A new report shows how much mobile app usage has grown during the pandemic, reaching 4.2 hours per day, a 30% increase over 2019.
As people have been staying at home and engaging in remote work, digital services and entertainment have experienced meteoric growth. A new study by App Annie shows just how much that usage has exploded.
According to the report, in Q1 2021, “the global average time spent was 4.2 hours a day, up 30% compared to two years prior.” Some countries passed the five hour mark, namely Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea. Meanwhile, India saw the biggest growth, with consumers spending “80% more time in apps in Q1 2021 than they did in Q1 2019.”
There were interesting variations in the popularity of apps, specific to certain markets. While Facebook, TikTok and YouTube were some of the usual favorites, Signal and Telegram were very popular in Western Markets. In other markets, investment apps were among the favorites, including crypto trading apps such as Coinbase and Upbit.
The full report is well-worth a read, and shows the ongoing transformative effect the pandemic is having on the mobile industry.
Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store saw massive gains over the Christmas holiday as people stayed at home.
As the coronavirus pandemic has hit record levels, health experts urged people to stay at home and cancel their holiday plans. While some refused to do so, many did change their plans. As a result, people looked elsewhere for entertainment and distraction, specifically to app stores.
According to Sensor Tower’s estimates, people spent a shopping $407.6 million on the App Store and Play Store on Christmas. This represents a 34.5% year-over-year (YoY) growth from 2019.
The biggest category was games, which grew 27% YoY, representing $295.6 million. Aside from games, Entertainment was the biggest category, with $19.3 million being spent on the App Store and $4.3 million on the Play Store.
Sensor Tower’s figures are just the last example of the digital transformation currently underway, accelerated by the global pandemic.
As people all over the world are locked down or under stay-at-home orders, the mobile app market is booming as people look for things to do and ways to stay connected.
According to data released by App Annie, mobile apps saw significant growth in Q1 2020, both in the time spent using them and the money being spent on them. The report found that “Google Play downloads grew 5% year over year to 22.5B, while iOS downloads grew 15% year over year to over 9B new downloads for the quarter. On Google Play non-gaming apps accounted for 55% of all downloads, while on iOS the figure was slightly higher at 65%.”
Similarly, when it comes to purchases, customers “spent over $23.4B through the app stores, the largest quarter ever in terms of consumer spend. There were also over 31B new app downloads, a 15% increase from Q4 2019.”
The report goes on to point out that there was a direct correlation between areas hit with the pandemic and surges in mobile app usage and purchases. The more countries required citizens to shelter-in-place, the more they turned to mobile apps.
The report, while not necessarily surprising or unexpected, is further evidence of the fundamental shift the computing industry has experienced toward mobile apps and services.
Mobile apps are a major part of how people interact with and consume digital media with the number of people using smartphones growing all the time. The app ecosystem is even playing more of a role in search now.
There’s never been a better time to have a mobile app and get consumers to put it on their devices. That’s easier said than done, of course, and even if you do manage to get people to download it, there’s a very good chance they won’t keep it.
Yahoo has a new study out looking at what makes people replace the apps on their phones.
“As the app ecosystem continues to grow exponentially, app replacement has become a huge issue for developers looking to increase retention rates,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews.
According to the company, apps are replaced by nearly half of all smartphone dominant users every week.
“To help developers and app marketers understand how they can avoid the replacement cycle and how to prevent it, Yahoo took a deep dive into this phenomena to analyze the behavior of smartphone users in the U.S. between the ages of 13-64,” the spokesperson says. “The report, released today, yields some interesting insights in regards to app longevity, drivers of app downloads, and the future of the app ecosystem.”
It found that “app clear outs” tend to be performed at least once or twice monthly as boredom often triggers deletion. In other words, your app needs to remain relevant.
Here’s a look at general prompts for downloading a new app:
“Utilize advertising to reinvigorate app usage, as half of users would re-start using an app due to an ad,” the spokesperson says. “Optimize your presence to deliver on relevancy for the consumer, who is open to discovery via searching app stores. Encourage reviews and ratings, and set the right pricing.”
