Database Develop

Appboy Interview

Below is the text of a brief email interview conducted with Cezary Pietrzak, Director of Marketing at Appboy, for an article about app analytics that will be published soon to the XDA Portal. If you have any experiences with specific analytics providers, post them in this forum.
What are the most valuable pieces of data that come out of your product? Why? Give examples of how I might get actionable data, make a change, and improve results.
Appboy’s entire philosophy is making data actionable and giving developer tools to drive user engagement within the app. We’re very much against collecting data for data’s sake which is quite common among mobile analytics tools which bombard you long reports and meaningless percent changes. To change this mentality, we start by collecting data on an individual user level rather than on aggregate, because that allows for more flexibility and customization when running marketing campaigns. We then offer a robust customer segmentation product that lets you create dynamic groups of app users across any attribute or in-app behavior. Lastly, we provide a complete suite of messaging tools, a customer support product and HootSuite social integration to influence specific segments and behaviors.
For example, app developers can use an in-app message to drive feature discovery, help customers get through onboarding, and notify them about bugs/issues in the app - something that has helped our clients minimize negative app store reviews. They can also use push notifications to bring lapsed users back into their app and drive regular engagement through timely updates. Many developers forget about the importance of customer support in a competitive app ecosystem, so we provide them with a simple feedback tool to deal with customer issues in a timely manner. And our HootSuite integration lets developers identify their app users on Twitter while enhancing existing profiles with in-app behavior data, which gives them more firepower to drive loyalty and virality.
Appboy’s big-picture goal is to help app developers increase ROI and drive lifetime value of customers, so we’ll continue building features that support this vision and help them turn their app into a sustainable business.
What most differentiates you from your competitors (features, pricing, etc)?
Appboy’s biggest point of difference is our holistic approach to customer engagement. We bring together the most effective app marketing tools on one dashboard, including messaging (push notifications, in-app messages, email), customer support, social and cross-promotion. No company can claim the breadth of our offering nor the benefits that their deep integration brings. For developers, this means managing only one SDK (vs. 4-5) and one standardized customer data set for all of their app engagement needs. Appboy also stands out through its performance-based pricing that is tied to MAUs rather than data points, which aligns our incentives with those of the app developer.
Explain your range of pricing and, if you have a low tier or free option, what features are only available to premium users?
We have a free version of Appboy (complete with all features) available to any app with <10K monthly active users. For those with a larger audience, pricing starts at $199/month and scales accordingly. The reason we use monthly active users for pricing is to properly align incentives, as Appboy only makes money if the app is successful. Most of our competitors charge by data points or API calls, which creates negative incentives to use their tool and collect the proper data. We also have an enterprise product with custom pricing depending on client needs.
Are there any technical aspects of implementation that would be helpful to explain?
On Android, the Appboy client will ship in two parts: 1) an internal jar library exposing the Appboy events and analytics API, and 2) an open source Android library project implementing the Appboy UI and user interactions on top of the API. The open source library will be available as a public repo on Github and licensed with the Apache 2.0 license. With this setup, developers will be able to fully customize the UI/UX of Appboy within their application, while easily keeping up with upgrades and enhancements.
What advice would you give to help make new independent app developers more successful?
Start thinking about user engagement before you launch your app. Once you go live, you only have a small time window to reconnect with the app users you lost before they’re gone forever (on average, apps lose 76% of their user after 3 months). Ask yourself: What is the ideal user flow in your app? Which parts of your apps cause the most friction and drop-off? How can you encourage people to use your app on a regular basis, and how can you incentivize them to come back once they’ve left? What tools will you use to facilitate and automate this task? Because they focus on the long-term, these questions will help you craft a better product and a better user experience from the start.
It’s also important to understand your goals for the app. While some apps may want drive in-app purchases, others are more concerned with time spent in-app and stills others focus on general exposure and branding. These goals often overlap. For example, many app developers are now discovering that monetization is most likely to happen after a customer is happy with the app experience and has spent considerable time engaging with the product.
If you’re interested in learning more about our approach to engagement, here’s a visual presentation we put together on Slideshare that explains it in depth: bit.ly/mobileappengagement.
Related to the above, in your mind what makes an app successful? Why do some "great" apps not get noticed?
Building a great product is table stakes, but it’s only a start. Here some of the important characteristics we’ve noticed among the most successful apps:
Community. Great apps build a community of people who evangelize the app to their friends and across social networks, which drives their growth at essentially no cost. The challenge of community-building is that it requires work, both on the product side - building hooks to make social sharing easy, as well as on the marketing side - systematizing your outreach to customers and encouraging them to promote you. Most app developers don’t invest their time in the latter because they think it takes too long. What they fail to recognize is that the process can be automated across customer segments without losing the personal touch. For example, the smartest apps ask only their most active users to rate them or share them with friends, because they expect a much higher response rate among this group.
Content. Great apps serve great content and make sure it’s always fresh. Most content is served on the product side through the app’s core function (eg latest weather, breaking news, social status updates), but a lot it can be conveyed through various form of messaging. For example, using push notifications or in-app messages to serve micro-content (rather than plain alerts) can drive engagement significantly. Email is also very effective - we’ve seen apps use it to provide their customers with personal stats and weekly summaries of app usage. Giving people something to talk about on social media is also effective, and can be used to bring users back into app experience. When creating content for your customers, think about the story you’re telling and the progression of information, and don’t be afraid to repurpose what you already have.
Context. Great apps have a knack for connecting with people in the times, places and situations where they can provide the most value. They don’t try to be top of mind all the time, because that’s not sustainable. One of the big problems we’ve seen in the last few months is app developers abusing push notifications and spamming their users which generic, one-size-fits messages. This only leads to frustration and encourages people to shut you out. The best apps use location data, behavioral triggers, historical usage patterns and other data to create a very relevant, contextual and personalized experience. For example, Fab alerts you about new sales, Foursquare tells when your friends are nearby and Circa sends notifications about stories you follow.
An “great” app often doesn’t get noticed because it assumes that a great product experience is enough to succeed. That’s simply not true. First, the structural challenge of the ecosystem are much higher than on the web - apps need to get discovered, apps take time to download and apps are easily lost on phone screens. Second, building relationships with people takes time and effort, and apps are no different. If you’re unwilling to invest your time engaging your customers, then you’re inviting your audience to go to a competitor who better at managing relationships.

