Posts tagged Making
Making Android Pay For Developers: Checking Out The New Tools In Google Play
May 23rd
This post is the second in the ReadWrite series Making Android Pay, in which we explore the opportunities and challenges mobile developers face trying to make money from Android apps.
How do you get mobile developers to love you? Give them free tools and pad their wallets.
One of the big themes for Google last week at its I/O developers conference was helping developers make more money creating apps for Android. That included a variety of tools to help them engage with their users and process transactions as well as optimization tips to monetize Android.
Monetization is a big challenge for Android developers. Developers who make Android apps earn a fraction of what they make from Apple’s iOS, which paid developers nearly $1 billion alone in January this year and $8 billion total as of February. Android developers can only dream of such riches.
(See also How Google Is Wooing Developers to Make Apps For Android First.)
Yet there is hope. Google’s VP of Android product management Hugo Barra told I/O attendees last week that Google had paid more to Android developers in the past 4 months than the previous 12 months before that combined. This increase has been driven by a renewed focus by Google to give developers more tools to make money, culminating in a slurry of announcements to the Google Play Developer Console last week.
“Everything from the analytics integration we have shown to you could imagine other things that Google could put together,” said Ellie Powers, product manager for Google Play in an interview with ReadWrite.
Powers continued:
I think that is sort of the next thing. They want to have deeper insights. They want to know exactly what they should work on. And I think [with] the things that we are doing we can continue enhancing them. Developers always want more stuff. They are always really hungry and we are hearing from more and more developers. They are saying they want to invest more because you [Google] give us such great data we are able to use that to understand our users better and invest more in the Android platform.
New Tools In The Google Play Developer Console
Specifically, Google issued six new features to Google Play to help Android developers optimize towards monetization:
- App translation service: The ability to translate an app into a different language directly from Google Play Developer Console. This is an agency approach (human, not machine) that Google purposefully chose because it found the human touch of translations provided better results on the local level.
- Revenue graphs: A new tab in the Developer Console gives developers a summary of their app global app revenue over time.
- Alpha and beta testing and staged rollouts: Perhaps the biggest announcement for Android developers last week, beta and staged rollouts are unique to Android. This should encourage developers to take bigger risks knowing that they will not be rolling out a bug-laden app to 100% of its users.
- Optimization tips: Based on analytics from Google Play, optimization tips will point developers towards market segments that could benefit them, like launching in a new country or developing specifically for tablets, which make 1.7-times more revenue per user than do Android smartphones.
- Google Analytics: Mobile data on usage, time spent and a variety of cohorts as Google Analytics for Mobile is integrated straight into the Developer Console.
- Referral tracking: Where are your installs coming from? Did getting written about by the major tech publications give you a bump? How about that in-app advertising? Referral tracking will tell you.
More Ways To Pay: Simplifying The Billing Infrastructure
Overlooked in the improvements made to the Google Play Developer Console were several infrastructure tweaks to the way Google processes payments for developers. The purchase flow (from app discovery to payment) has been simplified with the new user interface in Google Play, making it easier for users to pay in a variety of ways. Those include expanded gift cards and pre-paid options (which Google announced at I/O 2012 and has been improving on ever since).
Google is working hard to get Android users to overcome their relative reluctance to paid purchases by promoting gift cards and other pre-paid mechanisms – like Google Play promotional credits with mobile device purchases. While Google acknowledged at I/O that “the barriers to success for a paid title is very high,” making a purchase with a free credit seems to help encourage users to keep buying even when the credits run out.
(See also Google Is Making Life Easier For Android Developers.)
The company is also boosting options for direct-carrier billing in markets around the world. One reason for the success of Apple’s App Store is that the company already has every user’s credit card number. Because Google doesn’t make or sell Android devices, it may not necessarily have that information. In developing markets, especially, credit cards are either non-existent or not popular. Direct-carrier billing gives Google a popular, easy-to-use payment method almost everywhere. About 50% of Android’s daily active users now have access to direct-carrier billing, the company said.
