WWDC 2013 has not been announced by Apple yet, but everybody is already talking about it.
Some rumors say it will happen between June 10th and June 15th according the forecasted planning of the Moscone Center.
We created a stream on appsfire which will display apps who are planning to be present at the WWDC this year.
How to get in there? Just tweet “Looking forward to meet @appsfire at WWDC 2013 http://getap.ps/deals/wwdc2013” and you’ll get featured – Tweet it!
We wanted to address a topic we re often asked about, but that is not very well understood in our industry.
App discovery is a jungle but it does not mean every single service that labels itself “app discovery” operates by the same rules.
You can find two categories of discovery services: paid discovery services and unpaid discovery services.
Paid discovery services require from the app developer some sorts of financial transaction to be exposed whether upfront, fee based or revenue share based. The most famous form of paid discovery are ad networks: admob, millennial, iAd, Facebook… They get paid by developers to expose apps through ad units and then users decide to interact with those ads. But paid discovery can have some other forms like the “Free to paid” services, some blogs who ask to be paid for a review, PR of course and SEM if used for that purpose.
The prime incentive for paid recommendation here is by far money. And the user being exposed to the recommendation comes second.
Unpaid discovery services will drive users to consider downloading an app without any sort of financial incentive from the developer and without a direct interest in the specific app they are recommending. The most famous form of unpaid discovery are the editorial lists that Apple and Google are putting together every day [if you still believed you had to pay for this, stop dreaming…]. Most review sites publish unpaid reviews (e.g. AppAdvice, 148apps, iPhon.fr,.. ), SEO is [normally] free, friends recommendations,..
The prime incentive for the unpaid recommendation here is quality, credibility and trust. The user here comes first.
Both paid discovery and unpaid discovery are necessary in that world and have benefits. But paid discovery has to be disclosed of course, because the user has to understand the agenda and the prime motivation of the recommender. How can you trust a recommendation service if the prime motivation is not perfectly aligned with yours: getting what is best for you?
Bottom line
App discovery as a service can work only if users trust you. Paid or unpaid, in the long run you can’t fool users. If you run ads, or if you are paid just say it – clearly. It will only reinforce the trust your users will have into your service. Imagine how bad it would look if Apple were taking money for apps being featured, but were not disclosing it in a clear and obvious way both to users and developers. If you do not get paid, users have to understand it too, although it is likely to be their default assumption (hence the importance of disclosure)
And when, as a user, you’re exposed to a recommendation, always ask yourself “why am i being recommended this? ” . Think of how many times you saw an “ad” which didn’t look like an ad..
As a developer try also to understand how users are usually exposed to an app with the service you’re going to use and understand the rules by which it operates.
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side note: Appsfire is all about unpaid app discovery. Our recommendations are made only based on the quality of the apps we believe are good [we call it "app score"]. We also leave some room so users can also become recommenders of apps they believe are good (We call it “spotted by users” ) even if we may not recommend those apps ourself. But we do also run an ad program which is for app promotion and we clearly disclose this is promotion. This is how we make a living.
We are very happy to announce the winners of the 3rd anniversary contest.
On twitter, you have been 2,469 people to tweet the message and on facebook 42 people found the correct answer ( which was 2) to the question.
We selected randomly 3 winners among those people.
Congratulation to:
You won a $50 iTunes voucher!
Thank you for your participation and stay tuned for the next contest!
Yesterday we introduced the latest version of Appstatics, the simplest and most powerful way to track the performance of iOS & Mac apps from your iPhone.
What’s new in 1.6?
1: FAST, POWERFUL & OH SO PRETTY
We completely redesigned the app. It is faster, more powerful and more elegant than ever. Just because it’s a data-driven app doesn’t mean it can’t look super awesome!
We hope you like it. (For avid Appstatics fans, you’ll notice we that decided to put Global rankings first and not the Category so you can get to rankings faster than before.
2: TRACK REVIEWS
As a developer, it is very important to understand what your users think about your app, but it’s hard to switch between stores in iTunes to see the different reviews by country. Appstatics is going to fix that: you can now track your reviews from every App Store around the world!
We’ve also added Appsfire’s App Score to every app so you get a quick glance at the quality of each app.
3: FINE TUNED SETTINGS
We’ve added some settings so you can configure the app to present you with the info you want right at startup.
If you use Appstatics mainly to follow your portfolio of apps, you can have the app display the “Favorites” tab right at launch instead of the default “Popular” tab.
Finally, we added a little optional upgrade. Since you’re probably most interested in how your app is performing in major markets, we added the possibility to see first the major App Stores first (USA, UK, etc.) so you can get to that info faster.
So what are you waiting for? Go download Appstatics 1.6!
Hi,
Next Tuesday is a very special date for us: We are celebrating Appsfire’s 3-year, 3-month and 3-day anniversary!
To celebrate this occasion, we’re offering 3 iTunes vouchers of $50 (because $33 iTunes vouchers don’t exist!)
