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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…

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“Windows Phone is the new cool” touts Vision Mobile’s latest Developer Economics report. In it, they point to the fact that 57% of developers plan to adopt Windows Phone very soon.  At CodeNgo we’ve had a chance to play with the Lumia 900, and it is not a bad device at all, albeit with quite a few shortcomings in functionality compared to iOS and Android.

Top-8 mobile platforms developers are planning to use, irrespective of their main platform

The release of Windows 8 may of course change that, and with Microsoft’s recent release of the Surface tablet, chances are they may become a serious competitor in the handheld device space.  They are even getting rid of old ghosts by dropping the Zune name.

So will buzz equal support? Well according to Vision Mobile it may not necessarily be so. Support will definitely be a function of the tools needed, and Vision Mobile points out the issue of having to have a PC to use the tools. Well, we are not convinced that is the case, as Windows Mobile developers may not necessarily always come from the iOS camp, and there are cross platform tools which negates the need (mostly) for Microsoft’s tools. Perhaps the biggest hindrance is a seemingly tightening of distribution around the Windows Marketplace.  Windows apps used to roam free and were distributed by multiple app stores, but are now following the closed Apple model with tougher qualifications for approval and onboarding. This can be a dangerous path to follow and may end up with the same criticism facing iOS, which is lack of distribution opportunities, poor content discovery and too much work going into managing the business side.

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You’ve spent months(?) slaving away creating the next cool app. You drop it in iTunes and/or Google Play and sit and wait. And wait. And wait. Chances are you will make very little money. Research from Vision Mobile has shown that most developers are disappointed with revenues (Do check out their latest Developer Economics report! Well worth a read).  A few years back, other research pegged the median revenue for an iTunes app at $700. Chances are that it is even lower now.

There have been cases reported of developers selling their apps on eBay.  And now a whole new set of companies like Apptopia set themselves up to actually sell the app for you.  So instead of slaving through your own distribution, is selling your app the answer?  We encourage you to look at the interview with Apptopia CEO on Untether.tv (note 1 hour long!).

They brings up a key point: You DO need sales and marketing in order to make money.

At CodeNgo we certainly see this as a possibility. However, if you do not try and distribute your own app, you will never learn some of the key skills it takes to make a successful app: Listening to your customer, iterating, and improving. You may not want to learn marketing and distribution either, but at least companies like ours are here to ease the pain on that. And of course, there is 0 guarantee that selling your app is any easier than trying to get consumers to buy it.  But we applaud companies like Apptopia that provide alternative channel. But as with anything in business, you need to weigh the pros and cons and understand what you are doing.

 

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Both Google and Amazon are touting subscription as the thing you should be looking at if you are a mobile app developer. The principle is quite simple as described by Amazon:

So essentially it allows you to set up a recurring charge, but with very little other functionality.

Google’s subscription is more advanced and ties in with Google Play so users can see what they have subscribed to. Google allows you do to monthly or annual billing. Upon cancellation by the user, the user can use the subscription until the end of the term. So this looks all good an exciting. And what app developer would not be happy to get customers who keep on paying? Well, before you consider subscription billing, we at CodeNgo recommend you consider three things before you launch an app with it.

1. Subscription and mobile does not have a good history

Remember the days of the ringtone subscription? Users were enticed to download a ringtone, and in the process signed up to pay $5 per week for perhaps 5+ ringtones, when most users really wanted just the one ringtone and barely realized they subscribed. In every market fortunes were built on acquiring users who stayed +12 week on a subscription plan (catch us over a beer for more details on this one :)) which covered the user acquisition costs and made it possible to have a profitable business with a billing method that saw 50% or more going to mobile operators.

So you may be thinking “But this is different!”. Yes indeed, the market has matured and so have buyers and content providers. At least some. But it does not take too many shark like content providers – and not too many upset parents who find out their kids subscribed to a pricey monthly package – to restart the regulatory issues that at least when mobile billing was concerned had the oversight of mobile operators.

2. Don’t force the model

Subscriptions are a natural fit for certain types of content, such as magazines or other types of content that gets refreshed regularly. Social games may or may not fit the bill depending on the type of game – and consider that the majority of the online social gaming guys use item billing at the moment even though subscription billing on web has been available for some time. If you have a piece of content lending itself to the model – by all means, but don’t use subscriptions purely to try and increase the amount of money you can draw from users.

3. Understand what subscriptions means for your business

This third area is arguably the most important. One off purchases are light years less complex to deal with from a business model perspective. Usually if the user gets what they want, they understand they have to pay and even though they may be unhappy, they will likely not ask for a refund unless there is a bug.

