From Samsung:
| [Seller Office] Notification regarding Improvements to the Accounting Service | ||||||||||||||||||
| Dear seller, This is the Seller Office Team. Thank you for your continued support of the Samsung Apps Seller Office.We would like to inform you of the following improvements to the accounting service: |
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| If you have questions, select Seller Office > Support > Contact us for inquiries. | ||||||||||||||||||
| We will continue to work hard in order to provide you with the best possible service. | ||||||||||||||||||
From Samsung:
| [Seller Office] Service improvements in April | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dear seller, This is the Seller Office Team. Thank you for your continued support of the Samsung Apps Seller Office.In consideration of your valuable advice and opinions, we will further improve the Seller Office service for your convenience. Please note the following information when using Seller Office. |
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| If you have questions, select Seller Office > Support > Contact us for inquiries. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| We will continue to work hard in order to provide you with the best possible service. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
From Amazon
Dear Mobile App Developer,
Soon, Amazon will open distribution in nearly 200 additional countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, India, South Africa, South Korea, and even Papua New Guinea and Vatican City. Many new consumers will be able to access a large and growing catalog of apps and games from Amazon. This means that your apps and games will quickly be available to a much larger audience.
Recently, we announced new opportunities to monetize your apps on Amazon, including our new Mobile Ads API with competitive eCPM, and the fact that we will be distributing tens of millions of dollars worth of Amazon Coins to U.S. Amazon customers in May, to spend on apps, games, or in-app purchases; and developers will receive their standard revenue share for these purchases. We offer tools to make implementing our APIs simple, including the new, fasterKindle Fire emulators , and the Amazon Mobile App SDK Eclipse Plugin .
If you’re new to distributing apps on Amazon, get started at the Mobile App Distribution Portal . If you already have apps on Amazon, no actions are required. For the full list of countries we’re distributing apps in, click here .
From Amazon:
Submit for Approval by April 25th to Take Advantage
Amazon Coins is launching in May. Tens of millions of dollars worth of Amazon Coins will be given to U.S. customers for free to spend on Kindle Fire apps, games, and in-app items. If your apps are already available for sale to U.S. customers on Kindle Fire, then no action is required. If you have new apps or games ready, submit them by April 25th so they’ll have the best chance of being available for Amazon Coins purchases at the launch of the program.
For more information on Amazon Coins, click here. Stay tuned to the Distribution Blog for more updates and announcements regarding the launch of Amazon Coins.
New Kindle Fire Emulators
Wouldn’t it be nice if emulators weren’t so slow? The new Kindle Fire emulator startup and run time with the x86 system images is now close to that of an actual Kindle Fire. It also looks and acts the same–if you’ve used our standard ARM system images before, there’s no change in how you use the new x86 system images.
To learn more and download the new emulator, click here.
Amazon Mobile App Distribution Blog
Have you visited our blog recently? Here are some posts you may have missed:
From Samsung
| Dear seller, Thank you for using Samsung Apps Seller Office; we deeply appreciate your support for our service.The Flexible Price function has been available from the Seller Office since December 13, 2012. Some Paid applications may have been sold at lower price because of the Price Tier applied for specific countries prior to the application of Flexible Price; because of this, we recommend that you use the Price Change function to set the price with the latest price standard. If this applies to you, check the price of the applications you have for sale and adjust it again using the Price Change function according to the current price standard and exchange rate without having to complete the Certification process again; we recommend that you do this because setting the local price with the current standard will help you increase sales. |
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| If you have questions, select Seller Office > Support > Contact us for inquiries. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| We will continue to work hard in order to provide you with the best possible service. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The folks at The App Entrepreneur posed an interesting article about whether apps for your TV will be growth area in the future. TAE is somewhat skeptic, pointing to OS challenges and the like. They also argue that the format may not be great for apps:
TV apps that would probably work would be gaming ones – instead of a laptop or mobile screen the user will now have a bigger screen, even in HD which would make gamers happy. They could also work in the communications category where instead of the whole family trying to squeeze behind a laptop camera on a Skype video call, there’s more space and better visuals. But does this however mean future TVs will have cameras on them?
Now this is where we disagree. Yes, browsing Facebook on a giant screen may or may not be your cup of tea, nor playing Angry Birds in 50 inch screen (although at CodeNgo we are geeky enough to fantasize about this). The real power of TV apps comes when they interact with the programming. This is of course possible today on tablets, where really cool interactive apps have been developed to enhance the TV viewing experience.
Other companies like ConnecTV are really focusing on the social aspect of watching, which lends itself perfectly to a bigger screen, as you would not have to shift your viewing focus to the tablet from the larger screen. Check out this video to learn more about these guys:
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkYPcqLWoMU’]
We think TV apps will come, and it will be huge. What the tipping point will be is hard to predict, as obviously you need a large installed base (smart TVs) with a well functioning eco-system for developers. We know for a fact there are app stores that are quite serious about this. The beauty of this of course is that CodeNgo stands ready to support these kind of apps too – continuing to be your one stop shop for self publishing.