“With the rapid adoption of larger phablet devices, the use of content apps has increased significantly. Make sure your apps are optimized to make the most out of a larger screen.”
You can find the full report here.
Images via Thinkstock, Yahoo
Google announced that publishers can now add mobile app URLs to Google News via the Google News Publisher Center.
The Publisher Center was launched last year as a destination where publishers can make changes to their news site details, update section URLs, label sections, etc.
“We know many of your publications have their own native Android and/or iOS apps–so starting today, you can now add your mobile app URLs to the Publisher Center,” she wrote. “In the very near future, we will surface the mobile app links on the Editors’ Picks section in Google News–both on the web and in the News & Weather app.”
To take advantage, just log into the Publisher Center and click “Mobile Apps” in the left-navigation bar. From there, you can pick between Android and iOS.
“Please note, your apps must contain primarily news content,” Chan says. “Additionally, you must first add your Editors’ Picks feed in the Google News Publisher Center for your URLs to appear.”
This is just the latest move from Google that helps developers and publishers get their apps discovered.
If your business doesn’t have a mobile app yet, it might be time to change that…for SEO purposes. Now it’s an even better idea to have an app available for both Android and iOS users. Google is indexing app content across both platforms, and it’s using the implementation of app indexing as a ranking signal for search results.
Do mobile apps make sense for your business? Do you already have them? Planning to have them developed? Discuss.
First off, you should know that more Google searches are now taking place on mobile devices than on computers in ten countries. That includes the U.S. and Japan. That means on smartphones specifically. When Google announced this news, it shared a report about search ads getting better for app discovery, so that’s another thing to consider. One in four app users discovers an app through search, according to the report. And Google’s really only just getting started with this whole app indexing thing.
Google first began testing app indexing in the fall of 2013. Googlebot began indexing content in Android apps, and gave webmasters the ability to let Google know which app they’d like Google to index through their existing sitemaps file and through Webmaster Tools. Over time, they expanded the testing, and at Google I/O last year, they opened up app indexing to all Android developers. Here’s a session from the event, which you might want to take a look at if this is all still new to you.
Here’s a much shorter overview on getting your Android app in the Google index:
For more on getting your Android app set up, read this.
In December, Google said clicks on app deep links jumped by 10x the prior quarter, with 15% of signed-in Google searches on Android now returning deep links. These numbers have likely only increased since then.
As you probably know, Google announced two new mobile ranking signals in February. One was the famous mobile-friendly update, which looks at the mobile-friendliness of your mobile website. You probably heard it referred to as “mobilegeddon,” though ultimately, it so far hasn’t had a very big impact on rankings in general.
The other signal Google announced, which it said it had already implemented, was app indexing. That was only for signed in Google users who had the app installed on their Android devices at first, but last month, Google expanded the signal so that users no longer had to have the apps installed. That’s huge.
“You’ve invested time and effort into making your app an awesome experience, and we want to help people find the great content you’ve created,” said product manager Lawrence Chang in a blog post. “App Indexing has already been helping people engage with your Android app after they’ve installed it — we now have 30 billion links within apps indexed…people searching on Google can also discover your app if they haven’t installed it yet. If you’ve implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.”
“With the addition of these install links, we are starting to use App Indexing as a ranking signal for all users on Android, regardless of whether they have your app installed or not,” he added. “We hope that Search will now help you acquire new users, as well as re-engage your existing ones.”
This week, Google announced the expansion of app indexing to iOS apps, and there’s no reason to think that the ranking signal won’t apply there as well.
This isn’t available to all iOS developers just yet, but Google says indexed links from an initial group of apps it’s ben working with will begin appearing on iOS in search results both in the Google App and Chrome for signed-in users globally in the coming weeks.
In a separate announcement, Google also revealed that goo.gl short links will now function as a single link for you to use to all your content, whether it’s in your Android app, iOS app, or website.
“Once you’ve taken the necessary steps to set up App Indexing for Android and iOS, goo.gl URLs will send users straight to the right page in your app if they have it installed, and everyone else to your website. This will provide additional opportunities for your app users to re-engage with your app,” explained Google software engineer Fabian Schlup. “This feature works for both new short URLs and retroactively, so any existing goo.gl short links to your content will now also direct users to your app.”