And asking for a refund for instance in Google Play is straight forward, as users can ask for a refund within 15 minutes of purchase. Not so with subscriptions, as they have to be done by the developer. So you had better be prepared for increased customer support requests.

Also, consider that for instance, Google’s set-up is such that when a user un-installs the app, the subscription continues, so even despite the fact that users are warned the subscriptions are active, this could quickly become a customer support nightmare.

Besides increased customer support, you will also need back-end systems to manage this. As Google points out:

“As a best practice, we recommend that your app includes business logic to notify your backend servers of subscription purchases, tokens, and any billing errors that may occur. Your backend servers can use the server-side API to query and update your records and follow up with customers directly, if needed.”

Also, you need to manage subscriptions and have reports and alerts for new subscriptions, cancelled subscriptions, upgrades/downgrades (if offered), suspended subscriptions – as well as understanding when your subscriptions expire and renew. This is essential in order to manage the subscriptions business in an effective way.

So while we are excited that subscription models are now possible in-app, we are cautiously optimistic to the premise. In a sense, this is yet another fragmentation layer – one of business models, that adds to the multiple levels of fragmentation already existing in mobile. But at least this one is built around monetization rather than technology platforms 🙂

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Google recently announced they will be supporting subscription billing in their in-app billing engine. A Senior Vice President for Glu said “In-app subscriptions allow us to offer entirely new types of products, things that just weren’t possible before,” — “This is huge for us and game developers in general.”

So will subscription really be this huge? Maybe, maybe not. If you look at the social gaming space online, there is clearly a heavy bias towards virtual currencies and item billing, although subscriptions are becoming popular (billing providers like PlaySpan recently announced support for subscription services). There is a reason for this. Subscription simply do not work for all types of services, and can be prohibitive from monetizing users who do not want recurring transactions happening. Also, subscriptions require a lot more managing and hand holding of users (switching plans, canceling before term, messaging before renewal, setting ideal bundles, etc, etc).

You can tell that we at CodeNgo are not sold on subscription being as big as item or per download billing. We do however thing it is a pretty important step as it will allow developers to experiment with the category. But we certainly fair the old days of subscription billing for mobile content where users were overcharged for content they did not want. If subscription billing is you choice, then make sure you do you research behind the economics of how you do it correctly. We will provide more research and background on this topic in the future.

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HTML5 has a few challenges in reaching its potential in the mobile space. Although the platform offers opportunities for developers to bridge the gap between platforms, it also creates a problem with its ability to reach customers like iOS and Android markets. HTML5’s ecosystem needs channels for distribution to app stores, but the HTML5 based platform still lingers between the gap of compatibility as leading app platforms.

Opportunities Are Available

Developers can enjoy the benefits of HTML5’s platform, but the lack of discovery, monetisation and retailing is short for support. Unlike Apple/Google’s platforms, HTML5 bridges the gap between systems and it may be the answer to developer woes of which platform to support. According to the Vision Mobile’s Clash of Ecosystems, HTML5’s promises for the mobile space is infinite because it uses the basic structure of the mobile web browser to access application instead of specific mobile configurations for use (2011).

Once HTML5 reaches its position of control in the mobile space, customers will have access to HTML based apps with appeal and usefulness that is readily available through discovery of its technology like Apple/Google’s app stores (VM Clash of Ecosystems 2011).

Facebook Sets An Example

With HTML5 being a business model, it is also the first platform crying out for developers to enhance its possibilities. Companies such as Facebook are using discovery and vision to build on its talents for creating HTML5 apps specific to its customers needs.

An example of this clever strategy is the Spartan project, an HTML-based app store, that avoids the concepts of Apple-Google dependency (Vision Mobile 2011). Currently, Facebook Platform has over 300 million mobile users through its app store based on the HTML5 model.

Independents Bridge the Missing Links

Independents flourishing under Apple-Google app dominance can build a name for themselves while helping developers gain leverage in producing high-quality apps. App store approvals are possible if developers are willing to invest their time with reliable distribution companies.

The interlink of professional distribution opportunities for HTML5-based apps is possible with an independent firm. Furthermore, if connected with the right intermediary such as Codengo, developers are in the right position to reach a bigger audience to earn a profit from their apps.

Additional Sources:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20103948-93/getjar-offering-premium-android-apps-for-free
http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2011/09/discovery-kills-distribution-the-real-impact-of-the-web-highway
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/independent-app-stores-take-on-googles-android-market
http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2011/11/new-report-mobile-platforms-the-clash-of-ecosystems
http://www.visionmobile.com/product/clash-of-ecosystems/