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Apple now lets apps send ads in push notifications

Apple will now allow push notifications to be used for advertising, so long as users agree to receive the ads first.

As spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple updated its App Store guidelines today with a change to its traditionally strict restrictions around push notifications. Apple has long banned apps from using notifications for “advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes,” but that changes today. Apps can now send marketing notifications when “customers have explicitly opted in to receive them.” Users must also be able to opt out of receiving the ads.

The change follows a couple incidents over the past two years in which Apple bent its own rules by sending out push notifications that read a lot like ads. Since other companies’ apps could be banned or have their push notification privileges revoked for that behavior, the moves were criticized as another example of Apple getting away with special treatment because it controls the platform.

Apple’s intention has generally been a good one here — no one wants to be spammed with notifications, especially not marketing messages they didn’t request. But the flat out ban led to some ambiguities that this new policy may be able to clear up. Can a retailer use a push notification to tell you about a sale, if you’ve already installed their app? Can Amazon encourage customers to buy a new phone through its app, as it recently did? Some of these notifications might be useful, and Apple’s new policy could let them through while giving customers control over whether they actually see them.

There were a handful of other updates that came down from Apple today, too. 9to5Mac says that Apple set a deadline for when Sign in with Apple has to be implemented: April 30th. The single sign-on system is supposed to offer a more secure alternative to Facebook and Google sign-ins, which are widely offered as a quick way to get people using a new app.

Apple also said it will more heavily scrutinize fortune telling and dating apps and will reject them if they do not “provide a unique, high-quality experience.” They’re now included under the same spam rules as fart and burp apps.

Another added rule bans apps that can be “used to commit or attempt to commit crimes of any kind by helping users evade law enforcement.”

Original website: http://bit.ly/38nyOCv

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This Top-Rated App Can Help You Deal With Stress in the New Year

Stress tends to accumulate around the holiday season but it’s not like it simply disappears otherwise. Life is full of stressors, from tight project deadlines to frustrating coworkers to rush hour traffic. Don’t just accept the stress, deal with it appropriately by investing in your own mindfulness. Aura is a meditation app that can help you manage stress and anxiety effectively without resorting to bad or destructive habits.

Aura was created by top meditation teachers and therapists and designed to help you prioritize and improve your mental health. Personalized with AI, Aura provides short, science-backed mindfulness meditation exercises every day to give you the peace of mind you need to power through stress and anxiety to be your best self. Each day, you’ll get a free 3-minute guided meditation session and have the option to choose between 3-, 7-, or 10-minute meditations throughout the day depending on your availability. By rating each meditation experience, Aura learns your preferences and can provide more specific meditations to meet your needs. Through the app, you can also track your mood patterns, save unlimited meditations, and access additional wellness content like life coaching sessions, stories, and music.

Find out why Aura has a 4.7 rating on 17,000 reviews in the App Store and a 4.5 rating on more than 7,000 reviews in the Google Play Store. Right now, you can get a one-year premium subscription for 57 percent off $94.99 at just $39.99, a three-year subscription for 78 percent off $284.97 at just $59.99, or a lifetime subscription for 83 percent off $499 at just $79.99.

Original website: http://bit.ly/37kAxsf

 

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3 Trends To Look Out For When Promoting Your App

According to survey data from Clutch, roughly 55 percent of businesses owned by millennials have their own mobile app. While many of these apps are meant to supplement an e-commerce store, SaaS, or other business model, for many fledgling companies, the app essentially is the business.

Because of this, app promotion has become more important than ever for companies of all sizes. Regardless of the function an app plays in your company’s business model, ensuring that your customer knows your app exists is crucial for your bottom line.The latest edition of the AppsFlyer Performance Index includes interesting data on several mobile app user acquisition trends, three of which I think are important for the upcoming year.