It is not a common anniversary to celebrate, but at Appfire we like to do things a little differently. Maybe you are wondering why we choose this anniversary date? It’s simple math…
3 – (3/3) = 2, and we’ve served 2 billon app recommandations through Appsfire!
For a chance to win one of these vouchers, you have 2 options:
Three winners will be selected from the people who tweeted the message and people who answered correctly question on Facebook.*
Good luck!
*The contest is exclusively for people having a US iTunes account, a French iTunes account or a Paypal account.
Today we’re very proud to introduce the latest and greatest version of our Android app. If you’re as eager to get this in your hands as we were to get it out on the market, read no further and go download it now from the Google Play Store.
To our Android fans and those on Android who love apps, this update has been long overdue. We delivered a major upgrade to Appsfire for iPhone/iPad this past autumn to rave reviews, and since then we’ve helped millions of app lovers on iOS to discover great apps and great deals. It took us awhile to bring the Android app up-to-speed, but we think you’re going to love what we have in store with 4.0.
Above all, we strive to deliver app lovers a simple and beautiful experience for discovering new apps. We’ve refreshed our longtime “Streams” interface to make it easy to browse through many apps across many categories with just a few flicks and clicks.
In May 2012 we introduced the Appsfire App Score, a 1-100 score for every app in the App Store. The higher the score, the better the app. Or, put otherwise, the more sure you can be that it’s an app worth downloading.
With Appsfire for Android 4.0, we’re bringing App Score to Android. As soon as you fire up the app to view your daily recommendations, you’ll see the App Score for each app. You can also get further detail when you click in to view an app in more detail.
One of the things we love about the Google Play Store is the beautiful artwork that they feature for each app. We’ve baked that right into the “Detail View” for each app. You can really get a sense for the style and spirit for (the awesome) Tango app in just a glance, don’t you think?
We could go on about what else we’ve packed into this version, as well as the updates and new features we’ve already got in the pipeline. But that might hold you up from downloading the app! So why don’t you check it out for yourself in the Google Play Store. As always, we’d love your feedback on what we can do to deliver you a better app discovery experience.
The App Score Report of January 2013 is out. The Top 25 ever did not change a lot. Only a few apps entered it and a few left.
The most interesting data is about Facebook-owned apps whose App Score decreased last month. It’s almost certainly due to the release of the Facebook Poke app, which has a low App Score, as the quality of each app from a specific developer impacts the App Score for all of their apps).
Imangi Studios (creators of Temple Run) released the 2nd edition: Temple Run 2 but did not reach the all-time Top 25. Maybe next month.
Mailbox is quite unique in the App landscape. They managed to get massive traction (top 5 in many countries including USA) in the App store without have a product that is actually available to most users (and obviously without spending a dime in marketing)
Mailbox is promising to revolutionise the way we’ll use email (Gmail for now) on our mobile phones (iPhone for now). So they have done a set of great things beginning with apparently an awesome product that only a few users are able to use for now and have added a reservation system to progressively let others in.
This was massively amplified by bloggers who are all saying this is a great product but did not care too look at the collateral damages of this invite system.
It is very clear this reservation has some deep technical reason to handle the scale. But we’re seeing here more of a smart marketing technique to create desire and interest. And we think they did not handle it right. Here is why.
The problem is the following: there is right now a lot more people waiting than people using the app [below what i see on my screenshot and i was very early on in the reservation system]. So why did Mailbox launched now?
They knew what the level of demand was before the pressed the green light button to release the app. They knew they would generate a lot of frustrations from users
And this translated in a massive proportion of 1 star reviews (20% of all reviews, 30% of the 5 star apparently attributed by those who were let in). Why so much frustration?
How could have they handled it better?
1. From the get go give a full preview of Mailbox on a dummy account. There is no scale or tech issues here. Just let people taste the product
2. include in the app a video preview of what the app does
3. include a feedback system in the app to make sure negative comments and frustrations go to them directly and not through the app store
4. Include in their app first screenshot the fact the app is not available yet and that there is a queueing system. They have a little sentence in the description: no one bothers to read description specially when you re showing up in the top 25.
That’s why although the app is being top ranked in many countries right now, the App score (our quality score) is only 63 (promising). Now let’s see how they handle their next steps.
update 24h later: it’s getting worse. Screenshot below is US only and it’s even worse in countries like France…And Mailbox App Score dropped to 38
2012 has been a tremendous year at Appsfire and we wanted to share some key figures with you:
Thanks to all of you. Let’s see what happens in 2013
You are an indie mobile app developer and you want your new baby to grow but don’t have much money? This post is for you
With the new year 2013, Appsfire has grown immensely (more on that in a few days).
We’d like to celebrate this beginning of the year with a very special deal for indie mobile app developers. We’ll break our regular promotion pricing structure to offer any small team behind a great app a package of promotion that will accelerate the growth of your project starting as low as $1500
Some developers (here and here) have already enjoyed it, big time. If you want your metrics to look like the graph below, Hurry. This is only this month of January 2013
You don’t want to miss it. First arrived first served, we have only a few spots
Shoot us an email at partnership@appsfire.com
