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August is nearly over, and so are the holidays for most.  The blogosphere is a bit slow, but luckily some eager beavers have been writing great mobile blog posts, which makes us excited to yet again host the Carnival of the Mobilists.  Thanks to the contributors this week for keeping up the quality content about the mobile industry.

Be sure to follow the COM on Twitter (@TheMobilists) to find out what’s happening within the COMmunity. To help spread the word, please tweet this post using the hash tag #com280.

BYOD

Most would be familiar with BYO (which in Australia is actually quite accepted to do in a restaurant). Add the ‘D’ to this, and you presumably get a headache for CIOs all around the world. Brian Katz takes offense to those complaining about this issue though, arguing that people have been bringing their own devices for years.  We completely agree with Brian.  In fact, Time Magazine recently ran an article on how BYOD is a game changer for education. Message to CIOs: Embrace it! Thank your lucky stars, and get with the program.

What apps are and are not

Two seemingly different stories relate to the very same topic:  When developing mobile apps from an enterprise perspective (whether to your partners or employees, or to your customers), one needs to define the mobile experience as a subset of the overall experience, not as an isolated mobile experience.  Jeff Hasen’s article on Mobilegroove’s summary of the Mobile Insider Summit gives a good account of Wells Fargo’s approach to mobile, and how their mobile apps and services interact with their overall offerings and other distribution channels, physical or online.  Equally, the Lowe’s example shows how their mobile apps tie into their overall CRM efforts.  Brian Katz again talks about this issue in summarizing a Twitter chat on Enterprise Mobile Apps, which is well worth a read.

Pick of the week

Many attribute the mobile data explosion to the iPhone or to Smartphones. But feature phones are perfectly capable data phones, and the app economy would never have taken place without reasonable data plans from operators. Yet, operators have not moved with the times, as Lisa Cinagiulli points out in the article “What We Learned from Kindergarten Now Applies to Mobile Data Plans“.  We loved this article, as it points out the need for personalized data plans not just based on usage, but on the family’s usage (which is clever if you are an operator, knowing that treating your customers nice when they are kids just may make them stay on at a later stage).  Of course, we would prefer near unlimited plans, with caps applying to the data hogs (frequent YouTube’ers and the likes) and let the rest of us not worry about usage!

Lastly, we encourage you to read our post on how mobile app developers increasingly are required to be marketers in order to achieve financial success with their apps. We offer some advice on how you can embed features in your apps in order to attract users, rather than spend it all on SEM or display.  We thank you for reading, and encourage you to look out for next week’s COM, #281!

 

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Message from Vodafone:

Firstly, thanks for using our shop proposition ‘Vodafone AppSelect’ to distribute your apps.

We’re writing to let you know that over the coming weeks we’ll be making a number of changes to the Vodafone Apps Publication Platform. These changes will be related to the following:

• A new improved, streamlined publication platform including a new front-end for developers, updates to your reporting, device configuration and front-end user management.

• The introduction of charge to bill in-app billing which introduces new opportunities for you to monetise your apps, including micro transactions and demo versions.

To operationally manage these changes the Publication Platform will be taken offline from 3rd September 2012 until late October 2012. During this period you will be able to:

• View your existing uploaded content but you won’t be able to make any updates / changes to it or upload new content.

• View your existing account profile information but you will be unable to make any changes to it.

• Access the “My Reports” section of your account and interact with your reports.

If you submit an app before 3rd September 2012 it will go through our QA process as usual, please note that you will not be able to submit after the 3rd September. If it passes our QA checks then it will follow our normal publication process. If it fails the QA checks then you will need to resubmit again once the Publication Platform is back online late October 2012.

If you need further support or have content already in Vodafone AppSelect that needs to be removed, please do not hesitate to contact Vodafone developer support at http://developer.vodafone.com/support/ticket/ or contact us via email dev.support@vodafone.com.

We’ll keep you informed of progress as we make the updates and appreciate your patience during this time.

The Vodafone developer team

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How many downloads are needed in order to stay in the top 50 in the Apple App Store or Google Play? 25.000 per day according to Vision Mobile‘s Mobile Megatrends 2012 report.   They make the point that apps need to move from product innovation to marketing innovation, and that apps are as mature as the fast moving consumer goods market now.

So how does a developer innovate in marketing? What exactly is marketing innovation, and how do you do this on a shoestring  budget? Which tools/services do you use? And there are many – just look at Vision Mobile’s atlas of services companies for developers:

So what is the most effective way to reach users? Well, obviously at CodeNgo we believe in maximizing your distribution reach – which means the max number of app stores, with localized versions for each market.  But beyond distribution you need to look at marketing, and the most effective way for apps is and will be word of mouth marketing.  So how do you take advantage of this?  Well, you have to start somewhere and we have found these key components need to be part of apps.

