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Posts tagged with "developers"

Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS→

Some nice updates for developers who integrate Facebook functionality in their iOS apps. A new native Share Dialog, with support for photos like the iOS 6 Share Sheet, will be available in beta today:

The native Share Dialog is simple to integrate and significantly improves people’s sharing experiences from your native mobile app. It has built-in support for publishing Open Graph actions. In addition, people now have the option to share activity from apps through this dialog without needing to login to Facebook first. This makes it faster and easier for people to share.

The data and publishing permission dialogs look good as well. Facebook says they’re 20% faster, too.

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A Better Testing Process for App Store Developers→

A Better Testing Process for App Store Developers

The Iconfactory’s Sean Heber, in a radar filed on Open Radar:

Allow developers to add “in development” apps to the App Store. Rather than having them go through review, they simply upload builds like normal but the builds are set as “in development” which then only go to registered testers associated with the app.

In his proposal, Sean goes through the steps a possible “beta portal” for App Store apps may require. While I’m not sure about the idea of putting available development builds in the Purchased section of the App Store (if only for the poor technical performances of that section), I do believe this is a good idea. The lack of any sort of deeper App Store integration is what helped the rise of services like Hockey and TestFlight, and it seems strange that Apple hasn’t done much in the area of testing development builds of apps. I would also add that it’s absolutely anachronistic how Apple is still forcing developers to associate builds with device IDs rather than Apple IDs of testers (device slots are limited, and many testers have multiple devices).

I’m also intrigued by Sean’s other idea – letting users pay for early access to betas:

Bonus points would be to actually allow the developer to put a price on an app - even for testers. Using a mechanism like this, the developer could gather a group of early adopters who are willing to pay for early development access - perhaps to help support the developer in their quest to build the next big game. The goal with this is to provide a way that the next Minecraft could actually happen on iOS. When Minecraft was first beginning, Notch allowed people to pay for beta “lifetime” access up front. Even when the game was barely a game or barely anything at all. That early access generated a lot of buzz and revenue for him allowing him to continue development.

Again, I’m not sure how it would work in practice, but I think the idea is fascinating and worth discussing. Imagine some sort of Kickstarter-like approach for App Store apps, managed and sanctioned by Apple, and directly controlled by the developer. The App Store needs many, more basic improvements, but this is still something Apple should consider.

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Apple Launches Three-Week Mac App Store Productivity Sale

As first noted by MacRumors, in its weekly refresh of the App Store homepage Apple today launched a three-week “productivity sale” on the Mac App Store. The sale includes discounted apps from the “Get Stuff Done” section: Clear, Things, 2Do, Due, Todo, TaskPaper, The Hit List, and BreakTime. The custom Mac App Store page says “Week 1” and includes apps of the “Prioritize” kind; it’s safe to assume Week 2 will feature “Organize” apps, ending with “Utilize” apps in Week 3.

Interestingly, the old link for the Get Stuff Done section no longer displays apps that had been assigned to that section, suggesting that Apple may be picking only some apps previously collected in “Get Stuff Done”.

Both on iOS and OS X, Apple has been curating a series of custom sections for the past two years. As we’ve noticed before, after a redesign of the App Store in mid-2012 with the first iOS 6 betas, Apple started increasing its curation efforts – an area that several developers indicated as Apple’s best option for showcasing apps from the App Store. However, in spite of sections being a shared effort across the iOS and OS X App Stores, some changes remained exclusive to iOS: recent examples include App and Game collections, or redesigned categories.

The timing for this sale is interesting. The App Store turned 2 in early January, and in my look at two years of Mac App Store, I noted how many developers had progressively grown tired of Apple’s unclear Sandboxing policies and restrictions.

Sandboxing has undoubtedly left a scar that won’t go away any time soon. While the world hasn’t ended, Sandboxing – and Apple’s vague stance on some technical aspects, not the best policy when combined with multiple delays – has led to a dichotomy: in spite of Apple’s best efforts, developers are still dealing with two ways to sell their apps – the Mac App Store, and their own websites.

In the same article, I noted how – after a whole year – the Mac App Store charts were still dominated by the same number of Apple apps, and how – according to AppShopper data – growth had considerably slowed down. I offered a variety of reasons to try to motivate how developers felt in regards to the Mac App Store, and what users should expect going forward.

A sale is interesting for two reasons: it highlights great software and it helps third-party developers. Apple can only benefit from letting users know that great apps for a simple, immediate concept such as “Get Stuff Done” are available on the Mac App Store. The obvious consequence is that promotions typically help sales: developers can still make a fair amount of money even at 50% off; users are happy because they can buy at a discounted price from Apple’s own store; and – at least theoretically – the featured apps should go up in the Top Paid charts.

At the moment of writing this article the Get Stuff Done apps are still not listed in the Top 10, but they’re rising quickly (plus, the Mac App Store homepage was refreshed only a few hours ago). The Mac App Store benefits from charts that aren’t dominated by 8 Apple apps out of 10.

