blackberry and offer collaboration tools and functionality. Tools and software in this category include Axure, Indigo Studio, Proto.io and many more.

[sectors slugs=’prototyping-mockup’]

Current challenges with prototyping tools

Prototyping tools are still in their infancy. They have been around for two years or less must be in sync with the ever changing mobile industry. New mobile devices become available on a daily basis, new versions of mobile operating systems and new functionality that needs to be supported makes the chase even more difficult. The main challenge is the ability to test the prototypes on the real device. In order to achieve this more tools render their prototypes in HTML5 so that they can run on a native mobile browser without the need of installing and maintaining various mobile apps.

Another major challenge is performance and by using HTML5 features such as animations render much slower on a mobile browser than they would on a native app, making the experience a bit far from real and as such defeating the purpose of doing a full prototype in the first place. Nevertheless, some of these tools have reached a maturity level that allow professionals to create fully functional, interactive mobile app prototypes of their apps that look and behave exactly as their app would. This allows the teams to conduct user trials, gather feedback, and iterate for improvements. Furthermore, a proper prototype narrows the communication gap between designers and developers (coders) as well as with the app team and the stakeholders.

Future opportunities with prototyping tools

Prototyping tools gain larger audiences as mobile technologies progress. As mobile apps become more sophisticated, more detailed prototyping is required. The mobile market grows and the prototyping tools market will continue to grow with it as more Operating Systems and newer more capable devices are released. New devices come to life every day, from car navigation systems to refrigerator panels, all having in common touch and interactive interfaces.

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Business Community

The state of App Search Optimization (ASO)

The reason why ASO is getting so much attention right now is because in today’s charts-driven app stores 10% of apps gets 90% of downloads. For developers, the only effective mechanism to catch attention is buying large amounts of app installs to catapult their app into the top 25 charts where people look for inspiration. But this approach has become very expensive as app install prices soar.

Indie developers who have limited resources struggle to compete and get their app in front of users’ eyes. At XYO, our goal is to change this and enable long-tail app discovery by helping users discover what they want even though they can’t express it. To build our site XYO.net we looked into search behavior to understand how people find apps. What we learned is that the majority of users has no real concept of how to search for apps and no idea about the vast supply of great apps out there, because they can’t see them.

The Super Early Days of ASO - A SImple Model To Compare SEO and ASO

To optimize for search it’s important to understand how users are searching. On the web, there is SEO as a proven tool for which countless SEO companies provide rich insights, and tracking success is easy. For mobile apps however, it’s mostly guesswork. “These are the super early days of ASO”, said Tomasz Kolinko founder of ASO specialist Appcod.es. App Store Optimization (ASO) at the moment boils down to optimizing a list of keywords for queries that users are likely to type.

So how do users search? Based on our data on XYO.net and by looking at the publicly available studies by Chomp (acquired by Apple last year), we have identified four types of users in app search.

Our main findings conclude that app search is dominated by vaguely expressed intents and very generic queries. Users are inexperienced in how to find apps and have difficulties navigating cluttered app stores.

80% of user searches are generic category or interest searches

XYO Insights - types of search queries

Most app searches happen with only a generally expressed intent. The majority of users (around 75%-80%) type general app categories into the search box. Examples of such categories are ‘social networking’, ‘education’ or ‘racing games’. Our findings are consistent with what app search company Chomp was publishing in its Monthly App Search Analytics study.

Around 10%-15% of all search queries look for simple inspiration: These users either type ‘games’ or ‘apps’ into the search box or add adjectives like ‘new’, ‘free’ or ‘fun’. Examples of such queries are: ‘addictive games’, ‘fun games’, ‘free apps’, ‘new apps’.

Only 5% of all users seek specific app brands or titles. Our data and other sources indicate that while some users are aware of mainstream brands like Angry Birds or Facebook, other mobile brands are mostly unknown.