Thanks for sharing!

POS Software looking for app Analytics

POS Software - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kroid.restaurant.pos_cloud
Hi! I am Brenan, web marketing personnel of a certain IT company. We have this POS software that runs on Android. A POS or Point of Sale system is basically used in stores or shops to automate ordering and payments. It also useful for business owners to take full control of their business and follow profit reports. We are little bit proud of the final product that we have though we are still planning to make changes from time to time. The app is now ready to download on Google Play for free, look for Kroid Cloud POS. You can check it out for us, please. In connection to this, we would like to solicit suggestions on what would be the best way to integrate Analytics for the app. One of our developer tried using Google Analytics but I believed she encountered some errors. Should we really use Google Analytics? What would be the benefit to use Google Analytics in our app? Sorry for these questions but we want to gather as much information that we need, especially thought from great minds in this forum. We would be very happy to listen from you. You can also suggest any positive or negative feedback with regards to our app's functionality and interface if you have time to test it. Thank you so much.
I want also to make this thread as a comment/suggestion/feedback thread for us to improve this POS Software to the needs of our target clients.

App promotion for free
Hi, my name is Anton and I am manager in young ad company.
Now we started to work with appsflyer, and we need to setup our tracking system.
We can promote your app for free (provide you CPI and CPC traffic) if you will implement appsflyer SDK, (that will be helpful for you in future) and help our engineers to set the post-back.
Please let me know if you are interested, and we will discuss how many installs we will give you for your help.
I look forward to working with you.
Anton Kogan
Project manager.
Skype: antonimc90
[email protected]

Hey Brenan, I am one of Internet marketer and currently working with world class mobile app development company from last 4 years but as per the your question concern I would like to suggest you Openxcell Technolabs. Please go to the website address of this company and visit Technology Blog page where you will find one article on this topic: "A Guide To Analyzing App Funnels". Please read this article one time, this article contains great information on app analytics tools and guide to analyzing app funnels. I sure that you will get the perfect solution of your problem. And analyzing app funnel is also one of the most important point of any application.

Hi Dear all!
I am Marco and I work in Point of sale systems NJ. Can somebody advice something about new developments in inventory, how to create more comfort for the employees and remove possible errors of the system?
Thank you in advance!

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Would you be interested in infographics about app marketing and design?

Hello
We are indie developers working on apps for android and IOS. In our time spent developing we noticed that one of our biggest problems is where to find necessary resources and materials to learn new things. Now don't get me wrong there is certainly no shortage of content about how to develop an app. But we've all seen and read articles that can be basically summed up into “If you want to market your app use Facebook”. Yeah, well that is not very useful.
We decided that in order to solve this problem we want to make community hub with all the necessary information in one place. We will scout the web for all the great articles, content and useful information about app programing, marketing and design and convert that content into infographics. This community hub will be used mainly to deliver snapshots (visual data) about very interesting (and often long articles) in a very easy and most importantly fast and readable way. This will ensure that you will not waste time searching for articles and then realizing that this is not what you wanted to know. You can just check out infographics and then decide if this is what interests you and click on the source to see all the links to articles that can further expand your knowledge about topic.
We want to hear your opinion on all this guys. This is a non-profit project and it will take us a lot of time to complete. So we want to make sure that there are people who will find this useful.

Do you want to take your privacy back?