Effectively, Apple is now doing app promotions. There have been similar initiatives in the past – Two Dollar Tuesday comes to mind – and even “bundles” grouping multiple apps together, but they weren’t Apple-sanctioned promotions. (Update: there were some apps on sale for Apple’s Back to School promotion in the summer of 2012. However, we can’t dig up any screenshots or links. Apple is also doing a similar “Back to Uni” initiative in Australia now, but there are no apps on sale.)

It’s easy to imagine how, in the future, if this will also be extended to the iOS App Store, developers will look forward to being included in Apple’s official promotions. Developers will get the exposure of the front page, the benefits of built-in social sharing on the App Store, and, possibly, a tweet from the @AppStore account – which has been posting links to apps on a daily basis. Apple is mixing the editorial aspect of the App Store (only apps “chosen by Apple” – therefore synonym of “quality” – end up in a section) with the universal appeal of discounts to generate word of mouth, sales, more variegate charts, and, ultimately, a nice 30% cut for the company.

Right now, this is just the first week of a first promotion Apple is only doing on the Mac App Store. It might as well be an isolated experiment that Apple won’t repeat again. Perhaps they will simply return to launching some promotions for Back to School in the summer. But considering the popularity of their Free App of the Week initiative, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more frequent Apple-approved promotions in the future. Apple needs a healthy, thriving third-party ecosystem, and third-party developers need Apple’s promotional and marketing machine. Old-fashioned sales might just be what (some) developers needed.

App Store Screenshot Changes→

App Store Screenshot Changes

Earlier this week, Apple announced a change in iTunes Connect for developers: app screenshots will be “locked” to an approved app, and developers may only change them upon submitting a binary for an update to an existing app (or new app). This has quickly been summarized as a way to slow down a popular tactic for App Store scammers; on the other hand, it also affects legitimate developers, who will now have to more carefully select app screenshots.

Craig Grannel comments on the change:

Users can now look at an App Store grab and be sure that’s the app they’re going to get. This means they will be more likely to trust the system and more likely to use it. That leads to increased income. The compromise: you can’t change your App Store grabs approximately every six seconds

This is one of those changes with consequences that are clearly visible and direct for those who follow development and App Store news, but more nuanced and indirect for the general consumer. Developers will find the change annoying, because it has become common practice to “tweak” screenshots even after an app has been released to highlight different features and/or include text overlays with quotes from positive reviews, and so forth. Now screenshots will perhaps be treated more like app icons, which have to be chosen and studied carefully upon submitting an app. Developers now have less chances to “get screenshots wrong”, unless they want to submit an app update to fix them.

On the flip side, this is the kind of news that average users won’t care about. The billions of App Store downloads are made by people who have no clue about scamming strategies and who definitely don’t read Apple’s developer news. They trust Apple to provide a quality App Store experience, they don’t know about the inner workings of iTunes Connect. This screenshot policy won’t be directly noticed by consumers, but it will help Apple provide a better experience by crippling a common trick scammers used to sell one app for another.

What’s the solution? Enabling a “trusted developer” tier could be an idea. But then again, how does Apple determine “trusted developers”? By making them pay more, or by manually selecting companies they know and trust? And if the latter solution is feasible, how can a kid with a legitimate idea become “trusted” if he has no connections at Apple? Should there be a “request verification” process? And so on.

As the App Store grows bigger and older, dealing with thousands of sellers will become harder for Apple; sooner or later, they’ll have to face the fact that the current App Store infrastructure wasn’t built for a million apps. That is already true for search and curation. Trusting more and more developers is just another consequence of growth.

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Apple Announces 40 Billion App Store Downloads, Almost 20 Billion In 2012 Alone

With a press release published today, Apple announced the App Store has reached 40 billion unique App Store downloads (excluding re-downloads and updates), with almost 20 billion of them happened in 2012. Apple says the App Store has now 500 million accounts, with 2 billion downloads happened during December 2012. The App Store has also reached the number of 775,000 apps available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, with seven billion dollars paid to developers so far.

It has been an incredible year for the iOS developer community,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.

The press release includes additional facts, numbers, and quotes from third-party iOS developers who were successful in 2012. For instance, Temple Run, a game developed by “husband and wife team” at Imangi Studios, saw over 75 million downloads; development studios Backflip and Supercell “brought in over $100 million combined” for freemium games DragonVale and Cash of Clans; and Autodesk is now offering 20 apps to iOS users, with over 50 million downloads thanks to the App Store. You can read all the third-party experiences and numbers in Apple’s press release here.

The revolutionary App Store offers more than 775,000 apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in 155 countries around the world, with more than 300,000 native iPad apps available. App Store customers can choose from an incredible range of apps in 23 categories, including newspapers and magazines offered in Newsstand, games, business, news, sports, health & fitness and travel.

In the press release, Apple also stressed the importance of the tools they make available to developers to release and promote their apps on the App Store. Apple specifically mentioned “great ways to monetize apps” including in-app purchase, subscriptions, and advertising.