Let users do the discovery for you

This can take a variety of shapes. To begin with, see how your app fits with the user’s address book. Is there a way to integrate it somehow (in game play, invites, etc).  Your phone’s contact list was the first mobile social network, long before Facebook or AirG.

Enable social network publishing – without being annoying.  Nobody (well, most people) wants to know you just bought a new fish for your virtual aquarium. But they may want to know that you just went scuba diving or that you voted for an artist on The Voice, or is just thrilled Sweden won Eurovision, or… you get the picture. Relevancy is the key.

And if possible, create incentives for people to involve their friends or recommend your app/service.  Want to reach that next level? Get a friend to buy the game, and you get your long awaited super powers, etc.  Lots of game examples here, but you can easily build incentives into most apps.

Give users a reason to come back to your app

We are big fans of apps that transcend both the online and mobile world. While you may not be able to build a game online and on mobile, you can certainly integrate to online leader boards, user communities, etc.  Push notifications are great – as long as they are relevant – and give users a reason to come back to your app and not forget they downloaded it.

Location awareness is another huge win if you can build it in. Apple’s new Passbook uses location to bring forward the loyalty card you are most likely to use. For instance, if you are at the grocery store, well then Passbook will have that grocery store’s loyalty card ready for you. It may now always be right, but chances are it is. Sheer brilliance.

So while most developers would never work with creative ad agencies, it does not mean you cannot innovate. And it starts with your code.

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There have been a number of articles and research on how much less Android users spend vs iOS users. The latest research from Lightspeed Research confirms that this is still the case:

Now with Android currently being the dominant OS, you would think that demographically both Android and iOS should represent a broad selection of the population, and that most mobile operators subsidize iPhones, so the argument that iPhone users are more affluent is not so relevant anymore.

What could a possible explanation be? Well one could certainly be that the ratio of free vs paid is much higher among Android apps:

Others have attempted to analyze other factors, such as developer support in terms of the cost (fee charged to submit), SDK, fragmentation, number of apps, cloud offering of Apple vs Google, the UI of the stores and more. Certainly these are factors, but we also believe that perhaps the most important feature is the ease of payment that comes with iTunes.  One cannot ignore the +200m credit cards on file that allows for paying with simply entering your password and confirm. Google has a shady reputation with their wallet, which does not help them.  Fragmentation in payments is a huge problem, and app stores that mandate their own in-app billing SDKs or do not provide adequate trust and ease of payment will make it difficult not only for themselves, but for the operating system and eco-system as a whole.

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CodeNgo’s Chris Jones was interviewed by Aussie Tech Heads last week. This is a video blog for the really, really tech interested people in Australia. Not only did they like us, they wanted to introduce us to VCs! This was a fun one to be part of, and hopefully only the first of many. The first 17 minutes or so contain the main interview:

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Today we’re excited to announce several enhancements to our AppStore Submissions Service that we hope will improve your CodeNgo experience.

The first is that we have added 10 new app stores to our Pro & Business plans bringing the total number of stores available through our Appstore Submissions Service to 20. New stores include Vodafone, Soc.io Mall and PandaApp to go along with the current lineup of stores including Amazon, SamSung, Getjar and of course Google Play. Now you’ll be able to reach even more app stores from just a single submission.

The second is a new simplified submission form structure that will make compiling the information necessary for submissions a snap. This new UI will make submitting apps for distribution across multiple app stores as quick and painless as possible.

In addition, for a limited time, we’ve cut the prices in half on all of our subscription plans. That means now is a great time to submit your apps to more stores and start making more money. Register your free account today, kick the tires a bit and send us your feedback to info@codengo.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

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We are thrilled to be hosting our first Carnival of the Mobilists, which we shamelessly take as a hallmark of the quality of our writings :).  We have come across several good stories this week to share with the mobile community.

Device fragmentation, testing and lessons from LiMo

Jonathan Kohl writes about what a mobile developer needs to do when setting out to test devices (did not know you needed real devices to test on? Oh yeah, you better believe it). He goes as far as giving advice as to how go about buying devices. We’ve talked about this issue here at CodeNgo before, and find that game developer Animoca’s Android collection is worth reprinting:

An image like this is enough to scare anyone from becoming a mobile apps developer. Luckily there are a number of alternatives to spending on devices, with services such as DeviceAnywhere and Mob4Hire and the likes.  A close cousin to testing is of course analytics within your app, which is what we wrote about at CodeNgo this week. Google is about to release some really cool tools that could help developers learn more about user behavior.  Jonathan has been busy and also posted on what makes good design for mobility.    And as if testing on iOS and Android is not enough, Martin Yagi looks at why Linux Mobile (LiMo) failed (imagine what the table above would have looked like if they didn’t), pointing to that the largest failure was that the platform was never complete and kept changing significantly from one release to the next. Of course, not too many people will recall a cool LiMo handset or a cool LiMo app – unless you were involved with it, so Martin’s rundown could be valuable lessons for Tizen and others attempting to bring up a viable challenger to the big two.

