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Want to create a food ordering app like Grubhub or UberEats? Not sure what tech stack to choose and what all to integrate? No problem. In this blog, I’ve covered (almost) all key points that connect the dots for creating a food delivery app like Uber Eats and GrubHub. Read on and know more about everything that takes to create apps to order food online. A food delivery app is not an unprecedented concept. More and more brands are entering the market for catering to the requirement of delivering sumptuous food online. Even amidst the challenging times of COVID-19, the online food ordering industry was booming with its contact-less delivery. Doordash, Grubhub, GoPuff, Postmates, etc., Technological advancement unlocked several opportunities for restaurants and eateries, which in return, evolved the food industry. As per the statistics, the . By 2027, these figures are expected to rise by 223.7 billion USD. global online ordering of food was estimated at 130 billion USD in 2022 Furthermore, another survey revealed that 27% of consumers in the US are willing to pay extra for fast delivery for their online orders. The US Department of Agriculture estimated that up to 54% of Americans spend a major chunk of their budget on ordering food online. There’s more for you to read ahead. Let’s dive in and absorb more information about creating apps to order food. But before proceeding with building an app, it is essential to understand and address the potential challenges. Once done with this, creating a food delivery service app would become a cakewalk. Potential Challenges That Should Be Addressed We’ve listed the common challenges that would simplify food delivery app development. Not Identifying The Market Needs If an app is not developed keeping in mind its target audience, most probably it would not sustain in the competition. Going through the competitor apps, figuring out the loopholes in them, and trying not to mess up by doing the same can save the app from getting buried. Outlining the segment that competitors have missed can give an upper edge. There are numerous food delivery service apps on the App Store and Play Store, but they do not cover everything. Identify those points and hunt the shark. Avoiding Vetted Analyses of Features Do you know what makes Doordash atop its competitors? The features like stability & performance are two prominent pillars that make this online food delivery app remain one level up as compared to its competitors. Statistics show that Doordash recorded 59% of sales in April 2022. It is because of two reasons- simple features that do not overwhelm the user and delivering alcohol by partnering with liquor stores. It’s a myth that more features would bring in the green shoots for food ordering apps. Sometimes, integrating several features can perplex users & impact the performance of the app negatively. Hence, food ordering app developers should look forward to including limited & necessary features. Not Developing an MVP like UberEats, Doordash, and Grubhub didn’t look the way they are today. It took them years to evolve after studying the market trends and requirements for sustaining in the competition. Food delivery apps Hence, it becomes vital to understand & integrate the necessary elements for the success of the app. For food ordering apps, it is essential to partner with local restaurants. Being a newbie in the industry, creating strong partnerships with restaurants and grocery stores becomes essential. These concerns should be addressed by food delivery app developers before proceeding to create food delivery services like the Grubhub app or Doordash. It would keep the technical and marketing pitfalls at bay, which in return, would guarantee success. Now, let’s understand the workflow of a food delivery app. Revenue Models of Food Ordering Apps Usually, food ordering apps have 3 types of revenue models: Subscription- Restaurant owners pay an annual fee to a platform to get their restaurant listed on the app. Advertisement- Restaurants buy premium listings that are run as sponsored ads. These are usually shown on the mobile/desktop website that catches the user’s attention. Commission- The platform chosen for operations deducts a specific percentage of earnings as commission. The fees vary by restaurant’s earnings and scale between 5-20%. The Must-Haves of Food Ordering Apps There are some vital elements that cannot be ignored in creating the best food delivery app. For food delivery app developers, it is essential to get the gist for integrating features because food delivery apps are used on two sides- the user panel and the admin panel. Maintaining a balance is a must because too many features can overwhelm the user.  Hence, integrate only the required features, according to the panel, as stated below: For User Panel Hassle-free registration & login Users should be able to register with the app & create an account without facing complexities. Login must include signing up with social integration (Gmail/Facebook), mobile number, or OTP confirmation. The registration and login should be kept simple. Search Option & Geolocation Users should be able to search for their preferred restaurants as per their location. By detecting the location of the user, the app must display the nearest restaurants available that offer paid or free delivery. Menu & Order Placement The app must display the menu of the selected restaurant. Once the dish has been selected, the user should be able to place the order, make the payment, and checkout. Payment Gateways & Order Tracking Food delivery app developers should integrate different payment options (CoD/UPI/Card/E-Wallet). Soon after making the payment, the details along with the invoice should be displayed on the screen. Users should be able to track the order status & real-time location of the delivery partner as well. Reviews & Ratings Since feedback is vital and helps to grow, developers must integrate an option for rating and reviewing order(s). Users can drop their suggestions based on their experience. For Admin Panel Here’s the list of features that must be included on the admin side of the app. Dashboard The dashboard of the app allows tracking of the overall operations of the business. It covers tracking the number of orders received, delivered, and canceled in a day. Apart from these, the dashboard also includes an analytics section where leading restaurants are listed. Individuals can perform R&D for gaining insights into better business development. Acceptance/Rejection of Orders Owing to several reasons, whether specified or non-specified, restaurants reserve the right to accept/reject orders. Some commonly specified reasons include distance and workload during peak hours. Accepting/rejecting orders can be managed within the admin panel. Payment Management The admin panel gives access to managing the payment section as well. Under this section, the admin can specify acceptable payment methods related to an order. It could be CoD, UPI, or E-wallet. Coupons & Offers Another major must-have for food ordering apps is the coupon section. Admin can provide exclusive deals & discounts to customers on their fast food orders. In order to create the best food delivery app, selecting the right tech stack becomes mandatory. Using the right programming language, an app can soar to greater heights. Here’s a quick look at the tech stack needed for creating apps to order food. Tech Stack Required for Creating Food Delivery Apps The performance of the food delivery app remains the foremost concern for users. Conceived using the right wireframe and technologies, a food delivery app would work like a finely-oiled machine when it has stability and performance. We’ve compiled a list of technology stacks that would help in creating food delivery apps. Programming- Flutter, React Native, Kotlin Cloud services- Cloud Sigma, AHU Registration- Facebook SDK, Google sign-in Payment- Google Pay, Amazon Pay, PayPal Geolocation- Google Maps Analytics- Google Analytics, Localytics Food Delivery App- Over To You Considering the pace of the ever-evolving industry of online food ordering, the future of food delivery apps is bright. Industry sharks like Uber Eats, Doordash, and Grubhub are leading the market, but with continuous tech upgrades, there’s room for more . food ordering apps Creating the best food delivery app wouldn’t be a tough nut to crack if the developer has the right vision & approach. By understanding the market trends and expectations of users, developers can conceive the desired food delivery app.

Building A Food Delivery App

Why Implementing Microservices on AWS Is Indispensable to a Modern Architecture for Business Agility

It’s been a . The tech giant celebrated the ten-year anniversary of the App Store, reached some new money milestones, saw PR highs and lows, and introduced a slew of new toys. iOS app development teams got some new technology to play with: iOS 12, , and ARKit 2. The upcoming year promises to have plenty more in store, with including more changes in screen size, improved graphics, and the iPhone 11. rollercoaster of a year for Apple Siri Shortcuts 2019 predictions With so many new innovations, mobile app professionals have their work cut out for them if they want to keep pace. Faster performance and edge-to-edge display mean less user frustration and more screen real estate to play with, but product teams should be sure that their app meets user expectations with every new update and feature. This is where choosing the right iOS app analytics tools plays an essential role. Vendors are continuing to expand their capabilities, build additional integrations, and add new features. To help you make an educated decision on what tools to use, we created a new and updated list of the best app analytics tools on the market. We researched the analytics SDKs used by the top apps in the App Store and listed their key features and pricing. Bear in mind that building any app analytics stack often takes more than one SDK, so pay attention to the key features for each tool. Many of them offer free trials, so you can mix ‘n match until you find a combo that suits your needs. Without any further ado, here are the 13 best iOS app analytics tools for 2019. Which one(s) will you be using to give your app its best year yet? iOS App Analytics Tool #1: Firebase “Firebase helps mobile app teams succeed.” Image: Firebase Built on Google infrastructure, Firebase is a suite of products that can be used individually or combined to expedite and improve app development, user experience, and growth. Firebase’s powerful iOS app analytics can track users from acquisition to in-app usage across different platforms. Firebase uses machine learning to offer smart user segmentation and predictive analytics. iOS developers can also use Firebase to monitor performance issues with the popular Crashlytics tool. Features: Predictive analytics Crash reporting with Crashlytics Cross-platform user tracking Integration with Google’s suite of mobile tools Price: Free, fixed price, and pay-as-you-go plans Free Trial: Yes iOS App Analytics Tool #2: Appsee “Understand in-app experience like never before” Image: Appsee The market leader in qualitative app analytics, Appsee’s robust platform goes beyond numerical metrics and offers powerful out-of-the-box tools for product managers, UX/UI designers, developers, and mobile marketers. Appsee provides session recordings and touch heatmaps that show exactly how users experience each screen and feature of the app. These tools are combined with features such as conversion funnels, crash reporting, navigation paths, and UI analysis. They help ensure deep, actionable insights on user behavior, usability, navigation, and more. Appsee helps entire mobile app teams make data-driven decisions faster, , and increase retention and conversion rates. reduce guesswork Features: Qualitative analytics: user session recordings, touch heatmaps Crash analytics and reporting via email, Slack, or SMS alerts Conversion funnels, action cohorts, and navigation paths Automatic tagging of events and gestures Price: Free, Premium and Enterprise plans Free Trial: Yes iOS App Analytics Tool #3: Mixpanel “Create products and experiences that people love.” Image: Mixpanel Mixpanel enables product and marketing teams to take intelligent action on their data with automatic insights powered by machine learning. Mixpanel’s extensive platform includes tools such as user flows and conversion funnels that help understand user behavior and increase engagement, retention, and loyalty. Mixpanel’s Predict feature can even make predictions on future user behavior and conversions. Mixpanel also goes beyond the analytics arena and includes tools for re-engagement through email, push notifications, and in-app messaging, and for running A/B tests within the platform. Features: Automatic Insights Predictive Analytics Conversion funnels Price: Free, Startup plan, Enterprise plan on request Free Trial: Yes iOS App Analytics Tool #4: Flurry “Actionable analytics for your mobile apps” Image: Flurry One of the most popular iOS app analytics tools out there, Flurry can track and compare metrics in real time across your entire app portfolio, including iOS, tvOS and watchOS apps. Flurry’s customizable dashboards zoom in on user actions, acquisition, conversion, retention, and revenue. You can even use Flurry’s machine learning to get predictions of audience metrics such as age and gender. Flurry also includes classic in-depth tools such as cohorts, user paths, and conversion funnels, as well as a crash analytics feature. Features: Predictive analytics User paths Customizable dashboards for acquisition, conversion, and retention Price: Free Free Trial: Yes iOS App Analytics Tool #5: Adobe Analytics “Eat, drink, and breathe insights with Adobe Analytics.” Image: Adobe Analytics Adobe Analytics is a tool catered towards enterprise apps , and provides a comprehensive suite of tools from attribution to marketing. These tools include advanced segmentation, user flows, and cohorting, among others. Adobe’s analytics tools collect data in real time. They also include predictive analytics based on AI and machine learning that can predict future behavior such as churn or conversion prediction. Features: AI and machine learning based predictive analytics Automatic anomaly Detection User flows and cohort analysis Price: Enterprise Free Trial: No iOS App Analytics Tool #6: Keen “Ship user-facing metrics in an afternoon, not months” Image: Keen Keen IO is a cloud-based analytics database for developers to create “an alternative to an in-house analytics database”. It streams data on any user interaction in real time, then stores it in a database that’s optimized for storing event data. As soon as the data is collected, developers can use Keen’s APIs to run analysis on them. With simple queries, mobile app professionals can then use the platform to view custom dashboards with funnels, segmentation, cohort analysis, and more. Features: Batch upload historical data Custom event tracking with rich attributes Customizable dashboards Price: By usage Free Trial: Yes iOS App Analytics Tool #7: Localytics “Real-time insights fuel smarter mobile app engagement” Image: Localytics Localytics combines a strong marketing automation platform with mobile analytics features for increasing engagement and improving features. Localytics analyzes entire user journeys and can even track app uninstalls. Customizable dashboards and filters enable at-a-glance insights that give each member of the mobile app team a detailed overview of the data that are most relevant to them. Localytics also includes an industry benchmarking feature so that you can compare your mobile app to others in the industry. Features: Predictive analytics Uninstall tracking Industry benchmarks Price: Upon request Free Trial: No iOS App Analytics Tool #8: Amplitude “Product Analytics for Startups” Image: Amplitude Amplitude helps you answer your user behavior questions and increase conversion rates by analyzing each user interaction. One of Amplitude’s biggest strengths is its powerful action cohort tool, which helps understand how users interact with the app and what brings them back. Amplitude can identify different personas that are likely to convert or become loyal users. Amplitude Insight uses machine learning to send smart alerts about various KPIs, helping mobile app teams stay one step ahead of fluctuations in conversion and retention. Features: Behavioral Cohorting Machine learning based smart alerts Single-user analysis Price: Free/paid plans Free Trial: No iOS App Analytics Tool #9: Adjust “Discover user behavior in real time” Image: Adjust Adjust provides end-to-end app analytics for mobile marketers, from attribution to uninstall/reinstall. Its customizable event tracking can cover every event and conversion goal, from the initial download and signup process to purchase completion. Adjust’s cohort analysis helps discover patterns in user behavior by segmenting users according to various metrics and filters. The Adjust dashboard is known for its sleek user-friendly design, and is also highly customizable. Features: Uninstall tracking Funnel and cohort analytics Customizable event tracking Price: Upon request Free Trial: No iOS App Analytics Tool #10: Apple App Analytics “Gain Insights with Analytics” Image: Apple Apple’s App Analytics, via App Store Connect, is included with the Apple Developer Program membership so there’s no need for coding or complicated setups. The free iOS app analytics platform tracks basic metrics for user engagement and marketing across iOS, macOS, and tvOS apps. It also provides data on user acquisition from the App Store and a crash analytics tool that filters crashes by iOS and app versions. Features: User engagement metrics App Store acquisition data Crash analytics Price: Free Free Trial: No iOS App Analytics Tool #11: Pendo “Pendo Makes Software Lovable” Image: Pendo Pendo offers in-depth product analytics that helps you understand who your power users are and what users actually do in the app. Pendo’s segmentation feature includes side-by-side comparisons of user behavior across various segments. If your company has multiple apps, you can use Pendo’s analytics tools across your entire portfolio of products and compare performance, engagement, and retention. You can even use Pendo to optimize your app with A/B testing and run experiments without having to write any code or even issuing version updates. Features: Custom segmentation A/B testing In-app messaging, surveys, or walkthroughs Price: Upon request Free Trial: No iOS App Analytics Tool #12: Countly “Secure and extensible product analytics” Image: Countly Countly’s customizable dashboards use plugins that you can choose in order to track user behavior analytics, crashes, retention, and even revenue. Funnels, user flows, and cohort analytics show you how users navigate through your app and where they drop off. Countly’s “Drill” tool helps answer pressing questions by delving deeper into the app’s data with a user-friendly built-in query builder — no complex SQL required. Another useful feature displays single user journeys to let you see how specific users navigate through your app. Countly supports iOS, watchOS, tvOS and macOS. Features: Funnels, cohorts, and user flows Easy to use query builder Crash analytics Price: Free/tailored paid plans Free Trial: Yes iOS App Analytics Tool #13: Heap “The New Standard in Tracking Customer Data” Image: Heap Heap is a code-free, point-and-click way to understand user behavior with both aggregate and single-user level iOS app analytics. It enables teams to make data-driven decisions faster by automatically collecting data on every user interaction, across different channels. Heap’s conversion funnels provide information across user segment or attribution channels to pinpoint exactly where users dropped off and help understand why. The dynamic cohorting feature enables creating segments of users and then combining them with a variety of user attributes. This helps understand user preferences and improve LTV. Features: Point-and-click, code-free setup with the Event Visualizer Cross-channel analytics Conversion funnels and dynamic cohorting Price: Free for small projects, fixed price for SMBs, price on request for enterprise Free Trial: Yes TL;DR: As iOS app development teams gear up for another exciting, challenging, and action-packed year, now is the time to review your analytics stack. Choosing high-caliber analytics for your iOS app can make the difference between a substantial improvement in KPIs and a dangerous drop. Why? If you and your team don’t understand what the data from your analytics actually means, you’ll end up wasting time and resources on guesswork, confusion, and mistakes. A good analytics tool will help you answer the right questions, and instead of creating more confusing ones. Before you plunge into your 2019 roadmap, make sure you have powerful tools in your toolbox. Shopping around for other tools, such as attribution, A/B testing, marketing, or crash analytics? Download our free Ultimate SDK Guide for a catalogue of the best mobile app SDKs of the year. Want more advice on using mobile app analytics without losing your head? _‘Analytics’ is a scary word. It often implies charts full of numbers, screens covered in technicolor graphs, and time —…_medium.com How To Succeed in Mobile App Analytics Without Really Trying