You can integrate the URL shortener API into your app’s share flow to take advantage of the feature a well. This way, users will be able to share links that automatically redirect accordingly. Others will be able to embed links in their sites and apps which deep link directly to your app.
“Take Google Maps as an example,” said Schlup. “With the new cross-platform goo.gl links, the Maps share button generates one link that provides the best possible sharing experience for everyone. When opened, the link auto-detects the user’s platform and if they have Maps installed. If the user has the app installed, the short link opens the content directly in the Android or iOS Maps app. If the user doesn’t have the app installed or is on desktop, the short link opens the page on the Maps website.”
You can set up app deep linking on goo.gl by participating in app indexing for Android and iOS and using the API with your app’s share flow, email campaigns, etc. That part is optional.
Last week, Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) added new reports to show how Google understands and treats app content in search results. This should come in quite handy if you go down the app indexing path.
Google I/O is just getting underway, so keep an eye out for plenty of content from there that will help you optimize your mobile apps and get more out of app indexing. Here’s the Google Developers YouTube channel, which will likely see uploads of related sessions from the conference eventually.
Are Google’s app indexing efforts enough to make you get your own mobile apps out there? Let us know in the comments.
Twitter is wooing developers more than ever in 2015. It’s hard to believe, but the company only recently held its first-ever developer conference, Flight. The October event saw the unveiling of Twitter’s Fabric developer kits and Digits sign-in.
There are three modular kits that address stability, distribution, revenue, and identity. Fabric combines services from Twitter itself, as well as its Crashlytics and MoPub offerings and other things. The Crashlytics kit is for stability, The Twitter kit is for distribution, and the MoPub kit is for integrating ads into apps. Digits is a phone number-based sign-in, and is part of the Twitter kit. More on all of that here.
Now, this year, Twitter is going on the road with a new developer event series called Flock.
The Flock Takes Flight
“Since we unveiled Fabric at our first mobile developer conference, many of you have started using the Kits to address some of the most common challenges facing app developers: stability, distribution, revenue and identity,” says Jeff Sandquist, Head of Developer and Platform Relations at Twitter. “We hope to meet many more of you over the coming months, so we’re hitting the road on a worldwide tour we’re calling Flock. We believe the next great app can come from anywhere so we are going everywhere we can to help you learn how to use Fabric to build great apps.”
Flock is to consist of two phases. The first one is a road trip across the U.S., which will see Twitter’s team of developer advocates traveling in a Fabric bus from city to city to host meetups and seminars.
The second phase will see the team of Fabric engineers and developer advocates traveling around the world to host a series of half-day events. Here are all of the dates:
Los Angeles, CA: Jan. 21-25
Las Vegas, NV: Jan. 26-27
Denver/Boulder, CO: Jan. 28-31
Kansas City, MO: Feb. 1-4
St. Louis, MO: Feb. 5
Nashville, TN: Feb. 6-9
Chicago, IL: Feb. 10-11
Detroit, MI: Feb. 12-13
London: February 19
Berlin: February 26
New York City: March 11
Tokyo: Spring 2015
Seoul: Spring 2015
Hong Kong: Spring 2015
Shanghai: Spring 2015
Bangalore: Spring 2015
São Paulo: Spring 2015
Southern Hemisphere Autumn 2015
Fabric Gets Some Updates
Since Fabric launched at the October Flight conference, Twitter has made several updates to the kits. For one, they upgraded the beta distribution tool with share links and crash-to-tester identification. This was announced in December. Share links enable you to create onboarding links for each build and invite testers through various media.
“Within your share link dashboard, you can manage all your links in one place — with complete control over who can access your builds,” explained Jason St. Pierre on the Crashlytics blog. “Share a public link with the press or your investors, or create a private link for internal dogfooding by setting domain restrictions. We also automatically point your internal links to the latest build so your testers can always access the latest from one reliable place.”