“We went from having 20 countries or so that could pay to what is it? 130 or so,” Powers said. “So that is amazing. I think with a lot of developers they are only thinking about people in their own countries but it turns out that there are billions of people in the world… So helping developers reach into new markets really helps there too.”
From a developer’s perspective, of course, it doesn’t really matter what option a user pays with – as long as they pay. Google takes care of the entire payments infrastructure on the backend – the developer doesn’t even need to know what option was used. The ongoing problem, of course, is that even with the improvements, Google Play still can’t match the ease of use of the App Store, which licenses Amazon’s 1-Click payment patent. Even as Android eclipses Apple’s iOS in many ways, playing catch-up in this area is likely to be an ongoing effort for Google.
Top image by Nick Statt: Google’s Android head Sundar Pichai announces 900 million Android installations at I/O 2013.
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Making Sense Of Google’s New Social Stuff: Messaging, Hangouts & Google+
May 16th
With a whirlwind of announcements at its Google I/O developers conference this week, Google’s vast suite of social products is finally starting to look like it was created by a single company and not cobbled together via a series of haphazard acquisitions. Here are the highlights of what’s changed:
Hangouts: Google Messaging, Unmessy At Last
Google is finally doing something to prune its thicket of messaging products. Let’s start with a look at the various chat and messaging products that were due for some much-needed spring cleaning:
- Google Talk. Talk was Google’s Instant Message client. It’s also called Google Chat or “GChat,” by many people who didn’t even know it was called Talk to begin with.
- Google+ Hangouts. Hangouts was Google+’s group video chat service, from the social network’s launch back in 2011.
- Google+ Messenger: A product redundant with Google Talk, Messenger was Google+’s own IM client.
- Google Voice: Google’s cult-hit digital telephony client, Voice allows users to route all their calls to one phone number. Google Voice works for calls and texting both on desktop and on its much-neglected mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Now, Hangouts becomes the messaging mini-umbrella under the social mega-umbrella of Google+. Hangouts, now available across desktop and mobile, will unify Google Talk, Google+ Messenger and the old Hangouts video chat service of yore.
According to a statement from Nikhyl Singhal, Google’s head honcho of real-time communications, Google Voice will be folded into Hangouts too (Yay!), though there’s no word on when.
Google+ Gets A Lot Of Love
Messaging may have been the messiest area of Google’s social services, but Google+ is the big umbrella that covers them all. Amidst the company’s epic 3-hour-plus Google I/O keynote yesterday, Google+ guru Vic Gundotra announced approximately one million updates to Google+, the social network that the company launched two years ago. Okay, he pegged the number at 41… but that’s almost a million.
The updates are extensive. As a regular Google+ user, it’s actually difficult to get a sense for what changed, since the redesign looks and feels right in stride with Google’s recent overall changes in user interfaces that runs from Google+ to Google Glass to Google Now and Android. So here’s a list of some of the most notable of the 41 updates:
- A multi-column layout. This can be toggled off, if you’re still into the Blogger single-column-era.
- Photos and videos get even bigger. Google is really into making media massive – and we would be too if the average person knew how to share properly high-res photos.
- New animations. Things are flipping and sliding all over the place in there.
- A third dimension. You can scroll up and down through your social stream, but Google wants you to be able to scroll in too. Now you can take a deeper dive on a given Google+ post -or is it a Card? I think we’re suppose to call everything Cards now — via related hashtags, which will lead you to more content of interest. It will also take you further down the Google+ rabbit hole, of course.
Lots of treats for photographers. Google+ has a thriving community of awesome photogs, and Google is keen to do right by them. Photos in Google+ now have all sorts of cool bells and whistles. A few I’m particularly stoked about include “auto highlight,” which de-emphasizes duplicate and blurry pics, automatically picking the best shot out of a batch. I’ve yet to test this extensively, but since I have a habit of bracketing (taking multiple shots at different exposures) – even on my phone – choosing the best photo of a set can be a major timesuck. This feature could help there. Another feature, “Auto Awesome,” can stitch together shots in a series to make a playful Photobooth-esque picture or even a Vine-like animated gif.