The Apps Have Spoken: Top 13 iOS App Analytics Platforms [2019]

Navigating the map of corporate IT can be treacherous for New World technology folk. Here are the top five objections to expect when you want to go serverless. You’re ready to get serverless into your organization — you’ve identified an opportunity, know how to build out the project, and now it’s time to get IT on board. The only problem is the Big Department of No has issues with this newfangled technology so how are you going to convince them to allow this heresy? Knowing the layout of Middle Management Earth is the key. Let’s take a look at some common concerns and see if we can address their major objections. Objection #1: We don’t need this. What’s Lambda good for? Resizing images. It’s awesome at resizing images, especially ones in S3. Unfortunately, most company applications cannot be replaced by image resizing alone, so we need to expand the realm of possible use cases and get people thinking. The same examples are recycled so frequently that we need to talk about how serverless is used. actually Almost is a good candidate for serverless — and these represent a number of workloads in typical companies. Cron jobs, reports and batch processing are at the top of the list. Even many supposedly synchronous tasks can work too, mainly because the latency just isn’t that terrible. any asynchronous task huge When your IT leaders give you the side-eye on serverless, remind them that it’s also . Functions are nice but if you add CDNs, object stores and databases, you now have all the toys needed to turn any flowchart into a working application. much more than functions Better yet — and they should like this — you can now build highly secure applications that scale automatically and cost a fraction to run. And you don’t have to manage any infrastructure to get these workloads to run forever. Let’s TL;DR those bullet points again: Highly secure Scales automatically Costs very little No infrastructure to manage So if they if want applications that just work with minimal management — you know, like congratulations, you just found the answer. Say it with me: Serverless is for everyone. most applications — Objection #2: This is nothing new. Bonus: Serverless is just a buzzword. According to some people who are wrong, serverless is nothing new. There’s an eye-rolling tendency with new tech to compare it to some past experience in a way that dismisses the actual benefit of the new. In this view of innovation, FaaS is sorta kinda like time-sharing on the mainframe much like taxis are the same . de minimis horse-drawn Hackney carriages This is tough one but I think we can dig ourselves out. Hopefully we can agree that horses and cars are different. Never mind the speed, convenience, air conditioning and lack of horse odor, there is a general ecosystem upgrade with taxis — the cost collapsed, taxis are everywhere on-demand, you can scale up the passenger count easily, and they gave rise to the next iteration — ride-sharing. The lack of horse manure on the streets is pretty wonderful too. So my point is, FaaS is to time-sharing on the mainframe as Uber is to horse rides. As a bonus, I was recently informed that ‘serverless is just a buzzword’ in that ‘everything you’re working on is a waste of time’ sort-of way. Both these sentiments were common in the early days of cloud too. Sure, I could tell you that serverless is so much more than an efficient use of an idle system, from practically no concurrency limits, infrastructure management, increased agility, and to a total refocus on business need instead of systems management — but I know these guys. They just want to tell you nothing is really new. Best just to agree and move onto to the next roadblock. Objection #3: “But vendor lock-in!” I’ve only ever heard this complaint from companies with multi-year Oracle contracts, Windows on every desktop and zero diversity in their infrastructure. It’s really strange to me. I can’t decide if it’s a catch-all gotcha in response to new ideas or genuine hand-wringing over committing to a single cloud provider. If we’re honest, any choice of technology involves vendor lock-in at some level, especially in enterprise IT. The question is really: are you trapped? Is there a 5 year contract (like Oracle)? Are prices going to suddenly spike after a cheap honeymoon period (like Oracle)? Can you move to another platform (unlike Oracle)? By any metric, committing to any serverless provider has significantly fewer lock-in issues than, say, choosing an on-premise RDMS provider (I can’t think of an example). Still not convinced? Well the good news is that you can mix-and-match serverless providers. Run your functions on Lambda, do your authorization in Google and store your data in Azure — go for it, it’s totally possible. Better yet, add an abstraction framework like and you can become much more provider-agnostic. Serverless From a business perspective, unlike the old days of rising IT vendor costs and multiyear commitments, all the major cloud providers have shown the opposite — costs continue to fall and this is now a pay-as-you-go world. Even if you choose to lock yourself into Amazon or Microsoft, you might be happy that you did. Objection #4: “My [team|manager|boss|cat|dog] won’t like this.” I used to think this was a flip-side to the tech Holy War problem — you know, where a group using one technology will never try anything else. But I’ve found it’s more related to fear of change in relation to people’s jobs. Beswick’s Law says that . Go ahead — Google it and I’ll wait. any mainstream discussion of artificial intelligence will eventually lead to a headline with a picture of The Terminator So it follows that since serverless means no servers, no servers means more automation, and more automation means a huge line of DevOps people in unemployment offices. DevOps people will just love the paper forms, fax machines and human interaction needed to get $100 a week. And to think it all started thanks to a harmless Lambda function resizing images. At least, that’s what some executives are hearing, and the #NoOps movement is ruffling some feathers in some entrenched teams. But it’s all bogus — in every serverless implementation I’ve seen, the DevOps engineers become the most important developers in the group. In fact, the man below, from ServerlessOps, frequently makes that exact point, even though his first presentation slide can suck the air of out most DevOps meetings. Tom McLaughlin Ops Teams — Don’t be scared of the man in the pumpkin suit. Why? Serverless management requires all the smarts that DevOps is good at — from security to deployment management — and this function is central to a fully serverless environment. It’s true that the job changes — you lose the annoying, repetitive, dull parts of managing infrastructure — but (I’d argue) it’s much more interesting. And you’ll get more sleep. This objection tends to have an aura of the Fear Of The Unknown — understandable but unfounded. As IT departments move from being a cost center to a strategic engine of most companies, we have to shake off the activities that aren’t a good use of our time. And yes, that means change for everyone — but no Terminators. Objection #5: “Serverless isn’t ready yet.” There’s a good portion of IT executive management who are terrible at predictions. Over the years, I’ve heard… Nobody will ever buy anything online Nobody will ever use their phones for banking Nobody will ever trust their data in the cloud … and these same voices that are consistently wrong and never held to account are often driving their IT departments. Go figure. The specific charge against serverless tends to take two forms. First, “nobody is using it”. Nobody apart from Coca-Cola, Zalora, Nordstrom, Next Door, Blackboard, CodePen, A Cloud Guru, Bustle, Localytics and thousands of others. Well, “nobody is using it ” — apart from Zillow, iRobot, Thomson Reuters, Netflix and (let’s not forget) Amazon itself. at scale Okay, so what they mean is serverless tools are currently immature and don’t support < >. It’s all true but it’s like complaining that flying cars are terrible because they don’t cure vertigo. There are new companies populating the ecosystem to address these gaps at all the time— take a look at Stackery, Epsagon and Binaris as shining examples. insert arbitrary requirement here Don’t get me wrong — some people have legitimate gripes against the cloud provider’s consoles, API limitations and problems with observability and debugging. Some of the brightest people I know in this space have glorious rants about all these issues and more. And you know what? They still use serverless. Second, the ‘too early’ claim is based around serverless being new, which it’s not. Lambda, the grand-daddy of the FaaS movement, is 4 years old and the development pace has been accelerating continuously. I don’t know what’s been put in the water at AWS but the Lambda feature release log has gone crazy over the last 12 months. First release on the far left: “Do timesharing like the mainframe”. Just because you haven’t heard of something doesn’t mean it’s new — serverless has been around for a while, it’s used by some major projects and companies, and the general hum of should be an indicator that’s it’s ready for you. On the plus side nobody has said, “There are servers in serverless” in quite a while so we’re making progress. success stories

Scared Serverless — How do you handle opposition from your IT group?