“No need to worry about manually adding new testers either!” he added. “With share links, you can automatically assign new testers to a group when they sign up via your link. This ensures that everyone will receive your updates in the future, as soon as you send them out. On top of that, you can now create specific groups ahead of time based on where you plan to post your links. Organizing testers have never been easier.”
The crash-to-tester functionality lets you instantly identify the tester who experienced a specific crash from within your crash reports. You can then immediately contact testers for feedback and work with them to reproduce the issue at hand.
“Answers gave us the analytics to track thousands of installs for free from our mobile app promotion campaigns and helped us meet our cost-per-acquisition goals,” said Greg Schwartz co-founder & CEO of calendar app UpTo.
“We love having the free mobile measurement solution from Fabric to track both app installs driven by our users sharing content on Twitter, as well as app installs we drove through Twitter Ads,” said Path marketing manager Ana Larue. “This solution gave us the visibility to track the 100,000+ installs we drove via Twitter in November.”
Organic installs measured by Answers are available in Card Analytics.
Last month, Twitter also launched theming support for Digits. This lets you make Digits blend into your iOS and Android apps.
“We understand how crucial your app’s sign-in experience is to growing and retaining your user base,” said Digits engineer Israel Camacho. “Digits can already be launched from any button anywhere within your app to optimize that experience. Now, with theming support, you can match Digits exactly to your app’s ambience so the Digits sign-in flow looks indistinguishable from your app. The look and feel of your background, call-to-action button and select text are all customizable.”
Finally, in the MoPub Kit, Twitter shipped support for MRAID 2.0 and specification to enable rich media ads in banners and interstitial ad units.
Expect to learn how to get more out of all of this stuff at the Flock events.
The Hatch Contest
Along with the Flock developer event series, Twitter just announced a new contest for startups called Hatch. With this, the company is calling on developers to tell them about their apps, and they’ll pick a winner, who will get meetings with Twitter execs as well as opportunities to meet with potential investors. They’ll also get some funding cash. There will be ten finalists, who will fly to San Francisco to present their startup ideas at the first annual Hatch Gala in July. Here’s a look at the prizes and what it takes to be eligible:
Submissions for Hatch are open now. The deadline is June 5, which will be followed by the first round of judging beginning on June 8, and the second round on June 15. The finalists will be announced on June 22, and the finalist event in San Francisco will take place on a date in July to be announced.
Facebook announced new buying, creative, and targeting options for mobile app ads aimed at helping marketers more effectively advertise during the holiday season, and presumably getting them to spend more money.
For one, marketers can now buy Facebook mobile app ads with guaranteed reach and frequency.
“This allows advertisers to boost awareness while controlling how often someone sees an ad,” Facebook is telling businesses. “For example, advertisers can set their app ad campaign to reach 5 million people with a frequency cap of three impressions per person for one week. Since reach and frequency optimizes for unique reach, it should only be used for campaigns with brand awareness goals, like those for app launches or updates.”
Additionally, mobile app ads in News Feed will now support video creative, and mobile app advertisers can start targeting Amazon Fire tablets.
“As more and more people upload, share and discover video on Facebook, marketers are realizing the value of video at every stage of the buying cycle, from awareness to conversion,” Facebook says. “This holiday season and moving forward, when eligible, video mobile app ads will play automatically in News Feed. Additionally, advertisers are now able to purchase mobile app ads with video creative through Power Editor.”
As far as Amazon Tablets are concerned, you may be interested to know that Amazon sold three times as many on Black Friday as it did during the same time last year.
Facebook already offered targeting for Apple, Samsung, and HTC devices. Now marketers will be able to advertise Amazon Appstore apps on Facebook to the appropriate audience.
If you’re a developer, Facebook has some things related to all of this to tell you too.
If you’re running a business or at least marketing one, check out the company’s blog post for some tips on holiday mobile app advertising.
It’s been looking like eBay Now’s days were numbered for quite a while now. Now, the mobile apps for the e-commerce company’s same-day delivery service have gone M.I.A.
VentureBeat reported all the way back in June that eBay Now could be on its way out. Last month, eBay held its Q3 earnings call, when eBay CEO John Donahoe made a comment indicating that the service wasn’t “essential” to is target customer base.
