Mobile cramming scheme halted by FTC
Thursday, November 30, 2023 by Richard Harris
The Federal Trade Commission has obtained orders with the four remaining individual defendants and their affiliated companies in a mobile cramming scheme that the agency says bilked consumers out of more than $100 million through bogus charges added to their mobile phone bills.
The proposed settlements with Darcy Michael Wedd and Phwoar, LLC.; Fraser Robert Thompson ...
AI app store optimization services from SplitMetrics and App Radar
Thursday, November 16, 2023 by Richard Harris
SplitMetrics, an American startup specializing in app growth solutions, has acquired App Radar, an Austrian app marketing and analytics platform in a seven-figure all-cash deal.
The agreement creates the industry’s largest platform providing AI-powered services including paid user acquisition (UA), app store optimization (ASO), conversion rate optimization...
Productivity app downloads are on the rise says Softonic
Friday, November 10, 2023 by Richard Harris
Softonic.com, the secure software distributor, recently revealed new data that suggests a surge in interest for niche productivity apps.
The data, extracted from Softonic’s own user metrics, reveals a snapshot of the most popular applications and the changes in their download numbers from January to September this year compared to the same period in ...
Premium app recommendations delivered to Xiaomi users
Tuesday, October 24, 2023 by Richard Harris
Digital Turbine recently announced the expansion of its partnership with the International Internet Business Department of Xiaomi. Users purchasing new Xiaomi devices in most markets in EMEA, LATAM, APAC, and MENA will enjoy premium app and mobile games recommendations delivered to the palm of their hands. Digital Turbine’s technology is already delivered to over ...
Piracy for streaming admitted by 44 percent of Asian consumers
Monday, October 23, 2023 by Brittany Hainzinger
Faced with a cost-of-living crunch, half of Asian consumers (59%) say they can no longer afford all of their subscription services. As a result, 44% now access content via illegal piracy sites. That’s according to a new Bango study, exploring subscription trends and the rise of Super Bundling in Asia.
Bango’s study incorporates data from over 6,000 consum...
GraphQL API launches from Point One Navigation
Thursday, October 19, 2023 by Richard Harris
Point One Navigation announced the public launch of its GraphQL API, delivering instant integration and unprecedented observability into precision location for GNSS-powered devices.
The GraphQL API radically simplifies development, eliminating the need for vendor libraries, intermediate data stores, or working with convoluted networks of REST endpoints. Developers bu...
WW2 mobile game Warpath reaches 30 million downloads
Friday, August 18, 2023 by Freeman Lightner
Lilith Games announced that Warpath, the free-to-play competitive RTS game available on PC, iOS, and Android devices, reached 30 million cumulative global downloads, further solidifying its reputation as one of the best military strategy games recognized by military game enthusiasts. Warpath is an epic military strategy simulator that tests players’ courage a...
State of Mobile Experience report from Embrace
Monday, July 31, 2023 by Richard Harris
Embrace released the State of Mobile Experience report detailing mobile end users' and builders' perspectives on performance issues and app experiences. The three-part study combines input from mobile engineers at industry-leading companies and app users and rich data from Embrace's mobile experience engineering platform. The insights reveal how ap...
Fake app reviews impact developers more than you think
Thursday, June 29, 2023 by Freeman Lightner
Developers are well aware that a significant portion of online reviews for products and services, including those on popular platforms like Amazon, eBay, and TripAdvisor, are in fact fake. The issue of fake app reviews has become an increasingly pressing concern. These deceptive reviews have wide effects on both developers and consumers alike, significantly impacting th...
Lawsuit from US developers sways Apple
Friday, August 27, 2021 by Richard Harris
Apple has announced a number of changes coming to the App Store that, pending court approval, will resolve a class-action suit from US developers. The terms of the agreement will help make the App Store an even better business opportunity for developers while maintaining the safe and trusted marketplace users love. Apple appreciates the developer feedback and ideas that...
How to get app reviews the right way
Monday, August 23, 2021 by Justin Welter
You’re playing a game on your phone and just finished a tough level. Or maybe you’re not into mobile games, but you are repeatedly swiping left if you know what I mean. Then a pop-up appears. “Like using our App? Rate us!” It stops your experience in its track to wait for a decision. What is driving these rating prompts, and why?
As Apple has ...
DevSecOps will go mainstream this year
Tuesday, January 26, 2021 by Richard Harris
Cybercriminals love Shadow Code exploits because hacking a commonly used library or service can place the malicious code on hundreds or thousands of websites. For example, the widely used jQuery JavaScript library has been breached multiple times, leading to digital skimming attacks broadly across the e-commerce sector. Adding jQuery to an application without ...