1. More Concerted Efforts Against Mobile Ad Fraud

Fraudulent app ad networks have consistently presented problems for app marketers, but the AppsFlyer report reveals that things are starting to trend in the right direction. In 2019, install share from fraudulent networks fell 60 percent, while cleanly-sourced app installs increased by 25 percent.Bad ad networks ultimately cause app marketers to waste their budget by allocating resources toward fake users. Inflated numbers give a false impression of app performance, and can completely throw off further optimization efforts.

As just one example, a post published on Medium reveals how deceiving a bad network’s retention rates can be.In the study’s numbers, retention initially appears quite strong, at 81% of all organic installs. However, digging into the data revealed that 90% of those installs were poached from organic traffic, revealing the retention rate at 47%.High retention numbers might make your marketing efforts look better. But anyone who is focused on getting the best results for her company will always want to dig deeper to make sure the numbers are actually legitimate.

2. Retargeting Users To Grow Stronger Customer Connections

While retargeting has been cited as an essential marketing tool for apps for quite some time, the AppsFlyer report makes it clear that this tactic is continuing to grow in relevancy. The number of apps running retargeting campaigns increased 57% year over year.

Despite this growth, however, some areas continue to lag behind.

For example, only about 15% of gaming apps run retargeting campaigns. In the marketing world, retargeting draws heavily from algorithms to put your ads in front of people who have previously used your app or visited your site. Retargeting is an opportunity to segment out your message based on behavior, where on your site they landed, how they got there, etc.

As Sparq Designs’ Adele Stewart explained in an interview with Fit Small Business, “Segment everything. Each specific visitor group is going to receive different messaging, different ads (served at different times throughout the day, month, YEAR!), and even different imagery. It’s necessary to get a good idea of what pages visitors engaged with. Those who visited the About Us page should be served an ad of general services. Visitors who reviewed a specific product page, should be served ads of what they looked like and similar imagery. If someone signed up for an account, show them what they’re missing – perhaps you offer 25% off if they follow through their purchase now. Give them something to come back to. Those who abandoned their cart should be served the exact product they left off on.”

Dig into retargeting if you haven’t already.

3. Working With Emerging Players

Finally, the report noted a marked increase in usage of several new platforms for app marketing. For example, the network Liftoff increased its app install contributions by 115%, while Snap generated 62% more installs in 2019 than in 2018.There is clearly a lot of potential in networks outside of Facebook and Google, it’s just a matter of finding a non-fraudulent, powerful one.

However, this can also influence a marketer’s willingness to more closely evaluate and work with emerging players in the app marketing world. Rather than be content to stick with the same platforms that have been delivering decent results up to now, become willing to form new collaborative partnerships that can fuel further growth.

Marketing an app isn’t easy, especially when there are literally millions of apps available for today’s smartphone users. But finding a good network to plug into, leverage retargeting and creating smart partnerships will give you a leg up.

Original website: http://bit.ly/2r49WAh

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Fabric’s new app helps parents with the hard stuff, including wills, life insurance & shared finances

A new app called Fabric aims to make it simpler for parents to plan for their family’s long-term financial well-being. The goal is to offer parents a one-stop-shop that includes the ability to ability for term life insurance from their phone, create a free will in about five minutes, and collaborate with a spouse or partner to organize key financial accounts or other important documents. In addition, parents are able to coordinate with beneficiaries, children’s guardians, attorneys, financial advisors, and others right from the app.

Fabric was originally founded in 2015 by Adam Erlebacher, previously the COO at online bank Simple, and Steven Surgnier, previously the Director of Data at Simple. The company last year raised a $10 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners,after having sold life insurance coverage to thousands of families.

Since launch, Fabric has expanded beyond life insurance to offer other services, like easy will creation and the addition of tools that help families organize their financial and legal information in one place. The idea, the company explained at the time, was to offer today’s busy parents a better alternative to meetings with agents to discuss complicated life insurance products. Instead, the company offers a simple, 10-minute life insurance application and the option to connect with a licensed team if they need additional help, as well as a similarly simplified will creation workflow.

As with the founders’ earlier company, Simple, which offered a better front-end to banking while actual bank accounts were held elsewhere, Fabric’s life insurance policies are issued by “A” rated insurer, Vantis Life, not Fabric itself.