Just a year ago, the first thing I did when I woke up was picking up my phone and instantly reviewing my notifications. Despite what Tristan Harris said about tech , I was still doing it. hijacking my morning routine I didn’t want to check my social media in front of my employees. I wanted to show to an investor or client that emailed me overnight that I was working early in the morning. I needed to know if an important email would impact my morning meetings. As a startup founder, I always had a good reason to do it. And it seems that I’m not the only one. According to a from the tech analyst company ReportLinker, recent survey 46 % of Americans admitted to checking their smartphones before they even get out of bed in the morning. How did that happen? Push Notifications Become Part Of Our Daily Lives A few months ago, the mobile engagement platform Localytics conducted and it appears that push notifications are better designed and accepted today than they were a few years ago. Marketers are getting better at communicating through mobile and push notifications became part of our daily lives. a survey on 1000 users The average person touches his or her phone and spends 2 hours and 56 minutes on their mobile device every day, which equates to an astounding . What’s worse, we won’t be spending much of that time communicating through text or, I don’t know, taking phone calls… More than spent using mobile devices will be spent on apps. 2,617 times every day 86 hours per month actual 90% of our time Most apps are specifically designed to be attention hogs, using color schemes, wordings, and layouts that make them extremely addictive. Before you know it, you open an application to check on who liked your photo so far and you’ve suddenly been scrolling through your feed for minutes, or even an hour. It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task. According to , professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, interrupted work has a cost: it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task. Gloria Mark App Marketers Are Only Focused On Your Engagement Sadly, push notifications are only part of a much bigger whole: Notifications were designed to inform you, so you don’t have to check the given app over and over again. Now, most of them have no other goal than engagement: when Facebook notifies you of every like, it’s to give you that sweet dopamine kick and eventually bring you back onto its platform. dark patterns. Dark patterns refer to any design feature intended to “nudge” the user into an action he didn’t desire. It seems that using push notifications by 88%. In fact, it has been found that sending out push notifications greatly increases user retention, somewhere between depending on the app and frequency of notifications. Anyone who opts into push notifications for an application is twice as likely to keep it on their device. boosts app engagement 3x and 10x Retention or entrapment? That’s great news for the retention-driven companies behind the applications we use, but it’s not so great for people like you when you find yourself being utterly distracted by them all day long. LinkedIn is a good example of dark patterns. Just about every time you scroll through your notification feed, you’re going to see things like: “It’s John Doe’s birthday today, tell him a happy birthday!” or “We found 97 jobs you may be interested in.” If you paid attention to these notifications, you’d spend half the day wishing the people in your network a happy work anniversary and the other half trying to figure out how they got in your network, to begin with. The sole purpose of these notifications is to get you to open your application and use it for longer than you ever intended to. It’s Hard to Find An Escape I usually turn to music during my work day to escape from the chatter and help me dial in my focus on what really matters. The issue is, notifications are now permeating into every area of our lives, private and professional. According to an infographic published on , . Entrepreneur 40% of workers say they accept having to answer an urgent email during the middle of dinner This leaves people with their notifications always on and frantically checking whenever their phone dings, whether it’s urgent for work or something that didn’t deserve their attention at all. Because of this, you’ll never be able to properly step away from your job until you turn the unimportant notifications off. Once you’re done with your emails or social apps, notifications are also coming from your collaborative apps installed on our computer or opened on your web browser. Popular collaborative apps like Slack are requiring you to be constantly connected. And if you’re like me, convinced that you might have missed something important, real-time conversations become a trap. But living moment to moment with the fear of missing something isn’t how we’re built to live. — Tristan Harris . Push notifications pose a huge threat to our focus and well-being, and initiatives to overcome it are rare in the workplace. Not only are your notifications wasting your precious time, but they are also eating away at the little bit of “me” time you would be getting otherwise. The simple fact is that you don’t need to be seeing all of your notifications, so why don’t we just filter them? Filtering Your Notifications Is Painful But Necessary The unfortunate thing about notifications is that they don’t come through like emails. If you turn on Facebook notifications, you get notifications from Facebook for just about everything. It is quite impossible for someone to distinguish between a buzz of an important notification that needed their immediate attention and the buzz of a notification that didn’t even really need to be pushed through. The only way to tell is to interrupt your focus, even briefly, and look for yourself to determine whether or not the notification required immediate action on your part. Whether the notifications are coming from Twitter, Slack, Facebook, or a handful of other applications that most people have installed on their phones, they are far from the first thing we should be seeing in the morning and they definitely aren’t worthy of stealing our attention away from important work throughout the day. This is unlike your mailbox where you can easily regain control with . filtering and cleaning features It’s a lot more complicated to manage push notifications. First of all, there are 3 different platforms to set up: your desktop, your browser, and your mobile. Second of all, filtering takes some effort to set up, as if we were encouraged to avoid doing it. Third of all, it’s pretty difficult to come up with something relevant and useful (“I would like to see in priority all notifications related to my family or my boss”). But the thing is, even if it takes time, you have to filter your notifications and remove the useless ones. This is the only way to restore your work/life balance. Restore Your Work/Life Balance How often are you interrupted throughout the day by a notification? An even better question: How often are you interrupted throughout the day by a notification that actually deserves your attention? Filtering out all the notifications that don’t deserve your immediate attention, arguably the majority of them, lets you focus on the task at hand. If your phone does ring, you’ll know it’s important. Plus, while you’re at work, . unimportant notifications will no longer pull you away from the projects that deserve your attention the most When you are in a deep state of concentration doing X, Y, or Z or when you are already in the midst of an important meeting with a client, you don’t need your phone buzzing just because co-workers are chatting on Slack or because your boss just penciled you in for a conference next week. Those are things you can get back to later as you devote your entire focus to what’s in front of you at the moment. That will greatly improve your mental clarity and performance while preventing overwhelm. Take Control With The Android Do Not Disturb Feature Start with filtering your mobile notifications. I’ll explain later how to deal with desktop and browser notifications in another article. Many articles will advise you to disable your mobile notifications for each application, one by one. But it’s way too long to set up when you have, like me, more than 15 apps. In addition, every time I install a new application I have to redo it and frankly, I forget every time to do it. I worked the problem backward and removed all the notifications and set up exceptions. Android allows you to do it with the . “Do Not Disturb” mode Enabling the “Do Not Disturb” mode on Android If you want to quickly enable Do Not Disturb mode, just swipe down from the top of your screen to open the notification shade, and select the Do Not Disturb icon. All your notifications will be blocked (including phone calls and messages). The “Do Not Disturb” mode allows you to set up exceptions and to hide all visual notifications when the screen is on and off. Then you need to set up exceptions: a long tap on the Do Not Disturb will allow you to make changes to your settings. Now tap on and it will allow you to white-list certain contacts or callers. As a startup founder, I decided to white-list all calls, all messages from my contacts and my calendar notification, but you can restrict or allow a lot more depending on your job. Allow exceptions > Custom One last thing: do not forget to hide visual notifications when the screen is on and off. This will significantly reduce your daily checks. Uninstall And Hide Your Apps To definitely take control of my mobile push notifications, I then decided to uninstall all my social apps and apps I have not used in the last 6 months. I removed almost 10 applications. The blank home screen is great to avoid getting distracted by the apps on your phone Finally, the last thing I did was adding a blank page and set it as the main page to hide all applications except my messages and calls. To do that, tap and hold on a blank area on the home screen. Then, swipe over to the right as far as you can swipe and then add a new home screen. You just have now to define this new home screen as the main one by taping the Home icon located at the top of home screen settings. In doing so, I reduced my interruptions by 70%. I feel more focused and efficient every day. Everyone will probably tell you that notifications are bad for your productivity and that’s why you should ignore them all. In practice, I cannot afford to miss a call from an investor or an email from a prospect. As a young entrepreneur, I have to deal with this flow because I cannot miss any opportunity. In return, I must find all means to better filter them. I am not a serial entrepreneur who can ignore all notifications. I need to be responsive to solicitations. The funny thing is that it’s a LinkedIn notification that allowed me to sign our first large client at Gwapit: was it a needle in a haystack? Originally published at gwapit.com on October 19, 2018.

Push Notifications Are Not That Bad, You Just Need To Take Control Again

Researching mobile analytics for apps is typically a time-consuming and daunting task. Yet, it doesn’t need to be. Although there is an affluence of solid platforms to choose from, there are just a noteworthy few that give you a significant bang for your buck. Several platforms have already established themselves as the favorites of 2019. In the past ten years, the quality of apps has changed drastically, and correspondingly UX standards have also greatly developed, thus tremendously impacting the need for, and competence of, mobile analytics tools. Thanks to thorough research and comprehensive new reports like , we’ve handpicked the top tools within the industry. With ‘ by mobile professionals, we pulled recommendations from three nameable subcategories: quantitative analytics for apps, qualitative analytics for apps, and performance crash analytics. Remain ahead of the curve and secure your spot as a mobile front-runner, with this neatly packaged guide that saves you time on any further investigation. Gartner’s Market Guide for Web and Mobile App Analytics analytics’ as the prioritized SDK Quantitative App Analytics — The Top Platforms Through numeric data, analyzes metrics that give you hard aggregate insights on , user actions, and usage trends. Putting everything into numbers, quantitative analytics provides you with answers to questions regarding how many total users you have or length of an average user session. Here are five market leaders in the quantitative mobile app analytics field. quantitative analytics conversion rates Mixpanel Mixpanel is a great choice for mobile professionals when it comes to crunching a range of data points and understanding the overall on desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps. It is codeless, which means that no code is required to track app metrics. Mixpanel is a market leader in regards to extensive event tracking and is utilized by top brands such as Ticketmaster, Intel, and Viber. user journey Features: Engagement Analytics Conversion Funnels Retention Analytics A/B Testing Automatic Insights Firebase Firebase is Google’s suite of tools for mobile developers. It works with other Firebase features so that you can measure everything in one central location, from your ad spend ROI to app crashes. There is one incredibly thorough dashboard where you can view all user behavior and cross-network campaign performance. Firebase supplies you with a variety of tools to develop your app on the platform. Additionally, you can export all of your raw data to for custom querying. BigQuery Features: Crash Reporting Deep linking performance In-app purchase data Attribution In-depth audience segmentation Amplitude Amplitude concentrates on analytics that help startups pinpoint and address trends users’ in-app behavior. By utilizing audience segmentation, Amplitude clients can analyze their users based on various parameters (location, install source, etc.) and examine these groups through funnels, , and retention. Also included is access to behavioral and retention insights, which are key indicators to identifying specific types of user behavior that correlate to strong retention. IAPs cohorting Features: Behavioral Cohorting Single-user analysis Funnels & Conversions Retention User paths Localytics From traditional analytics for apps to smart targeting and marketing automation, Localytics offers a variety of features. It’s easy to understand your users and their interactions with this platform, and you can take these metrics to great heights–for example, EyeEm was able to target users with high-risk churn rate and adopted personalized re-engagement campaigns, or and the NHL app managed to increase app revenue through in-app messaging campaigns. Features: Sessions and Events Retention Attribution Uninstall Tracking LTV Keen Keen is a cloud-based analytics platform that allows developers to stream, compute, and access all events through a single API. Keen offers companies the possibility to track complicated attribution, generate alerts, institute real-time analytics dashboards, among a variety of other solutions. With Keen, developers can remain flexible with customized infrastructure while giving users the best user experience possible. Features: Event tracking Real-time analytics Attribution Full resolution queries Smart charts Qualitative App Analytics — The Top Platforms There’s quantity, and then there’s quality. Of course both have their unique attributes, but in the case of mobile analytics, the quantitative edge can only be taken so far in measuring numbers. The qualitative realm tracks what quantitative can’t, the app’s user experience. Although relatively new to the sport, qualitative app analytics is a powerful team player on the analytics field. Some might even say its the MVP of the whole team, as it enables mobile app professionals to probe their apps on the single-user and aggregate user level, gaining actionable insights into users’ behavior and app performance. Appsee Appsee is the premier qualitative app analytics platform, and has helped set the stage for the qualitative movement. Continuing to reign as the market leader in the industry, Appsee has a vast assortment of valuable features, two of the most noteworthy being and . User session recordings automatically tag all user events and give an exhaustive visualization of each user’s in-app experience. Touch Heatmaps, on the other hand, provide information on an aggregate level showing exactly where and how users are interacting with each screen and if they face any UI struggles. User Recordings Touch Heatmaps In addition to these dominant qualitative features, Appsee offers conversion funnels, crash recordings and symbolication, action cohorts, among many others to choose from, depending on your analytics needs. Additionally, platforms are available so you can pair all your data together. integration Features: User Recordings Touch Heatmaps Crash and ANR Recordings and Reporting Conversion Funnels with Drop-off Videos Retention and Engagement Analytics Performance/Crash App Analytics — The Top Platforms Crashes happen. It’s the unavoidable truth of a mobile app’s life cycle, and even the best of the best of the app world encounter the occasional upheaval. But no matter what, it’s how you deal with these crashes–be it monitoring, analyzing, reproducing, or troubleshooting–that dictate the . Here are two top mobile app analytics platforms for tracking and resolving in-app crashes. future success or failure of your app Crashlytics One of the most established crash solutions in the industry, Crashlytics is completely free and supports both iOS and Android. It prides itself on having highly detailed crash reports which take into consideration many factors, such as device, battery status, charge in progress, proximity sensor, wifi connection, and physical phone orientation. On an aggregate level, Crashlytics examines your crashes, and accordingly generates reports that display crucial issues and trends. An added bonus is that Crashlytics sends a friendly alert to its clients if any crash goes unresolved after a certain period of time. Key Features: Comprehensive crash reports Real-time processing and alerts Smart charts on crash trends and insights AppLink.io AppLink.io provides precise information regarding crashes in your app, from the manufacturer to the connection type to the app version. With these distinctions, you’re able to delve further into keymetrics such as, the number of impacted users and the rate that crashes are occurring. Applink.io is compatible with iOS and Android apps, and the dashboard is also easy to use, helping you make sense of your app’s performance. Features Crash reporting Conversion tracking Event reporting Brief Synopsis Choosing the right mobile app analytics platform is a nuanced process, but once you have the right ones in place, the difference will be enormous. Quantitative data, qualitative analytics, and improve app performance and user happiness, which drive better mobile app results. Identifying critical UX/UI problems is key, and only by complementing traditional analytics tools with a session replay tool you will obtain deep insights into the user journey. Furthermore, these tools possess many features that can be utilized across departments further aiding in cross-team collaboration and communication. crash reporting Utilizing top platforms from these three analytics categories will provide you with the most holistic view of what’s happening in your app and allow you to visualize results on a comprehensive level, taking your app to a place of supreme optimization. Setting these tools into your strategic plan will improve user experience on an unparalleled level.