Re/code then conducted an interview with him, proclaiming eBay Now to be “essentially dead’. Jason Del Rey shared some comments Donahoe made:
“There’s no active plan to close it down,” he began. “But,” he added, “I think what you’re seeing is the shoppers that want same-day delivery tend to want it for consumables … groceries. That’s not really the sweet spot for eBay. Buy online and pick up in store — those are the kinds of things relevant to the eBay shopper.”
At another point in the call, Donahoe referred to the service in the past tense as an “experiment” and pointed out that the company hasn’t expanded from four to 25 markets as it originally said it would by year’s end. He also noted that eBay customers seem to care more about being able to pick up an order for free than pay to have it delivered super quickly. Donahoe said the company’s partnership with United Kingdom retail chain Argos, which lets eBay shoppers order stuff online and pick it up at an Argos near them, will serve as a model for how eBay continues to try to help its shoppers get their orders quickly at no extra cost.
Last week, Reuters reported that the company planned to “dismantle its standalone mobile app for its $5 same-day delivery service ‘eBay Now’ as soon as this week”.
On Monday, TechCrunch pointed out that the app has gone missing from Apple’s App Store. It’s also gone from Google Play.
It would appear that the service isn’t completely dead, however. According to TechCrunch, which spoke with an eBay spokesperson, it will be folded into eBay’s main apps and website.
Even still, eBay Now as supposed to expand to 25 new markets, and from the sound of it, that’s no longer happening.
Continuing its strategy of launching standalone apps for various functions, Facebook announced a new Facebook Groups app, which comes from its Creative Labs division. This one is immediately available for both Android and iOS (some of the other apps have been iOS only).
“Every month, 700 million people use Facebook Groups to stay in touch with family, collaborate on projects, plan trips and offer support to friends – and we built this app to help people share faster and more easily with all the groups in their life,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews in an email. “With the Facebook Groups app, you can easily discuss, plan and collaborate – nothing gets lost in the shuffle of text messages or email, and you can choose how and when to receive notifications.”
Interestingly, you’ll still be able to use Facebook Groups in the main Facebook app, which should please users, considering how upset everybody got about Facebook forcing people to use the Messenger app.
Defending the Messener move, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said it was basically too much friction to tap a tab in the Facebook app for messaging, so that’s why you have to use a different app now. Obviously this is a ridiculous explanation, especially considering that everybody knows Facebook is going to add money-related features to Messenger.
This is most likely the reason Facebook is going to continue to let people use the Groups feature within the Facebook app. It’s not looking to monetize it just yet.
The Groups app shows you all your Groups in one place, and prioritizes the ones you use the most. It also lets you start new groups, track notifications, and see suggested groups based on pages you’ve liked.
Adobe announced a new mobile app analytics offering called Adobe Analytics – Mobile Apps, which is obviously aimed at helping marketers and developers measure the effectiveness of apps, and get a better idea of how people are using them on different devices.
Adobe Analytics – Mobile Apps includes enhanced support for iBeacons, app acquisition analytics, a new mobile SDK that integrates with Adobe Target for A/B testing, Customer Lifetime Value reports, and retention analysis.
“To understand how users are finding, downloading, and using apps, app acquisition analytics allow marketers to properly attribute the success of app acquisition campaigns across paid, earned, and owned media back to all post-download user engagement,” explains Adobe’s Jeff Allen in a blog post. “A single mobile SDK integrates with Adobe Target (A/B testing), Audience Manager (third-party data integrations with audience segmentation), and Adobe Experience Manager (development and management of app content) to display a broad array of metrics in real time including lifecycle, device-centric, and location-specific data. For example, marketers can understand how frequently people launch the app, which segments are driving the highest conversion rates, how app usage differs in-store vs. out-of-store, and much more.”
“Customer lifetime value reports using customer attributes based on your app monetization strategy, such as product purchases, video views, and ad impressions, help marketers better understand and target customers based on their projected lifetime value,” adds Allen. “Built-in support for iBeacons enables marketers to target and deliver location-based messages in a variety of settings—from retail stores to large event venues. And, retention analysis allows them to understand the retention of newly acquired users, segment customers based on how they use the app, and more.”
