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Business Tips

Do Push Notifications Increase Engagement?

push notifications

Push notifications are a popular tool for this purpose. With the vast majority of app revenue growth coming from in-app purchases rather than paid downloads, it’s more important than ever to keep users engaged with your apps. Updating users about new content or activity and driving them back to the app. At the same time the technology is controversial since unwelcome or excessive push notifications annoy users, who will either disable them or worse yet uninstall the app responsible. So is it worth the risk? Do push notifications work?

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Business Tips

The App Localization Opportunity

app localization

As we showed in our Developer Economics 2012 survey, there is a massive gap between the number of developers creating applications for local languages (other than English) and the demand for local language content. For many app types, app localization is only a relatively small incremental investment on top of the original app build costs and yet has the potential to generate significant new downloads and revenue. How should developers decide if it’s going to be worthwhile?

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Business Tips

50+ mobile revenue models

mobile revenue models

This hackpad (a collaborative list composed by 150 people) has an impressive list of web and mobile revenue models, ranging from the classic ad-driven models and pay-per-download to intermediaries and commerce models.
For Your Inspiration.

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Business Platforms Tips

Backend-as-a-Service – Should You Use One?

Backend-as-a-Service

Many of the most engaging and popular apps connect to cloud services which either regularly deliver new content, enable users to interact with one another or both. Unlike a standalone application, such apps can incur ongoing hosting costs throughout their active usage life. Ideally your revenue model should mirror the cost structure. Using a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) reduces execution risk and time to market as well as removing server maintenance and scaling headaches, however, it typically increases the ongoing service costs making the revenue model fit even more important.  Obviously the technical requirements of the app constrain the selection of service and for basic backend features Cloudspring has a good overview article. The variation in pricing of backend services is even greater than the diversity of their technical capabilities but this post will provide some generally applicable advice.

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APIs Platforms

Facebook’s Mobile App Install Ads – will they work for developers?

facebook app installs ads

Back in August, Facebook announced a beta for a new ad unit to help drive mobile app installs on iOS and Android. That product was made available to all developers recently and the early user reports are very positive. Is this early success likely to translate into a long term win-win for both Facebook and the mobile developer community?

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Business Platforms Tips

The Developer Platform “Lean Factor” and Why It Matters

lean framework

There’s a lot of buzz about Lean Startups in the software community in general and amongst mobile developers in particular. How lean a startup can be is strongly influenced by the tools and processes available on their chosen platform. Which platforms enable the leanest product development processes? How and why does lean framework matter?

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Tips

What do people search for when looking for new apps to install?

new apps search

Bryson Meunier from Search Engine Land compiled a list of the 100 most searched for keywords in both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, for new apps. The data was gathered in June using Google’s keyword tool, so it isn’t exactly perfect, but it’s good enough to have a discussion about what works and what doesn’t. Surprisingly, only 22 keyboards appear on both lists, which suggests that Google and Apple uses different algorithms to display apps. It also implies that Android users and iOS users look for different things. Take the search query “games” for example: it’s the 5th most popular term for Apple’s App Store, but on the Google Play Store it’s 15th. The top result in both stores is, unsurprisingly, Facebook.

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Business Tips

Google now allows developers to give users trial subscriptions

user trial subscriptions

It goes without saying that people like to try things before buying them. Take magazines for example. No-one expects you to buy a year subscription to The Economist just so you can read it. You can check out a couple of their articles for free on their website, you might even buy an issue from your local newsstand. Then, once you’ve decided that their content is valuable, you buy a subscription.With apps and user trial subscriptions it’s a little bit tricker

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APIs Platforms

Windows Phone 8 coming, where’s the SDK?

windows phone SDK

Microsoft is set to unveil its next generation mobile operating system, Windows Phone 8, on October 29th in San Francisco. There’s a slight problem though.

Most developers don’t have access to the Windows Phone SDK.

Microsoft is providing key partners with a beta of their SDK so they can have apps in the Windows Phone Store on launch day, but it’s unclear how one becomes a key partner. If you run a service used by millions of people, services such as Facebook or Netflix, then chances are Microsoft called you. But if you’re an indie developer, it looks like Microsoft is going to make you wait.

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Platforms

You knew? The App Store in iOS6 is new

iOS6

Apple pushed out iOS6 to its customers earlier this month. According to Pocket, a popular service that lets you “bookmark” articles you might want to read at some point in the future, over 60% of their users have already updated to iOS 6. Chitika, an analytics company, reported similar adoption rates. Within 48 hours of iOS6 launching, they saw 25% of all iOS devices in the U.S. and Canada using the new version of the operating system. In other words, because Apple controls the software update experience, they’re able to migrate a significant portion of their customers to newer versions of their software practically overnight.

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