However, until now, Fabric’s suite of services were only available on the web. They’re now offered in an app for added convenience. The app is initially available on iOS with an Android version in the works.

“Money can be especially stressful when you’re trying to build a family and a career,” said Fabric co-founder and CEO Adam Erlebacher. “In one survey by Everyday Health, 52% of respondents said financial issues regularly stress them out, and people between the ages of 38 to 53 were the most stressed out financially. Parents want to have more control over their families’ long-term financial well-being and today’s dusty old products and tools are failing them,” he added.

Using the Fabric app, parents can take advantage of any of its offerings, including the option to apply for life insurance from the phone and get immediate approval. The app also makes it possible to share the policy information with beneficiaries, so it doesn’t get lost.

Another feature lets you create your will for free, and share that information with key people as well, including the witnesses you need to coordinate with in order to finalize the will, for example. And a spouse can choose to mirror your will, which speeds up the process of creating a second one with the same set of choices.

Fabric also helps to address an issue that often only comes up after it’s too late or in other emergency situations — organizing both parents’ finances in a single place. Many working adults today have not just a bank account, but also have investment accounts, 401Ks, IRAs, and credit cards, or a combination of those. But their partner may not know where to find this information or where the accounts are held.

The app, which we put through its paces (but didn’t purchase life insurance through), is very easy to use. It starts off with a short quiz to get a handle on your financial picture. It then delivers you to a personalized homescreen with a checklist of suggestions of what to do next. Naturally, this includes the life insurance application, as this is where Fabric’s revenue lies. And if you’re lacking a will and have other fiances to organize, these are featured, too.

The online forms are easy to fill out, despite the smartphone’s reduced screen space compared with a web browser, and Fabric has taken the time to get the small touches right — like when you enter a phone number, the numeric keypad appears, for example, or the integration of address lookup so you can just tap on the match and have the rest autofill. It also saves your work in progress, so you can finish later in case you get interrupted — as parents often do. And it explains terms, like “executor,” so you know what sort of rights you’re assigning.

Given its focus, Fabric protects user information with bank-grade security, including 256-bit encryption, two-factor authentication, automatic lockouts, biometrics, and other adaptive security features.

Fabric isn’t alone in helping parents and others financially plan wills and more from their iPhone. Other apps exist in this space, including will planning apps from Tomorrow, LegalZoom, Qwill, and others. Plus many insurers offer a mobile experience. Fabric is unique because it puts wills, insurance, and other tools into a single destination, without complicating the user interface.

Fabric’s app is a free download on the App Store.

Orginal Website: https://tcrn.ch/2XWa68x

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Apple become China’s largest Western software seller, thanks to booming App Store

Geographic appstore estimates spanning multiple companies and platforms suggest that Apple’s App Store, buoyed by growth beyond just games, is the top individual seller by company in China, but not by platform.

In a report by AppAnnie, China is suspected to have exceeded the U.S. to become the largest market for the iOS App Store, pulling down between $5 billion and $6 billion in revenue. Should Apple not grow its share, and merely maintain, given existing smartphone market expansion trends, this puts Apple on a track to garner $16 billion in purchases by 2020.

Ben Schachter from Macquarie Research, looking at the report, claims that revenue from all Android stores combined will exceed that of the iOS app store in 2020, pulling down around $20 billion. However, Schachter believes that Apple will still hold the largest share when measured by company going forward.

Historically, the China market has been dominated by entertainment, but this trend has started to shift. Unexpected growth has come from productivity apps, buoyed by the proliferation of 4G in nascent markets.

Other markets pursued by Apple aren’t expected to grow quite as quickly as China has, however. As cited by both App Annie and Schachter, India’s app store will climb to only $2.1 billion in total, across all companies and platforms.