Blockstack to increase monthly payouts
Wednesday, July 31, 2019 by Richard Harris
Blockstack PBC plans to increase monthly payouts from its developer reward program up to $1 million worth of Stacks tokens per month by May 2020. Payouts from the App Mining Program, which rewards developers who create the top-ranked applications within the Blockstack ecosystem, are set to increase gradually over time, starting in August and building up to a monthly tot...
The app store is not a monopoly says Apple employees in new survey
Thursday, May 30, 2019 by Richard Harris
Blind is an anonymous social network with thousands of verified employees engaging in discussions about work-related issues and industry trends.
Their weekly surveys gather real-time insight into employee sentiment on trending issues, with results broken down by company.
The most recent survey asked Is Apple creating a monopoly by only allowing consumers to purcha...
Blockchain development with strong APIs
Monday, January 21, 2019 by Richard Harris
2018 was the year of blockchain “pilot” projects - where companies began to truly explore all of the possibilities of the technology. For example, in PwC’s 2018 survey of 600 executives, 84 percent said their organizations had at least some involvement with blockchain technology - but only 15 percent reported having gone live.
As we jump into 2019, ...
Guest Post: It's Not a Web App, It's An App You Install From the Web
Monday, January 7, 2019 by Richard Harris
We received an email…
"I heard about Forecast, but I couldn’t find it in the App Store. How do I get it?"
"You don’t get it from the App Store: just go to http://forecast.io/ on your phone, and you’ll be given instructions on how to download it."
"Wow, this is great! I didn’t know you could get apps outsid...
Finding bugs in code through better QA
Monday, January 7, 2019 by Derek Choy
Let’s face it, smartphone apps have raised the bar for all of us. Ever since Apple released the first iPhone a little over a decade ago, there’s been a huge emphasis on creating software that is clean, elegant and easy to use. Consumer apps and websites have created much higher expectations for all software, and these days even business applications are expe...
The differences between web apps and native apps
Thursday, October 18, 2018 by Richard Harris
Even in 2018, years past the origional question, the debate rages on across the land, in office spaces and conference rooms every day - should we build a full-blown native mobile app, or is distributing over the web good enough?
By now everyone knows the “mobile-first” mentality because statistics like 50% of web searches being done from a mobile dev...
CA's AIOps platform launches
Wednesday, October 17, 2018 by Richard Harris
CA Technologies marked a major milestone in the company’s autonomous strategy with the availability of CA Digital Experience Insights now combined with the power of CA Operational Intelligence and CA Automic Service Orchestration. The AIOps-driven platform is designed to enable IT teams to automate and eliminate key tasks and make self-healing applications a reali...
Preventing bad app reviews according to Poq
Tuesday, October 16, 2018 by Richard Harris
Poq has released information to developers to help them understand the impacts of negative app reviews, and how to handle them, through a new white paper titled "The Ultimate Guide to Preventing Bad App Reviews". While it's aimed more towards retail-based apps, there is insightful information any developer can use inside the paper.
Poq points ...
Golden rules for an agile reporting structure
Thursday, September 13, 2018 by Dave West
For the majority of organizations adopting Scrum, they are moving from a traditional team-based model to a Scrum-based approach. Traditional team models vary for every organization, but normally have the following elements:
A project manager responsible for ensuring the project delivers
A line manager who individuals in the team report to. That person d...
Users will pass over apps with bad reviews
Tuesday, October 24, 2017 by Richard Harris
Fifty percent of app users are likely to be dissuaded from downloading an app based on customer reviews that mention bugs and glitches. This, according to a recent survey conducted by QualiTest Group, the world’s second largest pure play QA and independent software testing company. For developers, getting the app to market is often the top consideration, but releasing a...
Why brands will pay top dollar for your inapp inventory
Thursday, June 8, 2017 by Dan Laughlin
Ad fraud is expected to cost brands over $16 billion this year. The industry is on edge, and brand safety is a top concern. This is especially true after Fortune 500 advertisers discovered their ads appearing next to inappropriate content on Google’s Youtube.The industry has been working on solutions to curb ad fraud and increase brand safety, and yet the problem grows ...
Zendesk and Google Fabric partner
Thursday, April 20, 2017 by Christian Hargrave
Customers today expect help when they hit a customer experience snag, even if that is the middle of their commute or when they’re standing in a coffee line. Gartner forecasts that this year, 35% of all customer support will take place on a mobile device, an increase of 300% over 2014. In response to this customer demand, Zendesk has launched the first customer...