For context, Apple announced 10 billion App Store downloads in January 2011; 15 billion downloads in July 2011; and 25 billion downloads in March 2012. It took the App Store 1642 days to go from 0 downloads on July 10, 2008 to 40 billion today, with an average of 24 million downloads per day; however, it took 310 days to go from 25 billion downloads to 40 billion, with an average of 80 million downloads per day in the past 310 days.

To give a graphical visualization of the App Store’s growth, here’s a chart by Horace Dediu showing iTunes total downloads by medium (Horace also notes average revenue per app download is 25c).

And above, our charts showing the growth of the total number of apps, and the apps availability per platform (iPhone, iPad) months after the App Store’s launch, based on Apple’s official data (click images for full size).

Mac App Store: Year Two

Today, the Mac App Store turns 2.

Last year, I concluded my retrospective of one year of Mac App Store wondering whether 2012 would see more developers struggling to get their Mac apps approved for sale.

The Mac App Store is not without its flaws, and questions loom ahead as to whether Apple will lock down the system eventually — allowing customers to only install apps from the Mac App Store (as also recently suggested by Adam Engst on Macworld) — and cause a general confusion among developers and consumers as sandboxing is enforced and apps will need to comply to a stricter set of rules to be accepted on the Mac App Store.

A full year after that post, I believe it’s safe to say one word epitomizes Apple’s 2012 with the Mac App Store: uncertainity. Read more

Google Maps SDK For iOS And URL Scheme→

Google Maps SDK For iOS And URL Scheme

Alongside the launch of its official Maps app for iPhone, Google has also released a developer SDK to let third-party apps embed Google Maps directly. As detailed by Andrew Foster at the Google Geo Developers blog, the SDK – which requires signing up for API access – will allow developers to integrate Google Maps with their own apps, displaying embedded 2D or 3D Maps views with markers and info windows. The blog post also confirms that the SDK will work on the iPad; Google has confirmed to The New York Times that a native iPad version of Maps is indeed coming.

The SDK features vector-based maps that load quickly, allowing users to easily navigate 2D and 3D views, rotating and tilting the map with simple gestures inside your app. Developers can also change the Google maps view to include information such as traffic conditions, and control camera positions in 3D.

In the SDK documentation, Google says that the appearance of Maps embedded through the SDK is the same of the Google Maps apps, and that the SDK “exposes many of the same features”.

However, the SDK isn’t the only way for developers to integrate with Google Maps. Using a URL scheme, developers can point to the Google Maps app and launch it from their app into a specific view or map object. Documentation for the URL scheme is available here. Developers can link to Google Maps with specific views, modes (standard or Street View), set zoom levels, and pass directions with the URL scheme.

It’ll be interesting to see how and when Google Maps-compatible apps such as AroundMe or WhereTo will support the new Google Maps SDK. The addition of a URL scheme shouldn’t be underestimated either, as it’ll enable regular users to launch the app using tools like Launch Center Pro.

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Tips For Releasing and Marketing Your New App→

Tips For Releasing and Marketing Your New App

Good list of tips by Brett Terpstra that new developers should keep in mind for their app releases. I especially recommend the “What To Include” section:

Bloggers like links. It saves time when doing a quick mention and provides the material for deeper research if they decide it’s worth it. Include all of the most relevant links. Link to screenshots (don’t embed them) and your homepage or a press page.

A surprising amount of developers often forget to even mention their app’s name in emails we receive on a daily basis. Others mention it, but they don’t include a direct link to the App Store. Even worse, some developers send promo codes without mentioning their app’s name or direct link, so we can’t be sure what we’re being given, exactly.

From personal experience, I can say that having links to videos is also a huge plus. I’m not saying you should prepare dedicated videos for each blogger you’d like to try your app: I would suggest picking a few, and making screencasts with voiceover and picture-in-picture where you can explain the app, show how it works, and establish a different kind of indirect “eye contact” with the person on the other side of email. It takes time, but it’s worth the effort – especially if it’s the first time you’re promoting an app.

Read Brett’s excellent list of tips here.

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Tokens: Easy Promo Code Generation For Developers

I often hear from my developer friends that generating promo codes for iOS and Mac apps is a tedious and annoying chore. From what I’m told, you have to log into iTunes Connect – which hasn’t the most pleasant interface Apple ever made – and generate these codes that you have to manually copy somewhere to share them via email, Twitter, or other systems. It’s a slow process, and iTunes Connect forces developers to “submit requests” for how many codes they need without offering any sort of social integration.

Enter Tokens. Developed by Padraig Kennedy and Oisin Prendiville, Tokens is an automated promo code generator for Mac that makes it super simple to generate and share promo codes for apps available in iTunes Connect. Tokens couldn’t be approved in the Mac App Store because it uses HTML scraping to interact with iTunes Connect remotely; the developers offer a FAQ to understand how Tokens works, for which kind of apps, and why it’s built for OS X 10.8. Read more