Any gain in the China market will help to expand Apple’s Services business, and fulfill CEO Tim Cook’s prognostication that it alone will be the size of a Fortune 100 company before the end of 2017. In a previous analysis, Schachter said that the App Store model is “one of the best business models ever created.”

http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/04/13/apple-now-chinas-largest-western-software-seller-thanks-to-booming-app-store

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You Can’t Afford Any of These 4 Mobile App Design Mistakes

Mistakes made in the past can come back to haunt you in the present. This fact remains true for mobile app design as well. Designing errors can come back to impact the popularity of your app. They could be the difference between success and failure.

Yes, designing errors can destroy your app. In the cut-throat world of mobile apps, you cannot afford to make these errors. As a business, you’re going to spend a lot of money to build an app and you expect it to deliver high ROI. This won’t happen, if you’ve an app whose design is not up to the mark.

Let’s take a look at four such design mistakes that have the power to break your app:

1. Disregarding first impressions.
Think love at first sight, think app design. Saying your app is going to face a lot of competition out there, is an understatement. The competition is going to be humongous. This is why first impressions matter. Your primary aim is to make sure your app captures the attention of users as soon as they open it.

This is important because app abandonment rate is as high as 20 percent across all categories. If you don’t want your app to be a part of this 20 percent, start focusing on making a great first impression on your users. This can be done by ensuring your app loads quickly and still takes users through engaging animations that hold their attention.

2. Ignoring onboarding.
Designers forget that the app’s target audience will be using the app and its functionalities for the first time. While the app’s usability seems like a breeze to the designers and developers who’ve built it, the same might not be true for first time users. These users expect a walkthrough that illustrates the app’s features.

If you haven’t given the necessary importance to “onboarding”, you might lose out on a potential user who is looking for a demonstration of what the app does, to make better sense of its features and functionality.

There is a school of thought that says the “need to onboard a user” essentially means an app’s design isn’t user friendly. While that argument does have some merit, one needs to understand that “app use” must be stress-free for everybody. This is why onboarding is critical to the success of your app.

3. Lack of consistency.
Designers have this tendency to go overboard with their creativity. This leads to a situation wherein the app suffers from designing inconsistencies. The background color differs across all app pages, different typography is used all over the app and navigation patterns differ across the app.

If your application design suffers from inconsistent use of design elements and features, its UI goes for a toss. This means your app will require a steep learning curve that’s not appreciated by users.

4. Thinking through the Web UX Prism
There are occasions when mobile app designers tend to forget they are not creating a desktop app, but a mobile app. A mobile user has different expectations from an app as compared to somebody who’s using a desktop/laptop. The former do not have the luxury of larger screens, which means you need to focus on design minimalism and ensure only the most relevant design elements are visible onscreen.

You also need to keep minute details in mind, for example the width of the human finger to design the “hit” area. Make all clickable buttons as large as possible so that users don’t encounter the “fat finger problem”.

So, there you have it, four design mistakes that you must avoid at all costs. A great way of ensuring you don’t make these errors is putting yourself in the shoes of target users. It is user-oriented design that will help your app attract and retain users.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243252

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Does ‘pay by app’ mean an end to shopping queues?

Contactless payments may be all the rage these days, but you still have tap your smartphone, smartwatch or card on a terminal of some kind.And at busy times, this can mean standing in queues or hanging around for ages waiting for the restaurant bill to arrive.All that could be about to change.”Payments are vanishing inside apps,” explains Dave Birch, a payments expert at Consult Hyperion. “That’s where all the interesting stuff is going on.”Apple, Google and Samsung have all anticipated the significance of this and offer in-app payments via their own apps.
The services like Android Pay, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay all rely on the contactless payment infrastructure – embedded near-field communication (NFC) chips communicating transaction data with a payment terminal.
Yet NFC isn’t exactly new technology, and adoption rates for some of these services have not been stellar so far. Plus, US contactless infrastructure lags behind that of Europe.
Which is why alternative approaches – such as in-app payments – that do away with the need for point-of-sale hardware completely are causing such excitement.
Cash direct
This approach is also being adopted for easy person-to-person payments. “Everything [the user] can do within the banking app, he can do within the keyboard, our keyboard,” he says. The payee doesn’t need to have Paykey installed to receive the money – but he or she would need to be a member of the Paym database, which links UK bank accounts to mobile phone numbers. The Paym service currently has 3.2m users. Other person-to-person apps, like Venmo, are also hoping to corner the market for such transactions.