Greetings people of earth and other creatures!
Greedy people are trying sell you phones every year by using complicity of the mobile operation system.
Logic is simple.
Stock Android:
Full of c*rap.
Different kind of messengers, browsers, other useless app, which are installed as system apps and have an unlimited access to your input sensors.
Most of the apps rely on Google for push notifications, which makes a possibility that no matter the security of the messager to read them.
Do I need to tell more?
AOSP Roms:
When you install AOSP firmware on your system your phone won't be the same, in many cases camera or other hardware work differently. Anything could be in those unreadable partitions which selfs-wipes after unlocking.
Project Tomahawk:
The goals are to give people a key to their privacy and to reduce plastic waste by giving old devices a second life.
We gonna go the opposite way and to make Android lighter and simpler, removing all the "debugging" tools and "cloud services" from your phone. Making it work without monopoly services installed. That's just a step one.
Example
Contribution:
Anyone can contribute to the project by donating old devices, doing voluntary work , spread the information in your circles. Students are welcome here. Companies are welcome too, but the project will be in the heands of Community.

Doom Slayer said:
Greetings people of earth and other creatures!
Greedy people are trying sell you phones every year by using complicity of the mobile operation system.
Logic is simple.
Stock Android:
Full of c*rap.
Different kind of messengers, browsers, other useless app, which are installed as system apps and have an unlimited access to your input sensors.
Most of the apps rely on Google for push notifications, which makes a possibility that no matter the security of the messager to read them.
Do I need to tell more?
AOSP Roms:
When you install AOSP firmware on your system your phone won't be the same, in many cases camera or other hardware work differently. Anything could be in those unreadable partitions which selfs-wipes after unlocking.
Project Tomahawk:
The goals are to give people a key to their privacy and to reduce plastic waste by giving old devices a second life.
We gonna go the opposite way and to make Android lighter and simpler, removing all the "debugging" tools and "cloud services" from your phone. Making it work without monopoly services installed. That's just a step one.
Example
Contribution:
Anyone can contribute to the project by donating old devices, doing voluntary work , spread the information in your circles. Students are welcome here. Companies are welcome too, but the project will be in the heands of Community.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Allow me to introduce myself. I see your predicament and completely agree. I grew up with an old saying that one man's rubbish is another man's treasure and I think what you're projecting is a very positive thing.
Personally I've never heard of Tomahawk and I'm interested in finding out more about it but at the moment I'm I'm trying not to multitask you see c
I think your doing great.
Hopefully the following link to one of my all time favorite directors quotes and just views can help guide you on your journey my friend as it has with me.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/314980.Jim_Jarmusch

@2ISAB,
I feel you.
Thank you for the link, friend!
I am from country that you can leave, but it won't leave you. Stays in the head and keep you paranoid.
That's my personal interest in it, to finally be able to speak like back then.
Mission's goal is to help people get their privacy and we need everyone.
Idea is that simplicity is a key to perfection.
I am refurbishing old devices to make them "keep up" with new and "more powerful" devices.
As the result: better speed, better battery life and more privacy.
It can reduce plastic waste I guess.
And some people like older devices because they are awesome and have some sentimental value, but they work slow, as we used to the new "speed".
Maybe send it them who need it more.

Anyone?
I want to bring an easy to use, one button solution for securing a phone and giving people control over privacy.
This project will help to reduce waste by donating refubrished devices as an aid to 3rd-word countries.

Doom Slayer said:
Anyone?
<snip words>
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Anyone what bro?

Hi there! looking for your feedback!

Hi All!
I'm quite new android games developer. I'm looking for developers community feedback on my first "serious" project.
So, as I'm keen on brain teasers I wanted to create some puzzle game. I've started my research and found out one of old style games called Freeways. So I thoutght that I can improve it from design and car behaviour perspective.
For last couple of weeks I have few thousands of downloads but very few feedback!
And I don't know should I upgrade it further or there is no chance to find my audience....
I've spent like 1 year to make it and absolutly dissapointed that there is now feedback from players. Should I start another project? Another 1 year?
Please advise... Thank you in advance!
Link to my game is here:
Motorways mind logic puzzles - Apps on Google Play
Stack the states in brain teaser IQ puzzle. Memory & thinking car traffic maze.
play.google.com

WYSIWYG.
Feedback, yes well here you go...
Looks like a data miner to me
No reason to know my precise location or browser history, share with 3rd parties or for me not to have the option to delete collected data.
I wouldn't even install it... based on that alone.
The games I have are all firewall blocked
My favorite apps have zero permissions and never request internet service. They are also some of the best.

Hi Blackhawk! That's a feedback already. This is set up of ads mediation I'm using. Probably it stops other users aswell. Probably I need to find another mediator

Carrot Games said:
Hi Blackhawk! That's a feedback already. This is set up of ads mediation I'm using. Probably it stops other users aswell. Probably I need to find another mediator
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I know you want sponsorship and to generate revenue. I can understand that. It's a tough business. Poweramp has a good business model and is one of my few gladly paid for apps. A lot of bang for the buck and nothing comes close to it for a stand alone music player.
Unfortunately from a user prospective that degree of data mining is potentially harmful. Personally I won't tolerate it... no app is worth that. All social media and shopping apps are banned from my devices. Done that for a decade now. One of the first things I targeted when I started using Androids.