The Best Mobile App Analytics Platforms in 2019–2020

App growth & is the most critical piece for app businesses. Most product owners spend good amount of time in User experience, User interface, features & perfecting a shadow & corner radius. Very little thought & efforts are put in for sustainable & organic growth for mobile applications. Product owners & marketers are often do not have knowledge or right tools & methodologies on growth. marketing One of the reason can be marketing companies as well. Most of the marketers & agencies has confined Mobile App marketing with web SEO, content, blogs & ASO (App Store Optimisation). At MobileFirst, we are exploring new, creative & easy to implement ways for app growth & marketing. This is Arpan from , we are mobile app development & growth agency. MobileFirst Ideal Mobile App Growth Lifecycle — Ref. LeanPlum App marketing is beyond only running ads. There are still an organic ways to grow your applications Referring an image from App Growth platform called LeanPlum. In general Product Owners & App Developers should plan following 4 steps. Use Acquisition (Organic & Paid) User Retention & Reducing Churn Marketing Automation App Store Optimisation “95% Of Opt-in Users, who don’t receive a push notification in the first 90 days will churn” — This makes user retention a most crucial aspect for building user base. With this article, we are covering strategies to improve App Growth. e.g, With branch you can create App Content previews. On a lighter note, Winston Churchill famously quoted this for effective speech. This is very applicable for App Content previews. DeepViews “App Content previews work like a woman’s skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.” 13 Easy ways for achieving App Growth: Make your mobile app Content Aware : You can get organic growth with your app’s content. We recommend that you use SearchAPI, NSUserActivity, Spotlight Search, Indexing content for Android. This will create a long term effect in SEO & link generation of your content. Making mobile applications Social Aware: We recommend that you use right Social tools when you share via an application. OpenGraph & can be an excellent tool for creating immersive posts on Social Media. This will helps you create content rich social media posts when users share from your mobile applications. We integrated OpenGraph for Texas based Sports Platform — this is bringing 5% more users organically. A big reward for right app . Schemas.org engineering Open Graph tags make your applications Social Aware — By adding open graph tags, you are improving CTR by 40%. Making mobile applications Location Aware: Utilise an SDK to understand your User’s location to provide tailor made experience to you users. At times you don’t need them to provide their accurate location. Improve Discovery by Universal Links & Deep Linking: App to Site Association on your server to provide link back to your app. Improve Conversion by adding Smart Banners for App Downloads on your Website for conversion. This is simplest form of converting website visitors to app downloads. Apple & Google provides the tools or you can use Branch.io for this. Deep Linking SDKs by Firebase & Branch are quite popular you can utilise this to convert more users to App downloads. We will cover in-depth analysis of Deep Linking & how it can impact your customer engagement. D by Branch, they work as mini website for converting your visitors to App Downloads. This is one of the most effective way for app downloads. With DeepViews you can create a content preview websites. eepViews DeepViews by Branch — Cost Effective ways to promote & grow your user base. Understand User Journeys with the help of Mixpanel, Localytics, Firebase, CleverTap or Branch. There are lot of frameworks, based on your requirement you should pick the one. We will cover comparative analysis in next posts. Facebook & Goole re-marketing campaigns to activate users. Activating acquired users improve the conversion by 15 to 20% more. Only few of the SDKs provide this feature. This is very effective, as users already know your app & value. As an app owner you are reactivating the idle users with some incentives. This is more targeted incentives to acquired users. Automation to fix Funnel leakages with Email or Push Notifications, really effective for eCommerce related applications. What is funnel leakage? Imagine a customer has visited a specific product on an eCommerce app, added the product on Shopping cart — but have not completed transaction. A simple reminder via Email or Push Notification help you fix the funnel leakages. App Referral Program or Loyalty Programs. You can create with Deep Linking as well. With right strategy you can grow your user base organically. E.g Uber — Everyone remembers their first free ride & how they utilised loyalty programs to bring new users. The rightly executed Referral programs motivates your existing users to transact more on your platform. We built Loyalty program for a Client based in Singapore, this resulted in 20% more users organically. App Referral & Loyalty Programs are most efficient & scalable method to build your audience ASO (App Store Optimisation) by tracking & monitoring your keywords. You can utilise SplitMetrics, SearchAds, SensorTower for keyword tracking. Running App Store Ads & Google Universal Ads to understand the regions. At times some regions appreciate your application more than you have anticipated. You can utilise Google Ads & Apple Ads to understand conversion based on geography. e.g — One of our early apps got popular in Taiwan & Indonesia. We did not consider those markets to grow significantly. Eventually we changed our strategy to cater those customers with new features & translation for the region. We have a detailed deck & few case studies created for our clients, happy to share the same on personal emails. Regards, Arpan Desai (arpan@mobilefirst.in, Mobile Strategy & Growth Consultant at ). , If you are looking for help for your app business. MobileFirst Know more #mobile #marketing #growth #branch #clevertap #development #engagement #retention #leanplum

13 Ways to Engineer Growth as a Service

John Donne once said, “no man is an island.” If he lived in the 21st century, he might have said the same thing about software. Programs which, on the face of it, appear to be completely distinct entities, actually consist of dozens of other components made by other developers and companies. There are millions of third-party libraries and software development kits (SDKs) on the Internet. Developers download them and integrate them into their software, thereby saving them time when building features and functionality. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel for each thing they want to do. But are they also a security Achilles heel? Bay Area security expert examined several of the most popular SDKs, and found . Or, to put in plainer terms, they were being served in an insecure fashion, allowing a malicious third-party to intercept and modify the contents. Felix Krause many lacked transport-level security Your app is grass Before we go any further, I want to say that Krause’s research is platform-agnostic. It affects software of all stripes. . Linux. MacOS. . . Amiga too, probably. Windows Android iOS That said, in this section, I’m going to talk about iOS apps because it’s familiar to most people, and because it’s a particularly interesting case study. It also happens to be Krause’s major area of interest, and the platform upon which he’s based much of his research. Let’s suppose you want to infect a million users with malware. I don’t know why, but you do. It’s a tricky proposition. For starters, Apple’s locked down iOS tighter than Fort Knox. Grabbing an iOS zero day is a non-starter, too; those start in the six-to-seven figure range. iPhone So, as a last resort, you sneak a developer a compromised SDK, who then inserts the dodgy code into their app (we’ll talk about how this works later). You then get the keys to the kingdom, more or less. Although Apple’s killjoy sandboxing stops the real fun, the malicious code can still access: Any files and folders the app has access to Any permissions the app has access to (hello, microphone and location services!) The container belonging to the app iCloud All Keychain data the app has access to All information exchanged between the application and a remote server. Yikes. In short, you could turn an ostensibly-legitimate application into an Orwellian spying machine that records every tap — every keypress — made within it. It could even record where the user has been. And it could harvest credentials, which could be sold to other bad actors. And it’s all done at an unimaginable scale. An individual SDK might harvest hundreds of apps, which in turn ensnare thousands of users apiece. How this works Man-in-the-middle attacks are nothing new. This research isn’t about them, but rather about how important pieces of software are transported, and how that affects the broader software security ecosystem. It’s important to touch on how this attack works, however. This attack requires a third-party to position themselves either between a developer’s computer and the rest of the network, or between the network and the server providing SDK downloads. This allows them to observe and modify traffic as it goes from the computer, to the outside world. The finer technical details can be , if you’re curious. read on Krause’s blog The victim could be anywhere: at a hotel, a cafe, or an airport. It doesn’t matter. Once the attacker is positioned, they can start serving bogus SDKs. Krause pointed out that it’s trivial to replace text in an HTML document. So, they could change the link location on a download page to one that points elsewhere. An example given by Krause explores changing the location of Localytics’ SDK to one that’s visually similar, and unlikely to arouse suspicion. See if you can spot the difference: https://s3.amazonaws.com/localytics-sdk/sdk.zip https://s3.amazonaws.com/localytics-sdk-binaries/sdk.zip The former is the legitimate SDK, while the one containing “localytics-sdk-binaries” serves the malicious code. Krause has also created a proof-of-concept that allows him to switch the contents of ZIP files and binaries in real-time. This works by downgrading traffic from an encrypted format, to one that has no such protections, through a tool called sslstrip. Step-by-step, here’s how this works: A developer downloads an SDK T then modify it, inserting their own malicious code The attacker compresses the code. The attacker watches over the network traffic and waits for the developer to download an SDK. They then replace any ZIP file matching a certain pattern with their own payload. Vendors are serving insecure SDKs The avenue of attack highlighted by Krause’s research is a threat because of one thing: vendors are serving SDKs in a wholly-insecure fashion. Krause looked at 41 of the most popular SDKs. Thirteen of these were potentially vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, while five offered no way to securely download the SDK at all. Many of these belong to big-name tech companies. Take Amazon (which, to its credit, fixed the problem within three working days), for example. The Seattle-based tech titan served its AWS (Amazon Web Services) SDK downloads over ultra-insecure HTTP. Another major SDK provider, Localytics (which has also resolved the problem), had an unencrypted documentation sub-site, which linked to its SDK. An attacker could have intercepted this and replaced the link to a malicious substitute, as mentioned earlier. In line with ethical disclosure procedures, Krause gave the affected SDK developers a meaningful opportunity to resolve the issue before disclosure. This meant he contacted the relevant stakeholders within each organization, and gave them three months to resolve the issue to his satisfaction. The issue is remarkably trivial to fix. Unlike many vulnerabilities, which require weeks worth of legwork, vendors only need to ensure their SDKs are downloaded through encrypted channels. Depressingly, however, vendors have failed to take any meaningful action. Five days before the publication of this article, Krause wrote to me and told me that nearly two-thirds of the affected SDK providers had failed to protect their SDK downloads. He said: I just went through the list and checked if the SDK providers fixed their sites: I notified all affected in November and December 2017, giving them enough time to resolve the issue before publicly blogging about it. Out of the 13 affected SDKs, 1 resolved the issue within three business days, 4 resolved the issue within a month, and 8 SDKs are still vulnerable to this attack at the time of publishing this post. The SDK providers that are still affected haven’t responded to my emails, or just replied with “We’re gonna look into this” — all of them in the top 50 most most-used SDKs. Which is shocking…. The software food chain When you think about it, software isn’t too dissimilar from a piece of steak you might buy in a supermarket. You purchase it with the assumption that it’s safe to eat. For that to work, it needs to have been handled appropriately during each stage of the manufacturing process. From farm to fork, everyone needs to do their job properly. Software is a bit like that. The end-user purchases a piece of software from their supermarket (in this scenario, the App Store) with the assumption that it won’t harm them. But for that assumption to be true, everyone needs to adhere to security best-practices: not just developers. This story was written by Matthew Hughes, and was originally published on The Next Web.

