'Net Features : mobile app developers

Distimo Gives App Developers More Visibility

Michael Garrity — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Apps are a hot-ticket item these days, and as with any booming, young industry, there is a lot of room for improvement. Many developers have found themselves creating applications and then selling them into multiple app stores. But this isn’t always the most efficient way to promote one’s work.

Often, these apps can go overlooked by consumers simply because they didn't know where to look, or weren't aware of their availability.

This is an issue that app store analytics company Distimo has addressed with its latest product AppLink, a service that developers can use to create short URLs for their applications that takes users to landing pages built specifically for the app. These links can be tweeted, posted on Facebook and used in online and/or print marketing campaigns, and, of course, they can provide valuable insights on the app’s distribution.

Developers can also use the service to see how many consumers want their apps to appear on a platform that currently doesn’t support it.

The app’s landing page features an app screenshot, description, price information and links to the various platforms on which it is available. From here, visitors can also click a button to have the link emailed to them or scan a QR code, use Facebook and Twitter buttons to share it with their social media friends and use the appropriate links to find the app in the user’s relevant app store.

Distimo is offering AppLink free of charge and uses data already found in app stores to automatically create the landing pages, so users don’t have to upload anything (theoretically). Plus, it integrates right into the Distimo Monitor service.

App Development with a Local Flavor

Michael Garrity — Mon, 28 May 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Adding background location tracking and geo-fencing to your latest application just got considerably easier.

Popular app development tool provider Appcelerator is including Geoloqi services to its Titanium 2.0 platform. This means that Appcelerator’s 1.6 million iOS and Android Titanium-using developers will now be able to include geo-triggered events into their applications, and Geoloqi’s technology was designed to do so in a simple, battery-efficient way.

Using carrier signals, GPS, Wi-Fi and indoor tracking systems, Geoloqi is able to help apps track where a user is, which means the app can then present messages or trigger actions based on their location.

New Titanium developers can get a two-month free trial from Appcelerator if they register and download the Geoloqi Titanium module by the end of June.

Google Challenges Facebook for Mobile Developer Attention

Michael Garrity — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:35:00 GMT

Mobile application development platform Appcelerator recently teamed up with the International Data Corporation (IDC) to analyze the social mobile application landscape, and their results show that Google is poised to give Facebook a run for its mobile money.

After surveying nearly 2173 Appcelerator application developers across the globe, the surveyors found that most of them have a rapidly growing interest in social mobile. These developers also feel that Google will be the key to implementing their social strategies over the next year because of the company’s “broad range of assets,” including Android, Gmail, Google+ and YouTube, among many others.

Google’s various offerings make the company an important figure in the social mobile world because of their closely linked integration with one another; 39 percent of the developer’s questioned said these Google assets are actually more important to their upcoming social mobile development than Facebook’s social graph. Overall, though, developers reported that they don’t feel like they have the proper knowledge or tools to take full advantage of social in their application strategies.

“This translates into a big competitive opportunity for Google – and potential significant risk for Facebook – especially because developers perceive Google as innovating faster than Facebook,” says IDC’s VP of Mobile & Connected Consumer Platforms Scott Ellison.

Unfortunately, it’s not all great news for Google. The survey also reveals that Android is seeing waning interest from developers because of its continued fragmentation, effectively propelling iOS much further ahead in terms of developer attention.

Meanwhile, HTML5 appears to be moving to the center stage with both pure mobile browser apps and hybrid apps, making it a new challenger to the long dominant native apps that have pretty much always ruled the mobile development arena.

New Analytics Tools for Social and Mobile App Developers

Linc Wonham — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Claritics, a user-intelligence solution for social and mobile app developers, has announced the availability of Claritics 2.0, representing a major set of feature upgrades and new analytics tools to help app developers optimize acquisition, engagement and monetization campaigns.

Coming out of beta, Claritics now includes all new, more powerful cohort analysis, user segmentation and custom event tools that significantly simplify the analytics process while providing a more granular level of reporting and insights.

“We believe that analytics should be simple yet powerful, and that it shouldn’t require a ton of development resources to get up and running,” says Jay Bala, co-founder and CTO of Claritics. “The latest version of our analytics platform was designed to allow developers to instrument their apps in less than half an hour and start receiving analytics right away. Nearly all of the KPIs and reports developers need are available right out of the box, and anything else they need can be built quickly and easily by anyone within their organizations.”

Instrumenting and configuring an analytics package can be a painstaking and time-consuming process for app developers – one made even worse by the rigid event frameworks of most analytics tools. Claritics 2.0 ships with a large assortment of pre-defined user segments, cohort groups and in-app events so that developers can get access to domain-specific analytics and reports from day one.

New features include the following:

Cohorts Drilldown: Developers can easily analyze multiple, pre-defined cohort groups (1-day, 2-day, 3-day, 7-day, 30-day, 60-day and 90-day) to see which groups show higher rates of return and engagement. This feature supports the ability to further filter and analyze data based on age, gender, country and the channel through which the users were acquired in order to optimize marketing spend and acquisition campaigns.

Custom Events: Developers can create any number of custom events to track specific gaming events and game interaction mechanics that are unique to their games. Tracking user activity trends around these custom events with deeper demographic drilldowns provides developers with actionable insights into what works and what needs change every time new features are introduced to their games.

Improved User Interface: The company’s updated visualization interface features an easy-to-use dashboard and interactive charts that allow developers to drill down into more granular levels of data. The interface also includes advanced cohort analysis and custom event reporting capabilities that help game publishers visually analyze behavioral trends over time.

Top N or Bottom N Drilldown: With this feature, developers can now drill down from metrics like DAU, New Users, ARPU, K-Factor, Virtual Coins Spent, etc. to quickly find out the Top N or Bottom N demographic combinations that have contributed to each metric. This is in addition to the ability to drill down individually by age, gender and country attributes across these metrics.

Cross-platform Integration: Developers with games across multiple channels or platforms (social, mobile, online) can log onto a single dashboard to analyze user behavior from across all of their games.

Claritics is immediately available for application developers on Facebook, Android, iOS, HTML5 and other social and mobile platforms. The company offers a free, 30-day trial for all analytics packages, with pricing plans starting at $500 per month afterwards.

To instrument your applications and begin receiving analytics reports right away, developers can sign up here.