Adobe Analytics – Mobile Apps will be available next month. More details here.
Adobe says its analytics offering is already used by over 140,000 marketers.
In general, we shouldn’t consider mobile apps particularly secure for the foreseeable future. That is if Gartner is correct in its latest analysis.
The firm said this week that over 75% of mobile apps will fail basic security tests through 2015. This is not particularly comforting for businesses.
Gartner notes that enterprise employees download from app stores, and use mobile apps that can access enterprise assets or perform business functions, and that the apps have “little to no security assurances”.
“Enterprises that embrace mobile computing and bring your own device (BYOD) strategies are vulnerable to security breaches unless they adopt methods and technologies for mobile application security testing and risk assurance,” said Dionisio Zumerle, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Most enterprises are inexperienced in mobile application security. Even when application security testing is undertaken, it is often done casually by developers who are mostly concerned with the functionality of applications, not their security.”
“Today, more than 90 percent of enterprises use third-party commercial applications for their mobile BYOD strategies, and this is where current major application security testing efforts should be applied,” said Zumerle. “App stores are filled with applications that mostly prove their advertised usefulness. Nevertheless, enterprises and individuals should not use them without paying attention to their security. They should download and use only those applications that have successfully passed security tests conducted by specialized application security testing vendors.”
Gartner looks even further into the future, and says that by 2017, the focus of endpoint breaches will shift to tablets and smartphones. Through that year, it predicts, over 75% of mobile security breaches will be the result of mobile app misconfigurations as opposed to “deeply technical” attacks.
Nielsen recently released some research looking at mobile app usage, finding that while app usage is up, the number of apps being used isn’t really changing.
According to the report, American adults spent 30 hours and fifteen minutes per month on apps in Q4 2013, which is up 65% from two years before that. The number of apps used remained basically flat at 26.8 apps used per month versus 26.5 apps the previous year.
Nielsen’s Global Head of advertiser solutions Randall Beard writes, “Does this trend of channel overload sound familiar? I see a clear parallel to TV, where even as the number of channels and average hours of consumption have increased over time, the average number of channels watched has stayed close to flat—17, if you’re interested. We’re seeing the same thing in app usage—more overall time spent on apps, but not many more apps being used.”
Beard adds, “Now, ask yourself a really hard question: ‘how likely, really, is it that consumers would use an app from my brand as one of the 27 apps they use each month?’ The answer depends a lot on what kind of brand you have.”
According to the research, over 80% of time spent on apps is in the search, portals, social, entertainment, and communication.
Google announced the launch of app promotion ads for search and YouTube, following a similar offering launched earlier this summer for the Display Network.
The search ads enable users to get advertisers’ apps, and offer advertisers a three-step campaign set-up flow to promote them. These ads will only be shown to people who don’t already have the app.
Google is also letting advertisers deep link users directly from Google Search to specific pages of apps they’ve already installed. This is in beta, but you can sign up to use it here. Google explains in a blog post:
Customers like LINE, Zoopla and Booking.com are already testing deep-linking with their apps. Here’s how it works: let’s say someone has the Booking.com app installed on their phone and searches for “San Francisco Hotels” on Google.com; now they can go directly to the specific page in the Booking.com app that shows listings for hotels in San Francisco.
Apps can also be shown to YouTube users as they’re watching videos. This comes courtesy of a new ehancement to TrueView ads. Google notes:
With TrueView, advertisers can reach potential customers based on their interests, previously-watched videos and demographics.
To promote an app on YouTube, you can link your app’s ID to your TrueView campaign. This page tells you how to do that.
Google also touts three new search ad features: measuring app download conversions, integrating analytics data, and automating bid.
LinkedIn announced that it is launching a new iPhone app called Connected, which is replacing its Contacts app.
The app lets you know when people in your network change jobs, are mentioned in the news, have work anniversaries or birthdays, and reminds you to connect with people you recently had meetings with. It has a card-based experience, which is different for LinkedIn.