SDKs Could be the Trojan Horse for Millions of IPhones

Are you dead in the water with your Serverless development? Serverless is a misnomer. A perception. It was not materialized until it became a household name, a few years ago. If you’d ask whether there are servers in serverless, the answer — unsurprisingly — is a BIG yes. Now, the million-dollar question — do you have to worry about them? No. Back in the day, it was all just bare-metal servers, which were kept on-premises and managed by the organizations themselves. Then came the virtual machine, a piece of software that mimics the hardware-based servers. Cloud was the next big thing inspired by the distributed computing platforms. Containerization, a.k.a. OS-level virtualization came along and gained popularity afterwards. However, later, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) had covered some ground due to the emerging popularity of the cloud by then. Provisioning servers became automated with PaaS as the next step of IaaS. Technology continually evolves, like it or not, so does everything around us. In the last decade, we saw drastic improvements in connectivity, compute power, storage, etc. Serverless started appearing more and more (even got us ) after Business Development VPs started making and this continued the trend of PaaS (Platform as a Service) with some significant paradigm shifts. With Amazon Web Services launching Lambda at 2014 , serverless became inevitable. By today, it is one of the in the software architecture world. Baader-Meinhoffed impact stories ReInvent conference trending topics Diving into Serverless Serverless computing is a cloud computing model of which applications and services can be built and run without managing any servers. As such, the name has been derived corroborating the fact that provisioning, scaling, and managing of servers are entirely hidden from the operator. Serverless incorporates two different but overlapping realms — BaaS, shorthand for Backend as a Service, and FaaS, shorthand for Function as a Service. Serverless is not a , even though some misapprehends it to be a relatively new concept. Zimki started offering the first “pay per use” code execution platform in 2006 — before they at the end of 2007. Heroku by Salesforce has been silently operating their web application deployment model since 2007. Google App Engine was released in April 2008 with limited features by Google. It started out as a custom Python execution framework and now turned out to be one of the favorite cloud platforms for web application development and hosting. new kid on the block withdrew the service Brave new waves With the event-driven wave hitting the coast, ephemeral, stateless compute containers came into play. Unlike traditional architectures, these compute engines were invoked only once by a 3rd-party — and killed. People started calling monikers — Functions as a Service (FaaS) emerged. This was briskly leveraged by the developers for focusing and implementing own business logic triggered by specific events. FaaS completely abstracts the infrastructure layer from the developer charging only for the time of use. Quoting , AWS Lambda Run code without thinking about servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume. FaaS market is driven mainly by the shift from DevOps to serverless computing lately. Global forecasts predict the serverless market growing at a . Industry experts have some about the progression of serverless technology too. rate of 32.7% enticing views Serverless, the hero Introduction of serverless eliminates the woe to manage clusters of servers and the traditional “always on” server requirement. The underlying fleet of servers scales gracefully on its own, provisioning appropriate infrastructure, even to meet massive surges in traffic. They are regularly monitored and managed by the providers — also security patches and other immunization shots are taken care of. This cuts a considerable portion of the budget as it results in notable reductions in operational cost, not to mention the hassle. In serverless, you only pay as you use; the invocations are billed by fractions of seconds. Implementing a production-ready output from a mere idea is super-fast. Developer productivity for a first-time experience is a significant gain compared to struggling over different software stacks set up internally. AWS and pretty much all the other serverless solution providers give options and come as language agnostic endpoints (except for Google Cloud, others provide multiple runtime/development environments) which makes the first-time hands-on experiences much more relieved. free tier Serverless, the villain This does not mean that serverless is all god-like; it might include some . Usually, these costs don’t encompass only CPU and RAM usage, but the number of API requests, storage, and network might get their fair share. Sometimes, according to your specific business requirement, an implementation with multiple functions may be more difficult than having one with a single container. Code maintenance may incapacitate you, due to the distributed nature of your overall logic — or for more complex use cases, going with Kubernetes might be advantageous since it’s more mature. hidden costs incurred Lack of integration testing facilities on localhost is a huge downside of the existing providers. There is no easy way to emulate but can be overcome to a certain extent by using or . Manual machine tuning befitting your application is impossible because the server layer is intangible. Serverless Framework aws-sam-local Provider lock-in can be challenging when moving forward since each serverless platform is a far cry from each other based on their uniqueness and limitations. Because of the , applications may experience high latency at the beginning. cold starts Serverless Competition AWS is not the only FaaS provider in the market. There is a handful of other enterprise giants competing for the fattening market. Microsoft Azure enhances event-driven serverless compute experience with . IBM’s serverless domain provides which is based on Apache OpenWhisk, an open source project. is the Google Cloud Platform’s version of FaaS, which is still in beta. Azure Functions IBM Cloud Functions Google Cloud Functions Different providers provide a stack of fully managed products in their serverless platforms. These backend services require no provisioning, maintaining, or administration. Here’s a depiction of the various components in each serverless platform. Cloud Computing Platforms: Serverless Product Showdown Apart from these, is the Google Cloud Platform backed (acquired, , in 2014) mobile and web application development platform which consists of multiple integrated services. Most of the serverless providers showcase IoT framework support, mobile backend support and cognitive application development support as well. Firebase as usual Most Amazon web services have availability zone specific endpoints to compensate the latency in the applications around the globe. Developers have the freedom to use these regional endpoints or the default North Virginia endpoint. You can read more about AWS services that support particular regions in . Just like that, other serverless providers support different availability zones as well. here AWS Lambda and other services have SDKs that support serverless development in multiple programming languages. Amazon recently (2018 January) Go support. Read to know a great deal about a detailed comparison of different serverless providers. announced this article Many faces of Serverless Serverless applications let you run code without provisioning or managing servers. Serverless domain empowers a myriad of application opportunities. Some of them are divulged here as follows. 1 — Real-time data processing Real-time processing is found to be coined widely with serverless. Image resizing for viewing on different devices such as desktop computers, smartphones, tablets are done by The Seattle Times . SiteSpirit data services to build their cloud-based media library. using AWS Lambda uses IBM cloud 2 — Real-time stream processing Localytics to process billions of historical and live social media trend data for business users to query. IBM Cloud Functions can be integrated with Apache Kafka supported IBM Message Hub for . Plexure, a company engaged in innovative retail businesses based in New Zealand, to bring customer experience to the next level — with the help of Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps, now customers get alerts about the in-store digital display. uses Lambda processing stream data uses Azure serverless technologies 3 — Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) Zillow, one of the largest real-estate brands to provide customers with a smooth experience in near-real-time home valuation. utilizes AWS serverless stack 4 — IoT Backends In the IoT domain, there is an increasing growth of applications using serverless platforms. This explains how GreenQ, a smart residential waste collection company, exploits IBM Bluemix technologies to engage in a fast and more efficient service. exciting story 5 — Mobile Backends Bustle.com is a website catering to women which provides news, fashion and many more. They use Lambda and API Gateway for its iOS and website backend. With the , developers no longer worry about managing and provisioning infrastructure, all they focus on is innovating. The mobile app uses IBM Cloud Functions (former IBM OpenWhisk) to notify users about specific weather events (hurricane in Florida, for example) aligning god avatars according to their preferences. move to new serverless architecture WeatherGods 6 — Serverless web applications TimerCheck.io is a “deceptively simple web service with superpowers” in . The service is entirely built on Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda, and it provides an unlimited number of timers that can run infinitely. Eric Hammond’s words 7 — SaaS event processing San Joaquin Valley College (SJVC) is a private junior college in California. To simplify the IT management and provide the students with a better experience, they to Microsoft Azure and Office 365. With the help of Microsoft FastTrack, SJVC embraced the serverless technology and continued their journey of innovation. moved their learning management system Apart from these most popular ones, you can find more use cases of , , and . AWS Azure IBM Empowering serverless development Software architecture world is steadily being absorbed by serverless. It’s not going to be “Serverless Everything” anytime soon as there are still many blanks to be filled. Tooling is improving, but again, there are still . The earlier mentioned Serverless framework provides a CLI tool that lets users to be integrated with multiple cloud providers. gaps to be bridged , once an independent cloud-based IDE was to plug development aspect into its serverless stack. However, setting up a Cloud9 development environment requires a new Amazon EC2 instance or your own Linux server. The getting started process is reported to be more complicated than the original Cloud9 (c9.io) . Check attempting to come up with a self-sufficient AWS lambda function, which quashes the need of uploading a bundle with third-party dependencies — built locally. Microsoft Azure is powered by Visual Studio, another versatile but heavy cloud IDE with team services. Cloud9 acquired by Amazon by many users this neat trick Think Serverless SLAppForge, a totally new player, its beta release of , a customized editor for the development and deployment of serverless applications. It’s a hybrid model exploiting the beauty of drag-and-drop style and the full power of raw code. Sigma hides the underlying complexities of the platform from the developers using its own, “very” serverless architecture — which means, now you don’t have to dig into piles and piles of documentation and tutorials. recently announced Sigma This is equipped with intuitive code suggestions, context-aware code completion, auto-generated code snippets — still supports only Node.js though. It also takes care of the Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery flows of your serverless applications. If you have a web browser (I bet you already do!), a GitHub account and an AWS account, you’re all set — because there’s to install. Deploying your serverless application is minutes away now, not hours, not days. powerful IDE nothing Conclusion The paradigm shift to serverless is becoming inescapable by the day, just like was the change from on-premise to cloud. The Big Day that all applications go serverless is not far away. It’s high time to jump on the bandwagon and be a serverless developer since everything is propelling you to be more productive and efficient. Keep aside the worries about infrastructure; focus fully on the business logic. The ball is in your court; jump-start now! your serverless development Call To Action Appreciate and let others find this article. Clap. Share your views on this article. Comment. to receive updates on articles like this. Follow me. Chamath Kirinde , Keep in touch. LinkedIn Chummy Charms Originally published at chummycharms.blogspot.com .

Why Serverless? Why Now?

READ THIS before naming your startup

The key to keeping up with that engagement streak is getting users onboarded and up to speed as quickly and smoothly as possible. And that means guiding them along with seamless embedded learning. User attention is at a premium. Keeping people engaged during your app’s onboarding process can be tough, particularly if users are met by a confusing, fragmented experience. However, well-delivered contextual learning can avoid any of that confusion: embedded training will and ensure a good first impression of your app. guide users effortlessly through the onboarding process After all, first impressions are key when it comes to app engagement. An analysis of user retention rates [1] from Localytics in 2016 found that nearly three-quarters of users will abandon an app after just one use. That may be an uncomfortable statistic, but there is a silver lining: The more users engaged, the more likely they were to remain loyal. Localytics found that if users opened the app just 11 times in the first 30 days, they were only 14% likely to churn. The key to keeping up with that engagement streak is getting users onboarded; and the best way to do this is with . embedded learning Why Use Contextual Learning For App Onboarding? Using in your app offers a range of immediate benefits: embedded training By organizing all your training content in one centralized learning platform within the app, your users won’t have to go to an online help center or open a “ReadMe” file to learn the ropes. Everything they need during onboarding will be right at their fingertips. Improves user experience. Embedded training provides an immediately accessible, self-paced way for new customers to onboard themselves. This naturally reduces the time frame normally associated with user onboarding. Makes onboarding efficient. Embedding training in your apps helps onboard your user base more efficiently, and using a good learning management system (LMS) reduces your workload by making it easy to update your training materials from one central location. This is critical when your company is growing quickly. Streamlines your operations. Whether you’re onboarding one new user each week or several dozens each day, embedding contextual learning into your app is a much easier way to scale than sending individual emails or holding in-person training and webinars. Lets you scale training as needed. Related reading: How to Create an Online Course in 5 Easy Steps Getting Started With Embedded Training Embedded training provides so users learn features naturally as they go along. You can create libraries of accessible information, design training courses to teach users how to be successful and provide contextual learning to help users in the moment. just-in-time information It’s not as hard as it seems to get started. Look for a that: cloud-based LMS Maintaining brand consistency is important, especially during the onboarding process. lets you add your logo, select your colors, upload images and customize your HTML and CSS. Users won’t feel jarred by the experience. Is completely white labeled. Complete white labeling You need to be able to connect your online training center to your domain. Also, the LMS you choose must enable users to navigate seamlessly between your courses, products, and business applications without requiring additional logins. Uses custom domain and single sign-on (SSO). can help you improve core processes by correlating training outcomes with business goals, such as increasing customer satisfaction and product engagement. Has reporting and analytics capabilities. Data analytics from your embedded training You want something that integrates easily with the software you’re already using, . Plays nicely with your other systems. like OnboardIQ or Salesforce Taking Embedded Learning Beyond Onboarding While embedded training is helpful for onboarding, you can also use embedded training to keep users engaged well beyond those initial sessions. As ’s founder Steve Cornwell witnessed while using a rideshare company in San Francisco, embedded learning offers a convenient way to help users increase their skills. Instead of just scrolling through social media on their downtime, drivers can take advantage of the content embedded in the rideshare app to level up their skills and become more successful with the company. SchoolKeep Airbnb offers another example of how contextual learning adds value outside of onboarding. About a year ago, Airbnb redesigned their app [2] to provide a more streamlined experience for users. Rather than overwhelming users with options, a series of screens now guides users through the transaction. More interestingly, instead of stopping its functionality at the completion of the transaction, Airbnb’s new app presents users with an interactive guide to the city in which they just booked a room. This contextual learning content keeps users in the app and adds real value to their experience. The Future Of App Onboarding Traditional training methods simply don’t cut it in the fast-paced age of on-demand apps. But creating a seamless onboarding experience is simpler than ever before. Modern LMS solutions make it easy to train users in the moment when they need it most. With a suite of powerful tools at your fingertips, you can use contextual learning to lower support costs, deliver an interactive experience and increase retention rates. Your users — and your company’s bottom line — will appreciate the difference. If you’re looking to create an onboarding training program for your users, give SchoolKeep a try by booking a . free consultation call Footnotes: Visit Website is modern, easy-to-use software for the rapid creation and contextual delivery of branded online training modules. SchoolKeep Originally published at elearningindustry.com on September 26, 2017.