And when EU regulation comes into force in 2018 requiring banks to provide access to data for third party app developers, companies like Facebook or Twitter may well start incorporating payment functionality within their own apps.
“Once you can connect Facebook directly to your bank account, why would you go to your bank app?” asks Mr Birch. What price convenience? But there’s another issue at stake with mobile payment apps, besides convenience and functionality: security.”Mobile apps are miniature web apps, so there are many vulnerabilities associated with those,” says Tom Kellermann, chief executive of security investment fund Strategic Cyber Ventures. Around half of mobile payment apps have not had their code effectively audited for security flaws prior to release, he believes. Image captionDespite the rise of smartphones, about 85% of global transactions are still cash-based Users are also at risk of having banking credentials stolen after downloading malicious payment apps masquerading as official ones, he warns.
Mr Kellermann says his advice to users would include:

avoid using public wi-fi wherever possible install security software on your smartphone use strong passphrases on banking apps avoid leaving Bluetooth on when you’re not using it.Security issues aside, there can be no doubt that the smartphone is transforming the way we pay for things and send money to each other. But don’t write off cash and cards just yet, says Ann Cairns, president of international markets at MasterCard. She points out that around 85% of the world’s transactions are still in cash. “And that figure isn’t going down,” she says. There is also a great deal of costly infrastructure in place to handle card payments, so retailers will be reluctant to jettison all that immediately. But as ever cheaper smartphones come onto the market, mobile payments are only set to grow.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35933801

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Here’s which smartphone apps have the most usage on iOS & Android

Today has shared the monthly report on both smartphone and app marketshare. The data released today reflects the three-month average ending in December of 2015. The report breaks down the top smartphone platforms, manufacturers, and perhaps most interestingly, the most popular apps

Facebook remains the most used app on smartphones, reaching 76.8% of all smartphone users that are 18 or older. Facebook Messenger comes in second place with 62.5%, while apps from Google round out the top 7.

Apple Music, which accounts for anyone that uses the Music app on iOS, even if they don’t use the streaming aspect, achieved 32.2% reach during this time. Apple Maps came in slightly lower at 29.1%, compared to the 50.9% of Google Maps. The extra reach of Google Maps, however, is likely due to the fact that the app is available on both iOS and Android.

One interesting thing to note, however, is that these reach percentages only account for smartphone users 18 years or older. This restriction likely skews data somewhat. For instance, Snapchat does not make the list of the top 15 most used apps, despite it being one of the most popular and fastest growing apps among teenagers. Likewise, Twitter comes in 15th place in this ranking, but would likely place higher if the data accounted for users under the age 18.

Apple still holds the title as the top smartphone manufacturer this time around, although it did slip slightly. The report shows that Apple holds 42.9% of the market, a 0.7% change compared to the previous month’s report.

On the Android side, Samsung, LG and Motorola all saw minor increases of 0.8%, 0.5%, and 0.5%, respectively. It’s worth noting that the data released from  last month also saw Apple decline by 1%, making it back-to-back months of decline for the company. Nevertheless, it still leads overall.

In terms of the top smartphone platforms, Android still holds the lead with 53.3% of the market, an increase of 1%. Apple’s iOS accounts for 42.9%. Again, that’s a 0.7% decrease compared to last month.

With arguments of “peak iPhone” floating around, these numbers are somewhat interesting, but in the long run, minor marketshare fluctuations are nothing to worry too much about.

http://9to5mac.com/2016/02/04/most-popular-smartphone-apps/

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Discovering Opportunities To Drive Your Mobile Web & App Optimization Strategy

With the steady rise of mobile search, SEO practitioners these days need to consider how to optimize both their websites and apps for mobile search visibility.

Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm update, released in April 2015, gave a boost in mobile search results to pages with good mobile user experiences. Along those lines, Google has sought to increase the visibility of app content within mobile search results through app indexing. Thus, it’s key to have a strategic approach to our mobile optimization efforts — both on our websites and apps.

The now more mature mobile web and app optimization tools make this analysis possible, and straightforward, too.

1. Which Are Your Industry’s Top Mobile Web & App Competitors?
Let’s start with the fundamentals by identifying your competitors in mobile web and app search visibility. Are your competitors the same for both mobile web and apps? Are they the same as your desktop search competitors?

2. How Does Your Overall Mobile Traffic Performance Compare With That Of Your Competitors?
A question that arises frequently at the beginning of a mobile optimization process is, “What type of traffic can be expected from the optimized mobile presence?”

Although there’s no completely accurate way to answer (as it depends a number of factors such as your own efforts, your competitors’ activities, audience trends, industry seasonality, search platforms, algorithm updates and so on). That should give you an idea of what is achievable if you maximize the visibility of all your channels:

Mobile Web Traffic Potential
You can do something similar with your mobile app competitors and look at installs, active users and sessions. This data can also provide a reference to take into consideration:

Downloads Estimation App

For apps specifically, it’s good to look at traffic from within app stores, as well. SimilarWeb lets you see this information not only for in-store search, but also for all in-store related traffic.

3. What Are Your Current Mobile Web & App Search Rankings Versus Your Competitors’?
Once you have identified your competitors and their overall performance, you can dig deeper and analyze rankings. Look not only at your own mobile search rankings and trends, but at those of your competitors, too.

Mobile App Keywords

Besides in-store rankings and keywords, it’s also possible to obtain external search queries from search engines referring traffic to your mobile app (and your competitors).This will give you a much better understanding of the keywords generating visibility to your app presence and how your competitors are leveraging it already:

Mobile App In-Store & External Search Keywords

Now is also a good time to identify queries for which your competitors are ranking higher than you in mobile web search results and for which they have lost their rankings. You should strengthen your presence for these queries, and in cases where they have lost rankings, take the opportunity to fill the rankings gap.

4. How Does Your Mobile Search Visibility Differ From Your Desktop Search Visibility?
Take the keywords that you have identified in the mobile search analysis above and compare them with the top ones that you have been prioritizing in your SEO efforts until now. Are they different or the same? Use your current organic search traffic engagement and conversion metrics to prioritize keywords that will likely bring you greater benefits.

5. Which Of Your Best-Performing And High-Priority Pages Are Still Not Mobile-Ready Or Mobile-Optimized?
Once you have the keywords that you should target for your mobile optimization efforts, identify which pages you should be optimizing for them, and determine whether or not they are already mobile-friendly.

You can automate this by aggregating the relevant or already ranking URLs for the keywords you want to target and importing them into URL Profiler. From here, you can easily verify if they pass Google’s “Mobile Friendly” validation and their “Mobile PageSpeed” score by integrating with Google’s API.

6. Which Of Your Competitors Are App Indexing, And How Significant Is The Impact? For Which Of These Queries Are You App Indexing, Too?
Besides prioritizing those queries for which you have identified there’s a high interest in both mobile app and web search, you should also take into consideration the ones that your competitors are already targeting and benefiting from.

http://searchengineland.com/discovering-opportunities-drive-mobile-web-app-optimization-strategy-237625

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People Spent an Insane Amount of Money on Apps This Year

Apple device owners spent more than $20 billion in the App Store in 2015. Apple users broke App Store records by spending more than $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases this holiday season.

That figure includes money spent during the two week period ending on Jan. 3. New Year’s Day was the biggest day in App Store history, with more than $144 million spent in the 24-hour period.

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president who now leads the App Store, said that Apple device users spent more than $20 billion in the App Store throughout all of 2015. That’s double the 2013 figure.

Apple is now busy expanding the App Store to new platforms, like the Apple TV. The early crop of Apple TV apps already provide some insight as to how apps behave differently on the TV versus the phone.

http://time.com/4169153/apple-app-store-stats-2015/

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