Payments and local

We admit it – we’ve used Foursquare out of pure narcissistic pleasure. Nothing like being the mayor of a local coffee shop. But eventually it wears off (it did for us at least) – and then what? Steve Smith points out in the Mobile Insider that the SoLoMo (Social Local Mobile) services need to start becoming better to keep our interest. Check-ins are boring, but perhaps nice travel pictures are not? The point he is making is valid, but the challenge of making it relevant to an individual is certainly formidable.

Another related local cousin is the mobile wallet, which is easily expected to be the center point for bombarding you with local offers, loyalty cards and more. There are a number of players in this field, like Google and Apple, Credit Card Networks like Visa and Mastercard, Mobile Operators, start-ups and more. On the site Optism, Anthony Belpaire argues that mobile operators may not want to work with Google on this, as they will lose valuable consumer insights by not doing it themselves. Of course, that argument has been made in content, mobile marketing and many other areas, and the question remains on who the best one will be to create a mobile wallets and what that entails. Analyst houses like Telco 2.0 have identified that mobile operators need to do something to offset the revenue losses from voice, as data is not picking up the slack.

And lastly… the Boomers – the ignored generation?

In reading our favorite article for this COM, we must admit, we had not heard of the Silicon Valley Boomer Venture Summit. But it is clear from the article by Suzie Mitchell that Boomers (those born from 1946-64) are an attractive segment to create products and services for, yet is somewhat under served in the mobile services market. The article dis-spells the myth  that this generation is not among the early adopters, and offers some good advice on how to cater to this purchasing empowered segment.  Some of the advice comes down to basic usability (simple design, larger fonts) – and can easily be applied to any generation if you ask us.  The article has lots of interesting stats, so do give it a read.

That wraps up our review and we look forward to reading next week’s Carnival of the Mobilists!

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Google almost very quietly last week announced their new engine for in-app analytics. The new Mobile App Analytics plugin looks very impressive, and allows for both the usual you expect from Google, such as analyzing where visitors come from, usage engagement metrics, setting goals for user behavior and more.  Perhaps one of the more exciting views is the Engagement Flow:

This can allow developers to really understand how users interact with their app. It may not solve the issues of discovery as Google promises (someone needs to download the app and use it in order for developers to get stats), but it could pinpoint how social sharing and referrals can be used most effectively. Besides looking like a pretty awesome tool, it just may wipe out the app analytics industry as well, currently lead by companies like Flurry and Localytics.

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You’ve spent all the hard work making the app – designing, coding, testing, debugging, debugging, debugging, porting – and finally you are ready to publish it world wide to as many app stores as you can, but with one problem: Your app – and the associated marketing material – is in one language, possibly two.  If this sounds familiar, you are are hurting your chances for generating a good return for your hard work.

Data from Distimo shows that a disproportionate amount of revenues are generated from apps that are localized:

The graph shows that for instance in the iTunes App Store in Turkey, only 2% of the apps are localized in Turkish, yet account for 30% of the revenues.  Considering only 17% of the population speaks English in Turkey, this is a huge impact.  It gets even more extreme in Russia: Only 4.9% of the population speaks English, and approximately 5% of the apps are localized – however those apps account for over 70% of the revenue!

Clearly there are untapped opportunities. According to Vision Mobile, 85% of apps are published in English, 21% in Spanish and 16% in Chinese, implying that at least some developers use multiple languages. The contrast is of course that English only addresses about 8% of the world’s population.  When looking at the smartphone penetration, English speaking markets dominate, but clearly Europe is important and local languages there do matter:

But the main point about this graph is really about the opportunity. By localizing in multiple language you set yourself up to make far more money than when you do not. This is a key point we at CodeNgo take seriously, and will therefore in the not too distant future offer integrated language localization to a huge range of languages, so that when you put your marketing descriptions in, you can easily sign up to translate that quickly, professionally and seamlessly as you distribute your app. Naturally we will offer the opportunity for you to localize the content in your app too.  Stay tuned.

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So it is not really a secret that we are addicted to our phones, whether smartphones or not. Mobile guru Tomi Ahonen has long ago pointed out this addiction and even argued we should stop calling it a mobile phone.  But a recent study from Mobile Mindset is down right scary:

Now forget that these behaviors are both dangerous and unhygienic (think twice before you borrow somebody’s phone to make a call). Could this have other implications for mobile developers? Will there for instance be a saturation of push notifications?  In the strive to engage, are we engaging too much, and will it back fire? There is certainly a difference among ages here, so who knows.  For now we observe the trend, and start thinking of having that hand sanitizer more readily available…