For a full breakdown of Google’s social updates, hit the company’s official blog post or just cruise around in Google+ for a while. The the social network has been the butt of many a joke over the last few years, and we’re happy to see Google take the time to spruce things up a little.
Photos by Nick Statt for ReadWrite.
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Google Is Making Life Easier For Android Developers
May 15th
If you build a lot of Android apps, you know there are certain aspects of the process that make you want to rip our your hair. Google understands your pain. Even better, it’s offering some relief.
Instead of focusing on a new version of Android specifically to kick off the keynote at Google I/O this morning, Google focused on new tools and services that will make developers’ lives easier. Google VP of Android product management Hugo Barra announced a variety of new services for Google Play, location and gaming.
Android Studio
The biggest new feature for developers is Android Studio, a dedicated Google-made integrated development environment (IDE) custom-made to simplify the process of building, testing and deploying Android apps. In particular, with Studio, Google aims to solve one of the longest running and bigger problem for Android developers: fragmentation.
Developers often cite the variety of screen sizes and different Android versions as one of their biggest headaches. With Android Studio, developers can render their apps in real time across any type of screen size that Android supports. Studio can also help translate apps into different languages straight from the console.
Maps & Location
Google also announced new ways for developers to tap features of Google Maps in their apps. The new Google Maps API version 2 aims to make it easier for developers to add Google Maps straight into their apps while also improving the speed with which maps render.
Google said it’s also been working to improve the battery drain that turning on smartphone location services can cause. The company claimed that Android location services will use less than 1% of a device’s battery per hour. If that holds up in the real world, it would represent a major improvement over the current location performance on Android.
Google also announced three new application programming interfaces —i.e., hooks for developers to use Google services in their apps — for Android location:
- Fused Location Provider — location is faster to acquire, more accurate, low power location mode that uses less than 1% of battery per hour.
- Geofencing — Can have up to 100 geofences active per app.
- Activity Recognition — Help users track their physical activity. Machine learning classifiers to help people “quantify” themselves.
Google Cloud Messaging
Google said its Cloud Messaging service is delivering 200,000 push messages every second. That is 17 billion messages a day. Google claims to have 60 milliseconds latency, half of what it was when Cloud Messaging was announced last year.
Among the new features in Google Cloud Messaging are Persistent Connection and Upstream Messaging (from the app to your server, GCM does all the client side functions for you). Cloud Messaging will also be able to synchronize notifications between Android devices so you can send a message to a user’s tablet or Android smartphone in one shot.
Gaming
Google is putting a major focus on Android games at I/O this week and announced a variety of new APIs for Android games. None of these are especially groundbreaking, although they really make Android gaming perform a lot like Apple’s iOS Game Center.
- Cloud Save: The ability to save game play to the cloud and play among multiple devices.
- Achievements: The ability to earn badges based on performance.
- Leaderboards: The ability to have a leader board among your friends on a specific app. Instead of having to raise the global rankings, play against your friends.
The one mild stroke of genius here is that Google is rolling these APIs to both iOS and the Web, meaning that it can extend its gaming experience outside of Android.
Google Play Developer Console
The Google Play Developer Console was announced at I/O 2012. The goal is to help developers manage and monetize their apps. Five new features were announced for the developer console:
- Optimization Tips: Analyzes app and how it is doing in the Play Store and gives you tips to get it to perform better.
- App Translation Service: Allows you to get professional translations from the developer console. Russian!
- Usage Metrics: Google analytics metrics directly in the Google Play Developer Console.
- Revenue Graphs: Simple tool as a tab in the dev console to see how much money you are making.
- Beta testing and staged rollouts: Three tabs, alpha testing, beta testing and production. Can use Google+ and Communities to get beta testers. Can manage the rollout in one go. That is huge so you don’t push out bugs to thousands or millions of users.
The biggest announcement here is the beta testing and staged rollouts. This is something that iOS developers have been asking from Apple for a while.