For apps there is another category: functional app searches where the query describes what the user wishes to achieve. Examples of such searches are ‘crop photos’, ‘block calls’, ‘view movies’. Those functional queries are super important for classic web-based SEO – in mobile app search they are marginal at around 5% of searches.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5314774452/
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5314774452/

Optimizing search for users who don’t know how to search

App Store search is based on app title and a keyword list. For Google Play the app description also counts, which opens up more opportunities for developers to add seasonal or trending keywords (e.g. ‘easter’ or ‘gangnam style’).

In general, it’s advised to use a keyword tool such as appcod.es, MobileDevHQ, SearchMan , and appnique.com. These tools give an idea of keywords competitors are using and where the sweet spot of high search volume and low competition lies for a specific app.

[sectors slugs=’app-store-optimization’]

“Longer phrases are 70% of search volume on the web (indicator), they’re less competitive, and probably see higher post-click conversion (download) rates because the user explicitly searched for ‘free video poker game’, Niren Hiro, CEO at SearchMan told us. His conclusion: Developers can take steps to get the No. 1 rank under each of their ‘long tail’ keywords. That is, developers can optimize their rankings for keywords that will give them better results on the App Store when users go searching for certain kinds of apps. Optimizing for the long tail is key, because generic keywords will have high search volumes but a lot of competition and often lower conversion.

“We go from low(er)-volume, high-conversion keywords (such as ‘golfcoaching’), all the way to what we call secondary and tertiary market keywords, like ‘coaching’ or ‘sports’. Conversion for branded and function searches are likely to have higher conversion rates than inspiration or interest searches – and interest searches may have even better conversion rates than inspiration searches,“ explained Patrick Haig, VP, Customer Success  at MobileDevHQ. If history from the web will repeat itself, then it will become cumbersome for users to browse results, and they will start entering more descriptive phrases to get relevant results fast.

Apart from optimizing the keyword list, an app’s title is of utmost importance. We recommend including the most important keywords in the title to get found.

Showtime: App description and screenshots increase conversion

When users browse search results, two things matter most to increase conversion: app descriptions and screenshots. Over and over again we see the first three lines of description wasted by developers babbling about achievements that are meaningless to new users. Sure, a “Game of the Year” award is great news – but it’s secondary information as long as users don’t have a clue what the game is about. That’s why the app description should explain what the app does in the first 2-3 lines. Bullet points can be used if necessary, as well as precise and short copy. Later in the text authoritative reviews can make sense to build trust, especially for Android where this text is also indexed for search. “For Google Play, it’s even better if you can include reviews that include targeted keywords,” said Patrick Haig.

Screenshots have gained relevance significantly and are a popular medium for developers. Users rely on screenshots to see if they like the look and feel of an app they’re about to download, and –again– to find out what this app actually does. Jai Jaisimha CEO at Appnique: “Moment of truth: iOS6 design increases importance of the screenshot because that is mostly what they see in the App Store client on the phone.” That’s why adding explanatory text is useful – and developers should get creative about it. Patrick Haig: “Treating screenshots like a stop-motion commercial can be powerful.”

Reviews turn users into app ambassadors

Once a user has downloaded an app, ratings become priority because they are crucial for ranking: “We have an article here from Inside Mobile Apps that illuminates how important ratings are, segmented by each store (Google Play and iTunes). Also, it’s becoming even more important for publishers to improve upon their current version rating, as that’s the only rating seen by a searcher in-device (i.e., searching on their iPhone or iPad). Users have to dig in order to see the All Versions rating, which just doesn’t happen,” Patrick Haig from mobiledevHQ told us.

Source: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/star_ratings.png

Though important, ratings are not that meaningful to base a download decision on: The average rating is 3.8 making it difficult to see the nuances within the star rating system. To increase conversion, internal and external reviews are getting more and more significant. Being proactive in asking for reviews can save a lot of pain: Prompting users for feedback makes them convey a problem before they post a negative review, recommends Appnique.

Conclusion

At the moment, a big trend in app store optimization (ASO) is trying to overcome the obvious discovery problem by stuffing app’s titles with keywords, longer descriptions or almost complete sentences. The race for the best phrases keywords is in full swing. Obviously user experience will suffer in the process if keyword optimization will be used too excessively by a large number of developers. A backlash might be the result, similar to when Google punished some of the shadier SEO practices with their Panda update.