When you sync your contacts and calendars with Connected, you can turn on push notifications, which LinkedIn says are highly relevant, including reminders before meetings and “pre-meeting intelligence”.
Here’s how LinkedIn’s David Brubacher describes Connected:
Connected is all about providing genuine opportunities for you to strengthen your relationships. It helps you reach out to people in your network when it matters most, so you can keep your network active and warm.
We know you’d love to reach out and catch up with everyone in your network over coffee, but that isn’t always possible. Connected gives you relevant, and timely, reasons to reach out and keep in touch with the people in your network. This app helps you invest in your relationships today, so opportunities blossom for you tomorrow.
The app is available in the App Store. We’ll see if users really like it better than the Contacts app.
Twitter’s Vine announced that it is now showing loop counts on its iOS and Android apps, and on the web, to show how many times people have looped a video.
The loop counts also appear on Vine embeds around the web.
“With this update, there’s now a new way for you to quickly get a sense of how popular and interesting a Vine may be –– based on how many times people watch a Vine loop,” says Vine API lead Mike Kaplinskiy. “The number, which you can see in our mobile apps and on vine.co, updates in real time, so as you watch a video, you’ll know you’re watching with others at the same time.”
They’ve also redesigned the Home and Activity feeds.
“Additionally, the feeds in our Android and iPhone apps now feature a new design, offering you bigger edge-to-edge videos and a cleaner view of likes and comments,” says Kaplinskiy. “Finally, we’ve revamped the Activity feed to make it easier to know what’s happening on your Vines. In addition to a new separation between New and Older Activity, you’ll also see a notification when your Vines surpass milestones (e.g., 25 or 100 likes).”
He notes that some users may notice Vines showing a “+” next to the loop count. This is for those with loops from before April 3rd, which is the day it started tracking them. The “+” means a Vine has probably been looped more than what the number says.
Before you go getting any ideas, they also have systems in place to prevent/combat loop count abuse/spam.
Facebook accidentally pushed out its new Slingshot app in the App Store last week for a short period of time, but now it’s back, and it appears to be on purpose this time.
This time, the release is accompanied by an official blog post on the new Slingshot blog. Slingshot is described as the second app from Facebook Creative Labs (the first being Paper). It’s available for both iOS and Android (Jelly Bean and Kit Kat – later today).
“With Slingshot, we wanted to build something where everybody is a creator and nobody is just a spectator,” the team behind the app says in the introductory blog post. “When everyone participates, there’s less pressure, more creativity and even the little things in life can turn into awesome shared experiences. This is what Slingshot is all about.”
“Photos and videos that don’t stick around forever allow for sharing that’s more expressive, raw and spontaneous,” they add. “We can connect the same way we like to live: in the moment. We’ve enjoyed using Snapchat to send each other ephemeral messages and expect there to be a variety of apps that explore this new way of sharing. With Slingshot, we saw an opportunity to create something new and different: a space where you can share everyday moments with lots of people at once.”
Naturally, it’s been referred to as a Snapchat competitor throughout the blogosphere, and comes after Facebook’s failed attempt to acquire that company.
To use it, you take a picture or video, and send it out, but only those who send something back to you will actually be able to see it. Then they can reply if they want.
LifeLock, the company that promises customers safety from credit and identity theft, has temporarily shut down one of its services. The company has taken down its LifeLock Wallet app from the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon’s mobile app store. LifeLock cited security concerns as the reason for the app’s removal.
In a blog post issued last week, LifeLock CEO Todd Davis (the man who revealed his social security number for a now-infamous marketing campaign), issued a statement in the interests of “authenticity and transparency.” Davis revealed that the LifeLock Wallet app was not up to payment card industry (PCI) compliance standards. The app was pulled from stores when LifeLock learned that certain parts of the app were not in compliance.
According to Davis, LifeLock does not have evidence that any of its customers’ bank accounts, credit cards, or identities were compromised. Even so, the company has taken the drastic step of deleting all customer information it had stored on its servers using the app. Users will have all of the data stored locally by the app deleted when the app is started on their mobile device. Davis stated that these steps are being taken to retain customer trust in the company and to emphasize LifeLock’s commitment to keeping customer data safe.