What are the biggest new features in building for Android? What are you most excited by? Is it the Android Studio that helps you render from a dedicated IDE? Or the beta testing and stage rollouts? Let us know in the comments.
Lead image by Nick Statt for ReadWrite
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Seo In Young Feels Pressure about Making a Comeback This May – Yahoo! Philippines News
May 14th
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Seo In Young Feels Pressure about Making a Comeback This May
Yahoo! Philippines News Seo In Young′s new album contains a total of five tracks, including the promotional single Let′s Break Up, I Want You Back, Anymore, Letter and Let′s Dance. Let′s Break Up is a ballad piece that uses acoustic band sounds, and is about how a woman … |
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Complete Checklist on Making the Right Landing Page Rank [Infographic]
May 2nd
You’ve probably read a lot strategies teaching you how to craft the perfect landing page. Questions that usually come up include: “How do I optimize my landing page for top conversions?”; “What mix of content and UI ingredients should I apply to make the page perform best?”. Today I’d like you to look beyond that. [...]
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Are You Making These 5 Basic SEO Mistakes?
Apr 30th
Not getting the search traffic you were hoping for? In a new Webmaster Help video, Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts reveals five of the biggest basic SEO mistakes webmasters make, and suggests a few ways to improve your website.
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Are You Making These 5 Basic SEO Mistakes? – Search Engine Watch
Apr 30th
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Are You Making These 5 Basic SEO Mistakes?
Search Engine Watch matt-cutts-seo-mistakes Not getting the search traffic you were hoping for? In a new Webmaster Help video, Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts reveals five of the biggest basic SEO mistakes webmasters make, and suggests a few ways to improve … SEO Steps and Processes You Can Do Without Matt Cutts On The SEO Mistakes You're Making Step by step free SEO process |
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Governments Across The Globe Are Making More Requests To Remove Content From Google Services
Apr 25th
According to a new Transparency Report released today, Google received 4,096 government requests to remove 42,249 pieces of content during 2012. The purpose of Google’s Transparency Reports is to record the number of worldwide government requests to censor content on Google services, and…
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Making Smart Digital Strategy Decisions: Owned, Paid and Earned Media
Apr 17th
Online marketing is full of opportunities. It’s part of what makes it exciting. With so many ways to get the word out, it’s all too easy to launch straight into a digital campaign and see what sticks. While there’s merit in being open to different ideas, a little planning can give your campaign a much [...]
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Making Do With Google’s Leftovers
Apr 10th
It’s perhaps one of the industry’s great ironies that today’s hottest enterprise technology is yesterday’s leftovers at Google. Hadoop, an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce technology, is all the rage in the enterprise as a primary tool for tackling Big Data, and probably will remain such for years to come.
But at Google, MapReduce may already be too slow and not nearly scalable enough.
This isn’t news. Mike Miller, CEO of Cloudant, made this point in 2012, and Bill McColl, CEO of Cloudscale, made it two years before that. As McColl argued in 2010, “the people who really do have cutting edge performance and scalability requirements today have already moved on from the Hadoop model.”
Which is another way of saying Google lives in the future.
I’ve told the story before about a wealthy friend telling me his money lets him “see into the future a few years” by affording expensive things today that will be cheap for everyone in the future. In a similar fashion, Google, not to mention other web giants like Facebook and Twitter, is building things today, to solve problems of scale and data processing, that will likely be commonplace for mainstream enterprises tomorrow.
Today Google’s data and scale problems are almost magical. Tomorrow they will likely be average.
Which may mean that peering into the future, whether you’re an entrepreneur or a venture capitalist, may be as simple as watching Google. While Facebook releases much of its code as open source, the place to gaze into Google’s soul is its treasure trove of published research. There you’ll find “Efficient spatial sampling of large geographical tables” and more information on “Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database.”
You will see, in other words, the future of enterprise computing, otherwise known as Google’s leftovers.
Image courtesy of AHMAD FAIZAL YAHYA / Shutterstock.
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