Mobile payment provider Fortumo is getting serious about alternative app stores. Through their email blast entitled “Are all your eggs in one basket?”, Fortumo makes a convincing case why developers need to start thinking about other stores than Google Play. They make an important observation:
Unfortunately, the average user downloads only 40 apps for their phone while Google Play has 700 000 available apps. This makes gaining visibility expensive and user retention tricky due to hundreds or thousands of competing apps. Fighting for attention in Google Play is definitely worth it, but it would also be smart to try out alternative channels where the competition is less tough.
We wholeheartedly support Fortumo in this (surprise, surprise). Of course, being a provider of mobile billing they definitely understand that the predatory practices of Google hurts both developers and their business. A common objection to carrier billing has been the high cost, which can range for 20-40% of the amount, some times even higher. But given that the most common in-app pricing point is $4, with many prices ranging under that, it is not that much more expensive than for instance PayPal:
Let’s say you charge $0.99 for the in-app purchase. In the UK and Germany, this would pay out nearly exactly the same with carrier billing as it would with PayPal, often without expensive cross border fees for retrieving the money. While $4 would be pricier on mobile billing than PayPal, the difference is not huge – and a very key thing to consider is conversion rate. While not all users will have PayPal accounts, any mobile user will be able to pay through their mobile, often through a one-click confirmation. Any shortfall in revenue caused by payment fees in this regards will more than be compensated in the increased conversion rate and volume.
From BlackBerry:
We wish to bring all you game developers out there some critical information about GPUs and Texture Compression on BlackBerry 10.
Please note that there are two different GPUs available for the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone: Imagination GPU and Qualcomm GPU.
Even though the specifications of both types of GPUs are comparable, when you build and submit your games to BlackBerry World, we give you the ability to create separate BAR files to target a specific GPU.
Why is this important – Texture Compression.
If you have already built a game on a Dev Alpha A device and optimized texture data on that device, then you will need to repackage your game following the instructions described in this blog. If you do not repackage your game, it will not function on most BlackBerry Z10 devices sold today.
Additionally, if you are building a new game that employs Texture Compression, then you also need to properly package your game to account for the different GPUs.
For specifications on the BlackBerry Z10 GPU variants, and for additional detail regarding Texture Compression, read this post: BlackBerry 10: Texture Compression and GPUs.
Happy Developement,
BlackBerry World Team
Amazon just announced the release of their own virtual currency, Amazon Coin. Holders will be allowed to spend Amazon Coin to purchase apps, games, and in-app items on Kindle Fire. Naturally Amazon does this to promote the eco-system for the Kindle Fire, which to begin with is quite limited. There are however good reasons that Amazon Coin may be quite interesting for developers.
1. Virtual currency + games = good
There is no doubt that virtual currency is good for apps, especially games. In fact, GetJar who sputtered along for ages as more of an industry icon than a money maker, has seen an explosive growth since the introduction of their virtual currency. Research houses like Juniper feels the market will grow to $4.8bn in in-app purchases alone in 3 years.
We strongly believe while Amazon wants to strategically use this to push the Kindle Fire, the temptation to open this up to the broader Amazon Marketplace and all Android apps/devices will become simply too huge of an opportunity, and that Amazon will eventually open it up everywhere. Our second point adds to this argument.
2. Amazon’s market power should allow for a huge economy of Amazon Coins
The beauty of virtual currencies is that it can be tied to so much Amazon does, whether it is gifting, earning points for purchases, striking deals with advertisers and brands or more. There is no doubt that if implemented right, Amazon users will start accumulating significant Coin balances, but possibly also in smaller chunks (i.e. lots of people with small balances). What better way to spend the Coins on items costing $0.49-$4.00, i.e. your typical app or in-app purchase?
3. Amazon Coin is NOT like Facebook Credits
One could easily hear the argument that virtual currency is a bad idea, which is why Facebook abandoned it. This argument is flawed though, as Facebook Credits had a lot of issues that created problems for developers and Facebook itself. First, there was a question about the legality of FB credits. Second, FB credits created issues as games developers often had their own virtual currency, thus you ended up with virtual currencies competing and subsequent exchange rates between them. Third, since FB credits were priced in USD, FBs system did not easily allow for pricing in local markets, thus making global games way too expensive in poorer countries.
So while the announcement may seem small and limited to Kindle Fire at the moment, we think that this will not only open up and be good for all app developers submitting to Amazon, but it may also spur similar innovation with other brands and app stores.
Samsung is changing the size of their app icon images. The good news? As a CodeNgo user it does not matter, as we take care of that for you 🙂
From Samsung:
| Dear Seller, Thank you for using Samsung Apps Seller Office; we deeply appreciate your support for our service.Please note that Seller Office has changed the size of icon images, as below, in order to support the registration of devices with higher resolutions; so please check the notice to reduce the number of mistakes made when registering apps. |
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