Onboarding Users With Embedded Training To Ensure They Use Your App

Image credit: Pexels In recent years, the quality of advertising and the level of competition on various platforms have grown significantly. It is not enough simply to allocate the budget for promotion. Advertisers have to fight for customers on one of the most competitive spaces in the world. In the current market, brands need to learn how to create effective, attracting, non-annoying, valuable advertisement**,** constantly look for new insights, ideas and inspiration for their ad campaigns, choose the right strategies and good traffic sources. This includes the mobile sector. It is not easy to meet these demands. Today we will talk about new tools that help mobile advertisers to monitor the app market, explore competitors’ advertising strategies and make in-app advertising really effective. The Mobile Web and In-App Advertising As early as 2014, the number of mobile users exceeded the number of people connecting to the Internet via desktop. However, according to recent , apps take up 92% of total mobile time, while browsers account just for the other 8%. This is facilitated by the large number of apps for all occasions — the number of such programs in popular stores is already about . statistics 5 million According to Localytics, app downloads (Q1 2016 to Q1 2017) and consumer spending within apps grew 45% during the same period, reaching USD $15bn in Q1 2017. Apps also (CTR) at 0.56%, than mobile web, at 0.23%, and desktop web ads at 0.1–0.2%. In turn, Forrester analysts the number of global smartphone subscribers to reach 3.8 billion by 2022, crossing the 50% mark for smartphone penetration by population in 2017 and reaching 66% by 2022. have grown 15% year-on-year see higher click-through rates expect So it’s not surprising that in-app advertising is becoming increasingly popular for business promotion. According to , in 2016 the share of the market was 81% for in-app ads, whereas 19% of budgets was allocated for promotion on the mobile web. This year, the situation changed — mobile web accounts for only 6% of spending, and 94% of advertisements are now purchased in mobile applications. the Smaato advertising platform In their report, the Smaato experts note that this increase is due to the convenience and flexibility of in-app advertising. Business is attracted to flexible target settings, cross-device tracking capability, and advanced performance analysis functions. The problem of fraud is also more acute on the mobile web. In addition, in-app advertising is mostly native, built into the application context and not annoying for users. This makes it more effective than advertising on the mobile web, where ads are often clumsily built into websites, irritate, prevent from using it. This, in turn, causes a negative attitude towards the brand. How to Track and Monitor Ad Campaigns in Applications Although the advertising market in applications has already surpassed the mobile web, for a long time it remained non transparent for advertisers. There have always been competitive ad analysis and monitoring tools on the mobile Web (these are just ). However, until recently, no such services existed on the multi-million dollar in-app advertising marketplace. Yet, 2017 has been marked by the emergence of the first tools for analyzing the marketing strategies of in-app advertisers. Today we will look at the four most effective ones. some of them Apptica This service is created specifically to track and monitor advertising campaigns in mobile applications. It gives insights to all market participants and provides information regarding: top advertisers and publishers on the market and their activity; top in-app advertising campaigns by category, country and period; top ad networks, share of impressions, creatives frequently seen in, in-app traffic sources and its volume; top creatives — including most effective ad formats, first/last seen and active days; active ad network SDKs in applications, (statistics on Android and IOS, different application categories, and dozens of countries). The system aggregates data from different sources, bringing them to one common form, and displays statistics in a unified format. With the help of the service you can see what kind of creatives and ad networks mobile publishers are using. This information allows marketers to make strategic decisions about which creatives and ad formats are the most effective in their particular business area, and helps to improve promotion efficiency — for example, when entering new regions and countries. A company may find out and analyze competitors’ activity on this market, instead of spending money on experimenting with local advertising networks and different advertisements. Application developers, in turn, analyze in-app campaigns in competing applications to understand what kind of ads to show to their users. One of the biggest pros of the platform is free trial period, which is rarely found in similar systems. Since the product is still in the beta phase, the price is significantly lower than in other systems, special offer includes: $249/month for access to full functionality. App Annie — User Acquisition AppAnnie has long been present on the market and is an analytics platform that offers a variety of products including app analytics and store statistics. It provides data about app positions in markets, the number of downloads, app revenue, usage, and engagement. Not so long ago they introduced additional features such as a creative gallery, top advertisers and publishers in the Marketing Intelligence service, with includes also ASO. The service subscription cost, however is not specified. AppAnnie pricing, in general, is not very transparent as the cost of services is negotiated with each customer individually. Information about advertisers, publishers, creative gallery and a percentage of impressions running across an advertiser, publisher and ad network is included in the premium Marketing Intelligent package. Pricing varies with its minimal near $15 000/year (users various price options in this thread on Quora). discussed Advertisers use this system to analyze the performance of their own, and competitors’ advertising campaigns, while developers access useful data about downloads and application usage in different countries. Apptopia — User Acquisition This is another well-known analytics service that has recently added the option of accessing information about the purchase of in-app ads. The system allows you to get data on the use of ad creatives, ad networks, and how much is spent on promotion. Ultimately, the advertisers see what formats and advertisements work better in their niche. Information on ad campaigns, creatives and purchasing ads is part of the User Acquisition Suite package and is called Acquisition Pro. The cost of access is $1499 per month for the annual subscription. It isn’t currently possible to buy the creative ad monitoring data feature separately, so users must select two additional available Apptopia services. For example, another module can generate recommendations for the distribution of advertising budgets — based on the analysis of ARPU competitors, the system finds countries, application categories, and stores with the highest potential ROI. SensorTower — Ad Intelligence This is a platform for improving search visibility and increasing downloads. One of the variety of tools of the SensorTower ASO platform, is the Ad Intelligence tool with top advertisers and publishers, creative gallery and impression analysis. The system provides information about the costs of mobile advertising, the usage of advertising networks by competitors, and the effectiveness of specific ad creatives**.** Using this tool, advertisers can learn not only where and on what the competitors spend money, but also how these costs change over time. In addition, the system collects data on specific creatives and adds performance indicators to the dashboard. The price is not specified and upon request. Final Thoughts When you start working to promote business in the mobile segment, you should be aware that it is different from desktop, and that the mobile web is different from in-app. Gadget users spend the majority of their time in applications rather than on the mobile web. You should therefore show your ads in the place where your audience is found and where it’s convenient for your audience to interact with an ad. You shouldn’t focus only on the mobile web advertising by force of habit as applications now definitely dominate the mobile field. In order for your ads to be truly effective, you should use ad creatives that are right for your product, as well as being competitive, unique, clear, look good on any device, and more importantly, effective as target audience should respond to them. However, in-app advertising is more expensive than on the mobile web, so a large budget can easily be spent on experiments and A/B tests. To avoid unnecessary costs, before starting active actions and ad campaigns, you should do some research. For example, find similar products and apps in your segment, analyze competitors’ ad campaigns and top ad creatives they use for promotion, what kind of ad networks they use, share of impression among it depending on the country. Main traffic sources and effective ad creatives in chosen country for promotion are aksi important elements. Examining this information with the help of the services described above will avoid many unnecessary mistakes, significantly reducing the impact on your budget and brand awareness.

How to Spy on Competitors’ Ads Performance in Mobile Apps: 4 Useful Tools

Is it enough to ? Is this an exhaustive user engagement strategy? — Apparently, no. In fact, users are the lifeblood of any business or application, no matter whether your own a , sell business services, offer coaching programs or distribute consumer products. If you are unable to gain loyal customers, you will fail. just love your customers marketplace Most startups devote more attention to lead generation and user acquisition, but they miss the key point. First customers stay with you as long, as they are motivated and updated regularly. The way you treat your users matters. Do you provide them with ultimate experience? has surveyed over 18.000 respondents from nine countries and of pollees state that good service makes them . Verint 89 percent feel more positively about brands [Image source: Verint] And what about your business? How will you benefit from ultimate user experience? — Consumers can contribute to your and attract new users for you through positive , discussions on social media or sharing a positive experience with friends, relatives or colleagues. marketing strategy reviews [Image source: Verint] On the average you have only to create a , thus turning first-time users into loyal customers. Gimmicks and goodies can hardly cut through all the noise of app stores. What’s really needed instead is a strong user engagement strategy for your application. These aren’t snap tricks and they require sound approach and effort. However, they will work, if you put in the time. eight seconds good first impression Let’s explore the workable user engagement strategies together: First impressions are half the battle Most business owners take the literally, though beneath this phrase lie rich notions and multiple phases. What do you mean by saying “the first interaction”? Visit of app store listing? Application download? First login? Can we refer to all these actions as the elements of first impressions? — Apparently yes. “first impressions” We start with the element outside of the application: or . It is essential to take some time and think of the reasons why people will want to give your product a chance. What problems do you address? — Focus on benefits, instead of features. Don’t forget to showcase your app. app store listing landing page [Image source: Cosmunity , app developed by DA-14 team] Here we move to the next stage — . Most companies misunderstand this step and start to teach people on how to use their solutions. However, instead of guides and tutorials, you can focus on educating people about advantages of your app. Illustrated value propositions can become an excellent alternative. onboarding [Image source: Kissmetrics] Once the initial handshake is done, you need to ensure easy , nice , and smooth . app download welcoming direct interaction As a substitute for long tutorials, some companies encourage first-time consumers to start using apps immediately. For example, a welcome note from comes with a call to action, offering users to try a quick game. In this way, the company educates users and explains what the app is all about. QuizUp [Image source: QuizUp] provides newcomers with interactive guides and video tutorials. In such a way it highlights the most significant features and explains how these features should be used. Basecamp [Image source: Appboy] Slow and steady will hardly win the race Tough competition has set the bar high and modern users are more demanding than ever before. You can call a cab with a touch of a button. Online retailers offer same-day delivery. Pizza is ordered by tweeting. As a result, when users download an app, they expect it to be extremely fast by default. The CA Technologies showed that around 68 percent of users consider app loading time of less than six seconds to be acceptable. While more than a half of those surveyed demand a load time of less than three seconds. research [Image source: CA Technologies] For startups such statistics means that the sweeping majority of users can easily leave if brands don’t meet their expectations. These days it‘s no longer enough to launch a whole raft of apps with limited functionality. Applications have to quickly introduce options for solving problems, highlight benefits for users and work intuitively throughout the entire experience. Go social, go viral Social media is huge. There are over active social media users worldwide. 2.79 billion [Image source: Hootsuite] Do you merely connect people on Facebook and LinkedIn? Start considering social media as a useful tool, not just a platform. It allows you not to just grow the network, but also to identify questions, discover user requirements, and find clear market needs. For example, was one of the first companies to give a meaning to social media. By examining the data generated from social platforms (online discussions, posts, etc.), the company has identified promising consumer trends before its opponents. As a result, Lenovo was acknowledged as an innovator, while its customers received relevant and useful products. Lenovo new [Image source: Lenovo] Push notifications — this is how or can be defined. Being highly-customizable they help to gain the best conversion, outperforming emails. Apps that remain silent for a long time can be quickly forgotten and finally deleted. However, some companies go too far and start to spam their customers. “Everything new is actually well-forgotten old” in-product messaging push notifications Think of relevant push notifications to maintain mobile user engagement. The (OPB) application uses push messages to encourage listeners to tune in. Oregon Public Broadcasting [Image source: Urban Airship] After sending this notification, the company stated a percent increase in the audience listening to a particular radio broadcast. 483 Online publishing platform notifies users about new posts or top five posts within your network. allows users to set encouraging workout reminders. regularly sends behavioral triggers, stats, and recommendations. Medium 12 Minute Athlete Swarm [Image source: The Verge] Go far with deep linking Deep linking drives user engagement and gives you more control over the marketing and onboarding processes. It makes notifications more powerful, especially if you need to take users to a particular place within your app. With deep links you can determine which marketing campaigns are most successful or define further steps for making your application more accessible. The leading brands like and continue investing in this deep linking, so why should you ignore it? Google Apple [Image source: Branch Metrics] Moreover, deep linking can help you to grow the user base. In those cases, when the app isn’t installed on user’s device, companies apply and . In this way, users are first offered to download your app from App Store or Play Store and then they are taken to the particular “deferred” content during the first launch. Contextual, as well as deferred deep links, ensure better user experience, thus turning first-time users into engaged loyal customers. deferred contextual deep linking [Image source: Branch Metrics] Communication is a two-way street Communication with users is one of the easiest ways to increase or maintain app engagement. Some companies miss this step, thus making users write dissatisfied reviews directly on the App Store page. To avoid that, provide users with easy access to your knowledge base (FAQ) and options on how to get in touch with you. Receiving a request, send read notifications with standard turnaround time. More and more companies go on social media, ensuring a higher user satisfaction level. According to the J. D. Power , of consumers have already used a brand’s (from 23,000 of those interviewed). While customer service interactions on Twitter have within the last two years. predicts that 90% of companies will use social media for customer service by 2020, so maybe it’s high time to start? survey 67 percent social media page for customer servicing increased by 250 percent Go-globe [Image source: Twitter] The superpower of gamification Gamification doesn’t transform your app into a game, but it converts the user experience of your application into an engaging and entertaining activity. The general idea is simple: 70 percent of psychology, 20 percent strategy, and 10 percent of usage. tools Don’t know how to increase user engagement? — Most people like to compete, to outdistance, to win and to get something in return. Users can be offered various challenging tasks, like unlocking new features, earning badges, completing a profile, and so on. [Image source: Foursquare] Don’t forget to cheer them up through the tasks. You’ve probably noticed such motivating phrases like or , haven’t you? — This is just a simple example of a game played with our minds. “You are almost there!” “Wow, you’ve just completed 100% of your profile!” [Image source: Mailchimp] Engage at every minor opportunity The good news is that the capabilities for improving user engagement are boundless, but don’t forget to measure user engagement. The most common way to do that is to employ various analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Localytics, GameAnalytics, MixPanel, and many others. Customer engagement metrics can include the total number of visits, the total number of downloads, and push notification stats. Try A/B tests, produce relevant content, launch thematic campaigns, listen to your customers, and think of other opportunities. The key concept here is that user engagement isn’t a final destination, but a journey. You can hardly find a brand that can show off a perfect fully-fledged user engagement strategy. But implementation of these methods can help you to not just inspire your users, but also to build a strong brand and thrive in the market. Which customer engagement strategies have you already tried? — your thoughts with us. Share