Should you buy or build a mobile app for your business
Friday, November 11, 2016 by Glenn Chenier
The question of whether a company should Buy or Build a mobile app for their business is often portrayed as a binary choice between picking an off-the-shelf app/solution, or building a custom solution from scratch, using an in-house developer team or contracted 3rd party.
The Build vs Buy landscape has many more options. Organizations looking to adopt a m...
Enterprise Mobile Threat Update for Q3 2016 Arrives
Thursday, August 11, 2016 by Richard Harris
Appthority has released it Enterprise Mobile Threat Update for Q3 2016, which provides insight into the mobile threat landscape over the last quarter.Appthority’s Enterprise Mobile Threat Team monitors and researches the latest mobile risks that are direct threats to the enterprise. The data is compiled into the quarterly Enterprise Mobile Threat Update, aimed at provid...
Four Key Considerations to Get Past App Replacement
Wednesday, July 20, 2016 by Chris Klotzbach
Today, with over three million mobile apps available for consumers, app replacement - the deletion of an app due to alternative options - has become a major issue for developers looking to increase, let alone maintain, retention. In fact, according Yahoo’s research, nearly 50% of smartphone dominant users replace apps on a weekly basis. Furthermore, most apps are d...
Conversocial Offers Ability to Respond to Negative Google Play App Reviews at Scale
Thursday, May 19, 2016 by Stuart Parkerson
Conversocial is partnering with Google to offer Android app publishers the ability to resolve issues from Google Play Store reviews at scale. The integration with Google Play provides the opportunity for app developers to immediately read and respond to app reviews left by consumers in real time directly within the Conversocial platform. The integration provides to...
Five Common Mobile App Security Vulnerabilities And How to Fix Them
Saturday, April 30, 2016 by Seth Jaslow
Mobile app security leaves much to be desired. That was the conclusion of a 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) study which found that a staggering 96 percent of 36,000 mobile apps failed at least one of 10 privacy checks. Three years ago, a similar HPE study found that 97 percent of 2,000 apps reviewed held insecure private information. As mobile app usage conti...
appFigures Launches Review Cards to Let Developers Share App Reviews
Friday, November 27, 2015 by Richard Harris
appFigures, the app store intelligence platform that helps businesses and developers make better data-driven decisions, has announced its latest offering – Review Cards. Review Cards enable app makers using appFigures to share their app store reviews either internally or externally, with team members, friends, users, or the general online community. With Review Cards, a...
5 Ways To Promote Your App Without Spending a Ton of Money
Saturday, November 14, 2015 by Katie Meurin
The app stores are crowded. Bringing apps to the market and making them discoverable among your competitors can be difficult. Having a solid marketing plan in place before releasing your apps can increase the chance of being noticed. There are plenty of marketing strategies that can successfully promote your app – you are either going to have to give time or money ...
Applause Releases Updates to Its Mobile App Analytics Tool
Monday, April 13, 2015 by Stuart Parkerson
Applause has announced updates to its user sentiment tool mobile app analytics tool which crawls user reviews and star ratings from more than 30 million apps and 500 million app reviews in iOS and Android app stores across eight countries. The platform uses this information to offer competitive benchmarking, comparative analysis and more to provide a gauge of how a...
How to Save the Enterprise App after the End of TestFlight
Sunday, February 22, 2015 by Ran Rachlin
When Apple officially shutters its TestFlight beta testing service on February 26, many development teams who have been working with TestFlight will be forced to switch their testing processes to the iTunes Connect Testing service or to search for other alternatives.As builds from old TestFlight versions will not be transferred automatically, developers will need to set...
Apple's TestFlight Is Upgraded to Improve the Ability to Manage External Testers
Tuesday, February 17, 2015 by Richard Harris
Apple’s TestFlight platform has announced it is now easier to manage external testers using the platform. Improvements have been made to provide the ability to organize testers into groups to quickly send builds, provide separate instructions on where to focus, and to apply an action to several testers at once in TestFlight.Apple acquired the TestFlight platform when it...
ComboStore Launches February Marketing Promotion for App Publishers
Friday, February 13, 2015 by Stuart Parkerson
Those in the retail business know that Valentines is the first real opportunity of the year to kick off consumer shopping. It seems that everyone is in on the action and ComboApp’s ComboStore is showing its love for app developers with its spin on a Valentines Day promotion.ComboStore is an online app marketing super-store created to help developers with mobile app prom...