Davis also issued an apology to LifeLock customers, stating that the app should be back in mobile stores soon. From the statement:
We believe the LifeLock Wallet provides services and functionality that users value, and we’ll be working to return a Wallet with the highest level of PCI compliance to users soon.
We know we’re asking a lot of our LifeLock Wallet users – to delete and go without this application for a period of time. I personally apologize for the inconvenience.
Lifelock’s mobile app was based on the Lemon Wallet, a cloud-based digital wallet app created by the startup company Lemon. Lifelock acquired Lemon in December 2013 for over $42 million. The re-branded LifeLock app was featured prominently in a marketing campaign the company began in February.
Google announced on Tuesday that it is adding Google Analytics to mobile ad platform AdMob and launching new content experiments for Google Tag Manager.
Analytics will be available within the AdMob interface on a new “Analyze” tab, which should be quite helpful for app businesses.
“Today’s app developers have to make decisions quickly and implement them seamlessly if they want to stay relevant,” says product manager Russell Ketchum in a blog post. “It also helps if every business decision is backed up and validated by reliable data. Until now, app developers using AdMob and Google Analytics had to use two separate tools to monetize and measure. Starting today, they’re now in one place.”
There are also some new features including a drop down menu to switch between individual app reports and a new home page with reporting from both Analytics and AdMob. The new home tab will include data on how the developer’s app is monetizing.
Last summer, Google launched Tag Manager for mobile apps. The new content experiments let you run experiments to change things like in-app promotions, menu layout, etc. and modify app configurations without having to push out actual updates.
“But how can we always be sure that we are changing it for the best? Wouldn’t it better if you could validate business decisions with data? Now you can run content experiments on a subset of your users to choose the best option – where to show promotions? How often? Data in Google Analytics will answer your questions and you can now be sure your decisions will be backed by data,” says Ketchum.
As he notes, Tag Manager is made to be used by people who aren’t familiar with coding, so companies can let marketers or analysts run experiments without the need for the developers to get involved.
Facebook has released a new update for its Paper news reader app.
It will now let users share articles via Facebook Messages, text message or email, and turn sound effects off. It also now supports languages that use multi-stage input, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
The app was first released on February 3rd, and is only available for iPhone in the U.S. for the time being.
“Your Paper is made of stories and themed sections, so you can follow your favorite interests,” Mark Zuckerberg said of the app when he first announced it. “The first section in Paper is your Facebook News Feed, where you’ll enjoy inspiring new designs for photos, videos, and longer written posts. You can customize Paper with a choice of more than a dozen other sections about various themes and topics—from photography and sports to food, science and design. Each section includes a rich mix of content from emerging voices and well-known publications.”
Here’s the iTunes description:
Explore and share stories from friends and the world in immersive designs and fullscreen, distraction-free layouts. Paper includes your Facebook News Feed and sections about your favorite topics.
As Josh Constine at TechCrunch points out, the app’s sharing feature includes the following URL: fb.com/trypaper, which could get more people to give the app a try.
Square is testing a new app called Square Pickup, available by invitation only. The app reportedly lets users order food from restaurants who use Square, and is testing with “several San Francisco restaurants”.
Presumably it would be used with non-restaurant businesses as well.
Priceonomics.com first reported on the app after noticing it when picking up lunch. You can check out their article for screenshots.
After using it, the site suggests the product could be “a massive step in bringing more offline commerce online”.
The news comes just after a report from The Information indicating that Square is also testing a service in which it gives merchants “thousands of dollars” in capital to help them grow. That report also indicates that the company is considering taking a new round of funding, and delaying its IPO, which was expected to happen this year.
It’s been a pretty busy month for Square. The company also announced its first grocer partnership with Whole Foods Markets, and launched new money-requesting functionality to its Square Cash product.
The company has also made headlines for poor handling of a chargeback situation with one New York business owner, though its later efforts once the story emerged were somewhat redeeming.
Square is also said to be looking to offer more big businesses custom rates.