Actionable Strategies to Increase App User Engagement

You only get one chance to make a good impression. I speak often on the difference between building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and what I like to call an MLP (Minimum Lovable Product). I don’t believe in building MVPs. I believe in making incredible product experiences. And that starts with unforgettable first-time experiences for new users. Contrary to MVPs, where the goal is to get something barely usable out the door and into the market for initial feedback, an MLP takes the opposite approach, treating, among other things, the first-time experience of a new user very seriously. This is the first time they’ll see your product, the first time they’ll experience who you are and everything you stand for. And if what they experience is bare bones and clunky, that’s how they’re going to remember you. Don’t forget, “The average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days post-install.” You have to earn the right to more of your users’ time. Most startups don’t think about it that way. Instead, they think solely about the core product features, “the value proposition” and worst of all, what their marketing strategy is going to be. How a new user experiences the first 30 seconds using that product is almost an afterthought. Imagine if that’s the approach Apple took. Imagine if your brand new iPhone came in a worn cardboard box — instead of the pearl white vacuum chamber that feels like you’re being given a prized jewel. Or imagine if, the moment you turned on your brand new MacBook, it was out of battery. Or it couldn’t locate your local WiFi signal and easily connect to the Internet. As a new user, you would immediately feel frustrated, upset, let down — instead of excited, joyful, or eager to start playing with the product. If you want to build a product people love, you have to build a first-time user experience that tells an emotional story. Let me give you an example. When we were building Crashlytics, we discovered that the first-time experience for developer tools for mobile were abysmal. Facebook was the creme de la creme, and theirs was a long, instructional page with endless links that took 20–30 seconds to scroll down. Others had wikis with 72-steps (“Oh, you use a Mac? Click here…” 26 more steps… “Now go back and resume.”). Or even 10-minute long YouTube videos with a guy speaking in monotone voice: “Now.. drag this… here. Then… click… there.” What an awful way to make a first impression and to start a relationship with your users! So, we decided to fix that. We asked, “How can we make the first time experience fun, delightful, and do something that Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others obviously couldn’t do?” Well, we built a consumer-grade installer app. It even had an icon that *wiggled* so developers could understand it had to be dragged. This may seem like an easy (even obvious) undertaking, but to create an installer that worked on millions of computers, especially developers who loved to tinker and modify and customize their setup was no easy feat. In fact, we spent the majority of our time building this first-time experience, more so than we did the core Crashlytics SDK code! But it all paid off. Enormously. Our first-time experience was like nothing developers had seen before. They Tweeted about it. They told their friends. Eventually, by the time Twitter acquired us, we were already on 300 million devices. Today, we’re on almost 3 billion monthly active devices. Think this was a one-off? Let me give you another example where our focus on first-time experience helped us dominate another category. This time, it wasn’t a niche category like mobile crash reporting. Next, we were going to go for the crown jewel — mobile analytics itself. When we were building Answers in 2014, our mobile analytics product built to work with Crashlytics, we were launching a competing product to Google Analytics, the 800-pound gorilla in the analytics space — along with every other product in mobile analytics. And there were many: Flurry, Localytics, Mixpanel, etc. This space was incredibly competitive with very high stakes. — and they were number two at the time. And Localytics and Mixpanel had each raised almost $100 million, occupying positions three and four on the top list. Flurry was reportedly acquired by Yahoo for about $300 million When we were doing our initial research, one of the most glaring things we found was the way every other company handled their onboarding process. You signed up for an account. You added your code. And then, as a first-time user, you were given a dashboard screen — and because it hadn’t collected any data yet, the dashboard was completely empty. A big empty void. There was nothing to do with zeros across the screen and flat-lined bar graphs. As we went through the onboarding flow of our competitors, we noticed that, as users, our first-time experience didn’t feel very good. It was very mechanical: Enter your name. Your email. Insert this code. Now look at this empty dashboard. We thought, “This was what billions of dollars of value looks like for analytics?” We didn’t want to do that with any of our products. We wanted our first-time users to feel inspired, and for the experience to be thoughtful, and well-crafted. So, instead of thinking of our onboarding sequence as another box we needed to check-off in order to build an MVP, we spent a considerable amount of time working on that first touch point with a new user. We didn’t just want them to use our product. We wanted them to love it. Here’s what we did: With software products, there tends to be a bias toward more options. It’s the easiest, laziest way to solve a problem. “Should we show the user a dashboard of this first, or that first? Well, let’s have them choose!” This is the worst way to design and build products. With the onboarding flow, it is one of the only opportunities where you can force a linear progression in the decision tree of your product. We took that opportunity and ran with it. Our onboarding flow was a product experience in its own right. It had just as much thought put into it as the final product experience. When a user signed up, rather than giving them a million options, we showed them screens in bite-sized chunks. The human mind largely prefers information in digestible chunks (see how even this blog post is chunked out?). Embracing this for onboarding means a much more pleasant experience for the user. Each easy-to-understand screen only asked for information that we absolutely needed. This meant we didn’t ask for information that we couldn’t use right away. This is the golden rule: Don’t ask for information your product can’t use right away. It means higher friction, adds to frustration, and takes away from the overall experience. Our onboarding flow also required engagement. This meant we didn’t just dump them to an empty dashboard. As part of the onboarding and first-time experience, we made absolutely sure their code was installed. We deliberately asked them to fire up their app so that it would hit our servers. Of course, this meant extra engineering for us, since instead of simple account creation, we had to add a significant amount of logic to check the status of their own code, in their own app, and then display prompts, etc. However, this extra effort was worth it. Because we took the time to do this, it meant we were sure our code was in their app correctly. And our users got to experience the product first hand, right off the bat. On top of that, instead of throwing them into an empty dashboard, we created a fake dashboard filled with charts, but had it blurred in the background. In the foreground, we presented a small screen that had a spinner on it — and within that modal, we had these animated blocks flying on-screen. Until it became clear to the user that the blocks assembled… their own app’s logo. Our users loved that. This was a stark contrast to the form-based onboarding others in the space forced. We saw tweets about our onboarding — how delightful it was, how fun it was, and how personal it felt. This was when we knew we had made something memorable. Now, you may be wondering why a startup would prioritize spending so much time on the onboarding sequence and not investing that time in the core product instead. The results speak for themselves. Crashlytics was ranked #1 in mobile performance, and it had more usage than the platforms sitting at #2 through #6 — combined. Answers, our mobile analytics product, became the fastest-growing mobile analytics product out there. We beat Flurry and then Google Analytics, and were ranked #1 within 10 months of launch. At the 1-year marker, Crashlytics was acquired by Twitter. Then, in 2017, after Answers launched, Crashlytics and Answers were acquired by Google from Twitter. Obviously, we had to do a lot of other things right to become the leader of the mobile performance and the larger mobile analytics space, but our attention to detail for a new user’s experience is what ignited word of mouth around our products. We didn’t need marketing. We didn’t need to overspend in those departments other startups allocate so many (too many!) resources to. When you make something , the product speaks for itself. lovable So, how do you actually create an unforgettable first-time user experience? It comes down to the perception of time. A new user is extremely impatient. They don’t trust you yet. They don’t know what to expect, and they’re trying to decide (as quickly as possible) if you’re going to make their life easier, faster, and more efficient, or slower, more annoying, and boring. I often draw parallels between product design and video games because, of all industries, games are in the business of time. The more a game can make you feel like an hour has just flown by, the more likely you are to spend another hour, and another hour playing in their world. And when it comes to first-time user experiences, nobody does it better than gaming companies. From the moment you start a new game, you’re either immersed in it, or you’re gone. , the popular multiplayer game by Blizzard Entertainment, did something interesting with their waiting screen that I find to be a perfect example of creating a lovable product that respects a user’s time.Traditionally, when you’re playing a multiplayer game online, you have to wait for other players to join before the match can start. If it’s 6 vs 6, you need all 12 players — and for most games, players are left sitting in a waiting screen: Overwatch waiting for all users, finding server, etc. What did, which was clever, was instead of forcing players to wait, they would throw them all into a mini-game. It had no objective, no rules. It was just a leisurely way of spending time interacting with each other in the game world. And instead of opposing players running around and attacking each other, like a normal game, they would do things they wouldn’t normally do — like wave at each other, cooperate, etc. It was a new way to experience the same game, but was the equivalent of a waiting screen. Overwatch When a startup company is visualizing their product, they tend to forget the moments a user has to wait. They draw mockups of the different screens of their product, filling them with an array of charts and numbers and vibrant data sets, only to forget (when their product goes live) that a new user is going to be starting with… nothing. No data. No long term usage. Zilch. But what about the first time a user sees that dashboard? What about the first time a user looks at their “friend list” or message box? It’s going to be empty. Which means it’s your job to examine that specific moment in time and ask, “What can we do to make a user feel included here? How can we make them feel like they’re not waiting for something to happen — but that it’s already happening?” A lot of startups only approach the product they’re building from an engineering perspective, not a people-centric view. And people are very aware of time — how they spend it, how long things take, and the relationship between the amount of time they’ve invested and what they’ve gotten in return. The perception of time is very subjective. Which means, if you’re able to have the user’s mind focus on something else, time will move faster. And boring things like waiting — for a dashboard to populate, for example — will feel much shorter, which makes a user feel engaged and more likely to stick around. Here are some quick examples of how to make a first-time user feel as though time is moving faster than it actually is. In general, we would classify these as Progress Indicators. When a new user first enters the product, it can be extremely helpful to give them indicators on where things are and how it works. But this can also be a tactic for continuously keeping them engaged as they continue to use the product over time (as long as it’s done strategically and doesn’t become an annoyance). Tips for the product: Loading screens are an excellent place to put quick, interesting facts relevant to the product or its use case scenarios. “Did You Know?”: Slack does this. When you’re waiting for a Slack channel to load, you’re presented with a quirky quote. It’s something to take your mind off the fact that you’re waiting. Quotes: , especially, can help a user feel as though they’re witnessing something creative or unique unfold right in front of them — instead of feeling like they’re waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. Animations: Loading animations You can’t forget the time that takes place when a user is away from your product. For example, what we would do is send our users beautifully designed emails with impromptu updates that said things like, “TL;DR — your app was 98.% crash free this week.” This positive reinforcement made them feel great in the moment, and gave them even more reason to come back and continue using our product. Follow-up sequences: Now, what if you’ve built a product that multiple users from the same team log into? How do you ensure they all have that same unforgettable first-time user experience? This is something we ran into with Crashlytics. A lot of people have asked how we were able to be so pervasive in the analytics community, and get so much usage, so quickly. The truth is, we spent a lot of time thinking about how our product was going to fit into the natural work flow of everyday users. So many startups try to build products that, while might be great in theory, work against the natural daily rhythms, their natural workflow, of the very customers they’re looking to attract. Case in point: a lot of companies create products where a user might sign up for an account, use the dashboard, and then share their login and password with 10 other team members (in our case, engineers). The problem with that approach is that the product is only giving one of those users the full first-time user experience. Which means those email updates or notifications you’re sending as positive reinforcement are only being seen by the person whose email is linked to the account. That’s not a very people-centric experience. That’s just a product doing what it needs to do to function. With Crashlytics, we asked ourselves, “How can we have every single mobile developer out there to have that unforgettable first-time user experience — regardless of whether they’re on the same team as another developer using our product?” Why did we ask ourselves this? Because if one person has that lovable first-time experience, they’re going to tell someone else about it. Which means if 10 people have that lovable first-time experience, they’re going to tell 10 other people about it. This was a human-centric growth tactic. And it spread like wildfire. How we engineered this was we looked at the natural workflow of a developer and realized that part of their daily routine was to check in their code — either every few hours, once per day, etc. So, we created a user experience where as soon as user #2 of a company downloaded or synced up to the latest code tied to that company’s app, a pop-up would appear that had the profile photo of the first developer, and a message that said, “Hey, John needs to verify you’re on his team. Please type in your email address.” They would type in their email, and now they’re another user under Crashlytics — which means they’re also receiving those same notifications and emails instilling positive reinforcement. That small level of detail was the difference between each app company having a Crashlytics account, and each developer within a company having their own Crashlytics account. Here’s my final piece of advice for anyone who wants to build an unforgettable first-time user experience: Most entrepreneurs envision their product in its best light. They imagine millions of people using it, capturing lots of data, showing tons of activity. This is what I call a Day 40 vision. They create mocks of this vision. It looks great in an investor deck, but has little value beyond that. Few startups actually focus on Day 0, then Day 1, etc. Most users drop off well before Day 40. They need to continually see, and , the proofs of value. Otherwise, they’re going to enter an empty app, a stale product, and find little reason to continue using it. feel This is why I emphasize so heavily the importance of creating a first-time experience that delivers real value, and shows a user what they can expect moving forward, day after day. Unfortunately, most startups don’t focus on that first user experience — and they suffer for it. Which is why so few users make it to Day 40, and so few companies last through their initial round of capital. The one question I ask almost every company I’m an investor, advisor, or mentor of (and I’m in over 50+ startups at the moment) is what their onboarding process looks like. “How do you interact with your users on the second day?” You only get chance to make a good first impression. The First Time Experience is as key to your product’s success as any of the other features in your product, if not even more important — since it is the very first feature they will interact with. one Remember, you have to the right to more of your users’ time. earn Thanks for reading! I’ve been building startups for as long as I can remember. If you’d like to learn more about what it takes to build a successful company, subscribe here so you don’t miss my next article.