The ASO tips presented above are not meant to be a ‘silver bullet’ for app discovery. ASO is a useful set of techniques used to increase discoverability through keywords, complementary screenshots and –most importantly– understanding how users are looking for apps. But it’s just one of many approaches to attract attention in a crowded app store, the main one being: having a great app that’s worth discovering in the first place.

Categories
News and Resources

India – your next apportunity?

India app superpower

The world is getting ‘App’ified – and India is entering the fray at full force! Apps are an important element of consumer mobile behaviour – share of time spent on voice calls and texting is reducing, while time spent on apps and internet browsing is rising. With India rapidly growing as a major app superpower, it is important to understand the underlying drivers of this rapidly growing ecosystem.

Is there an “apportunity” for your app in India?

The Rise of India as an App Superpower

If you are creating an app in a localised language, you should also read The App Localisation Opportunity.

Categories
Tools

Cross-Platform Tools Shootout

Cross-platform tools

The “write once, run anywhere” concept may be pure fantasy for most apps but sharing code across platforms is desirable and in some cases essential to making projects economically viable. With the application frameworks for all the biggest platforms being in different languages, the market for Cross-Platform Tools (CPTs) to enable code reuse is understandably the largest one (in terms of number of competing solutions) we track. The time required to evaluate all of them is far beyond what most developers can afford to spend on such research. So, which tools are the best?

Balancing mindshare with developer ratings

In our last developer survey we asked CPT users to tell us what they considered most important when choosing a CPT and also to rate their primary tool (some developers use several) across multiple criteria. Because that report was primarily about tools, several of the CPT vendors promoted the survey to their developers. Although we try to weight responses resulting from different promotions to attempt to remove this sampling bias in our statistics, it’s not possible to eliminate it entirely from the relative popularity of the tools themselves. As such, although the developer mindshare is a useful indicator of quality tools, we shouldn’t trust that alone. Amongst the most popular tools, it turns out that CPT users are generally very happy with their choices.


The average score out of 5 for all of the tools with more than 30 sets of developer ratings is close to 4 and weighting that by the relative importance of each aspect increases the average for all of the tools except Qt.

Compare with care

[tweetable]It’s important to be careful when comparing scores for individual tools[/tweetable], since they may reflect the typical backgrounds and expectations of developers using them rather than some absolute rating. For example, Sencha scored 4.08 for “Native UI look and feel” despite having pure HTML5/JS/CSS components while Appcelerator only scored 3.86 here despite binding JavaScript logic to actual native components! Haxe (pronounced Hex) also shows a couple of issues like this. It’s a relatively unknown code translation tool which seems primarily targeted at former Flash developers, although by no means limited to that audience. Since the Haxe language can be compiled to most of the major programming languages it scores very highly on “Availability across platforms”. However, it’s important to note that unless developers want to build their own application framework from scratch or integrate with one in the target language manually they’ll also need NME, which does support a very wide range of platforms but not as many as some other CPTs. NME’s feature set is fairly gaming oriented, with access to further native APIs via native extensions, much the same as most of the other CPTs – there’s certainly not sufficient additional API coverage built-in to justify the increased score. Clearly it’s important to make a more thorough evaluation of tools before making a selection, even so, lots of satisfied developers can be a good indication of an interesting tool to evaluate.

And the winners are…

Using the weighted average score as our benchmark, overall Haxe came out as a clear winner in developer satisfaction. Second place went to Sencha, which seems to come out top on almost all metrics (except popularity) amongst general purpose web-centric CPTs. A very close third was RunRev’s LiveCode, which has recently gone open source with a dual-licensing model. None of these top 3 tools by developer satisfaction have more than 12% mindshare amongst CPT users, let alone the wider developer population. They all cover mobile and desktop platforms and between them cater to most tastes – there’s a strictly typed language (Haxe), web standards (Sencha) or a very high level dynamic language (RunRev). All of them are free to get started with, why not give one of them a try and find out why their users are so happy? After all, a happy developer is a productive developer.