The Quintessential Guide For Building An Unforgettable First-time User Experience

How to Build a Portfolio Platform App Using AngularJS

Image source: Unsplash The idea of is nothing new. What’s changed is that for the past two years companies have been more focused on creating them than ever before. chatbots It didn’t, however, happen overnight. People have been interested in creating a robot able to communicate with humans (just to mention , and ). since the early 1960s ELIZA ALICE SmarterChild Since then, we’ve made a huge step forward. We now have AI assistants like Siri and Cortana, home assistants like Amazon Echo or Home. There are more than alone. Google 100,000 bots on the Messenger Platform This Google Trends graph shows how the popularity of the term Chatbots has taken off since the beginning of 2016 According to Business Insider, . 80% of businesses want to use chatbots by 2020 In this article, we want to answer the following question: Why did chatbots become popular? Industry experts, including HubSpot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah, list : two main reasons for that Growing popularity of messaging platforms Advancement in AI and machine learning First, the way we communicate (and especially chat) has changed drastically since we’ve moved from phone calls to texts, and then to messaging apps. Now the companies have realized realized that chatbots are able to help various industries to reach, engage and serve their customers like never before, 24/7. Second, the current state of the AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and voice recognition enables bots to better understand users’ queries and to answer them accordingly. In fact, chatbots are becoming new interfaces in messaging apps, replacing many other mobile applications. “What 1997 was to Internet and browsers, 2017 is to bots.” — Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot founder and CTO Let’s take a closer look at the factors that made chatbots so popular. Messaging platforms trumped social networks Chatbots have become a vital part of messaging platforms’ ecosystem. In 2015, top 4 messaging platforms exceeded the biggest 4 social networking apps in the number of monthly active users, . according to Business Insider Source: Business Insider In April 2016, Facebook introduced their , opening up for bots developers. Facebook’s bet on chatbots was aimed to simulate “one-on-one conversations between users and companies [to] expand its reach in customer service and enterprise transactions”. Messenger developer platform As the Messenger alone has already , and Facebook is reaching almost , there are vast possibilities of using the data collected by the company to create more personalized chatbots, able to e.g. book a flight or make payments. 1.2 billion monthly active users 2 billion people “Chat apps will come to be thought of as the new browsers; bots will be the new websites. This is the beginning of a new Internet.” — , founder of Kik Ted Livingston Another thing is that the way we expect brands to communicate with customers has also changed. Today, we want companies to be available 24/7. This is now possible with bots, which can answer the majority of questions and to respond immediately. And, if needed, a human consultant can jump into the conversation at any time. Source: The 2016 Mobile Messaging Report Given that more than consider messaging their primary method of communication, chatbots may also increase the tech adoption amongst generations, helping brands to reach broader potential audience. 65% of Millenials, Gen Xers and Boomers Bots are the new apps Let’s face it — users are tired of apps. Since the introduction of iPhone and the App Store, programmers worldwide have developed more than 6,5 million apps . for all platforms Source: Statista.com Users and brands are fed up with apps for various reasons. For users, it’s become exhausting to install new apps and learn how to use them just to abandon them after few days. Actually, after just one use, according to Localytics survey based on 37,000 apps. 23% of users abandon the app Brands, on the other hand, find it harder than ever to acquire new users, as the competition became fierce. And, considering the high cost of developing the apps and the abandonment rate, many companies realized that it may not be cost-efficient to build their own, branded apps. Here’s where the chatbots come into play. They are cheaper, easier and faster to , making them a great tool for companies to test and implement their campaigns. As for the users, they are also easier to install and use, since everything takes place in a messaging app. develop and experiment with Bot platforms and developer tools The biggest tech brands like Facebook, Microsoft and Google made their bet on bots, introducing their own bot platforms. After acquiring , Google reached around 60,000 bot developers. There are now over 45,000 developers on Microsoft’s , and around 34,000 developers use the Facebook’s . API.ai Bot Framework Messenger Platform For Facebook alone, it resulted in more than 30,000 bots being created in the first six months after introducing its bot platform, . Wall Street Journal says There are also other platforms for bot developers available, such as the , and bot stores like or . Telegram Bot Platform Botlist Kik’s Bot Shop Furthermore, developers can use tools like or , based on deep learning algorithms and Natural Language Processing to build conversational interfaces of their bots. IBM’s Watson Conversation Amazon Lex Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that , calling them “conversations as a platform”. He compared conversational bots to breakthroughs like graphical user interfaces, browsers and touchscreens. chatbots will become the new interfaces “Chatbots will fundamentally revolutionize how computing is experienced by everybody.” — Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO The has resulted in 59% of US Millenials and 60% of gen Xers using them on messaging apps so far. And the numbers are still to grow. popularity of chatbots Source: BI Intelligence Conclusion Although the chatbot experience with chatbots, they are far better than they were just a couple years ago. is not yet perfect They are now able to assist us in some basic tasks that may be automated, saving our time and money. And given the popularity of messaging apps and the way that chatbots fit this platform, plus advancement in AI, machine learning and NLP, the trend of developing more and more chatbots is not going away. Thing to be discussed next is not whether the chatbots are here to stay, but what kind of bots we actually need. Now, we’d like to ask you one question: Which industries are, in your opinion, yet to be disrupted by the chatbots? Leave the answers in the comments, we’d love to read your thoughts about it! Originally published at blog.apptension.com on July 18, 2017.

What Drives The Growing Popularity Of Chatbots?

The assignment was to take an app or business idea and do market research to simulate making a pitch to a venture capitalist. Presented on December 8, 2016 Leading a successful company is a challenge that arises from its start. The goal of this assignment was to develop an idea and do sufficient market research to be able to simulate approaching a venture capitalist. We formed groups and worked as teams to develop teamwork ethics. What Was My Team’s Idea? We thought of a news app. The app will consist of news on humanitarian rights issues. We wanted to connect people to human rights issues. Users can take actions such as sign a petition, donate to a cause or be able to write to government officials. They will also be able to take pictures and share their stories. The stories that they share will have to be in accordance to humanitarian rights. After stories have been submitted to us, they will be shared in the app and on social media. Why Did We Want To Create This App? We felt that there is a lack of human rights stories in the media and thereby less people knowing about it. Our aim was to educate more people and filter “entertainment” or useless content as we described it. These content we felt disconnected humanity from stories that speak the truth; i.e. injustice to people. Who Is Our Audience? The app was directed toward age group 18–24 of men and women. This age group used their smartphones the most hours. *Click images to enlarge them and pinch to zoom in mobile devices Source: Statista Our next audience were activists. Our hope was that activists would share our app with their big audiences and populate our app. App Usage We needed to find out if developing an app was worth it. Looking at the chart below, we noticed that the number of hours spent on the internet through mobile devices is increasing. This let us know that we should move toward app development. Source: KPCB Google Play Store Vs. App Store Once app development has been confirmed, we now had to look at amount of apps between the biggest app markets Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. The number of apps in Play Store were significantly higher than in App Store. How Much Can We Be Worth? We compared company worth of App Store and Play Store. Play Store’s company worth is more than App Store’s. Next we estimated our monthly income on each platform. We did so by taking the average monthly income of apps in Play Store and App Store. This was done because the goal was to simulate market research. The aim of this assignment was not to actually do business to come up with our data. Based upon studying the average monthly income of apps in both platforms, we predicted that if we published our app on Play Store, our monthly revenue would be $2,735. If we published our app on App Store, our monthly revenue would be $3,693. Growing at a rate of 100%, our income for the first year would be $32,820 in Play Store and in App Store, it would be $44,316. We then took these calculations and used a to determine our net worth in 10 years. Our company would be worth $8,670,625 in Play Store and in App Store, our company would be worth $11,707,722. calculator Using the same calculator, our profit in 10 years in the Play Store would be over $15 million. In App Store, our profit would be over $20 million in 10 years. We determined that we should publish our app on Google Play Store. The decision was made based on the constraints offered by both platforms. App Store charges $100 annual fee for developers to publish apps for Apple products. Play Store only charges a one-time fee of $25. Another factor was the programming language to be used. Play Store uses Java that is an easier language to adapt to compared with objective-C used in Apple Store. Since we wanted to code our application by ourselves, we went with android application development. How Big Is The News Category In Play Store? According to the at the time, 2.97% (30,877) of all apps were in the news category. We determined from this that our stay in the market would be competitive since the news category is small compared to other categories. This did not cause us to change our idea. latest data How Did We Stand Out? Some of the biggest competitors in the news category are Google (Google News/Google Now) and Flipboard. However, their apps contain a broad range of topics, again leading to users getting distracted from human rights issues. While filters are available in those apps, they allow the users to choose from multiple categories. None of those news apps include features that allow users to take actions to situations. Our app had the options that allow users to sign petitions, donate to causes and write to their government officials. After Our Research After we had sufficient research data and a solid understanding of our business plan, it was time to submit our app idea to our teacher (Click Image Below). How Did We Code Our App? Me and my team went a degree above the rest of the groups in our software engineering class. Our teacher did not require for us to code an app. However, we thought this would give our presentation a greater value. Android apps are coded using a programming language known as Java. In order to code, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is required. An IDE assists in app development by organizing components of an application’s code into a neat format. Android Studio by Google was our choice of IDE. Presentation Lastly, we all had to create a presentation. After many revisions, we presented our presentation to the class. Our Asking According to our calculations and research, we asked for $8,000,000 for 35% stake of our company. Lessons Learned After presenting, we realized that we have made some mistakes. Based on the feedback we received, our presentation did not follow a storyline. This is a big problem because it shows our lack of organization skills. Secondly, we emphasized more on the content that we would produce. However, we did not look into sources that we would generate revenue from. One reason was because I thought that our company should be nonprofit. Our team discussions about this lead us to believe that somehow big companies would donate to us and being nonprofit would be a better option. In general, venture capitalists are looking to make money. If me and my team approached an actual venture capitalist with this element missing, we would be turned away. On our initial presentation, we also did not mention where we would advertise. While we did claim that letting activists know about our app can assist in generating users, it was not sufficient. We looked at the morals and made changes to our presentation by adding sources to generate revenue through. We began with an outline (Click Image Below) We reframed our presentation to fill in the gaps using our outline. The Final Presentation _Matter News By | Tahfimul, Jean and Daniel_docs.google.com Latif_Tahfimul_Matter_News_Presentation_12_8_2016 App Success When we published our app in the Google Play Store, we did not see much success. In our process of developing the app, we did not ever survey nor think of surveying our target age group. As a result, we did not know if they needed our app. Another fact is that we were not proficient at the language that we planned to code our app using (Java). We realized that for all of these constraints, we should take down our app. Currently The team members who were part of the journey from the beginning have left. However, I did not give up. I am in the process of learning Android Java to be able to successfully code the app and survey the original target age group. The Future I plan to grow this app into a bigger state. The profit earned through the app will go towards development of other services for the company. If the company grows big enough, it will house research and plans to give to and improve the developing countries. Sources 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/323522/us-user-mobile-app-engagement-age/ 2. https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/sUM0BRj7Dd2ENC 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/ 4. http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/11/10/an-analysis-of-apps-in-the-google-play-store/ 5. https://medium.com/@sm_app_intel/mobile-app-industry-revenue-statistics-wheres-the-money-come-from-82581a45186d 6. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236832 7. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-android-generates-31-billion-revenue-oracle-says-ijor8hvt 8. https://crowdsourcedtesting.com/resources/mobile-app-averages/ 9. http://www.pointsdevue.com/infographics/device-preferences-throughout-day-europe 10. http://thehackernews.com/2015/08/ransomware-creator-toolkit.html 11. https://www.onthewire.io/70-percent-of-enterprise-ransomware-victims-paid-up-data-shows/ 12. https://securityledger.com/2015/10/fbis-advice-on-cryptolocker-just-pay-the-ransom/ 13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtiRISepIfs&feature=youtu.be 14. http://info.localytics.com/hubfs/eBooks/Media__Entertainment_App_Industry_Report.pdf?t=1446481324994 15. https://www.bluecloudsolutions.com/blog/gangnam-style-insights-chartboost-tips-2013-plans/

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