Appsfire is introducing today a powerful and innovative signal to assess whether an app is worth downloading. App Score is a dynamic score which processes dozens of parameters several times a day across all the apps in the iOS App Store. The App Score for a particular app goes beyond the current ratings, rankings and reviews for that app; it also analyzes the rating and ranking performance over time, incorporates additional metadata and reviews for that app across the web, identifies apps engaging in suspicious rating/review behavior in the App Store, and synthesizes the publisher’s record across all of his or her apps.

The Long Version

The biggest pain point affecting mobile app consumers is discovery. To be more precise, it’s a pain to find GOOD apps. Billions of apps get downloaded, but only a small fraction are truly appreciated and used.

To discover great apps, you can rely on certain curated sources, from the App Store itself (whose Featured Apps section drives massive downloads) to myriad blogs and app review sites. But often that is not enough, as editorial curation is only one point of view, and typically fraught with bias.

Moreover, acquiring an app is more tedious than browsing a new website. Even when you’ve identified an app that interests you, you’ll still need to press the download button for an app, wait for the installation, open the app, and spend a few minutes figuring out if this app is right for you. Let alone the fact that few, if any, websites require payment to merely browse; in contrast, there are no trial periods for paid apps in the App Store. We have all experienced buyer’s remorse after paying for an app that quickly revealed itself to be a waste of time and money.

What we are introducing today is a powerful yet simple way to decide whether an app is worth downloading. App Score is the fruit of the intense labor we have put into building AppGenome over the past two years. AppGenome, an app metadata engine, aggregates hundreds of millions of data points on apps per week. As PageRank was the foremost signal that identified quality and relevance across the web, App Score is the foremost signal that emerges from our AppGenome.

THE PROBLEM: THE EXPERIENCE OF DISCOVERING QUALITY APPS IS BROKEN

Discovery in the App Store is broken because it is primarily based on two factors that are only loosely correlated to the quality of the app: App Store rankings and ratings/reviews. While intuitively ranking and ratings should be a measure of quality, a number of factors have undermined this.

• Rankings identify the top 200 apps, how about the other 630,000? Too many great apps never make it to the rankings. Why should they be marginalized? Every great app deserves its chance to shine.

• Rankings is easily gameable by marketers:  Rankings have become the playground of marketing experts. The objective of most marketing campaigns is not to acquire new users, but to vault the app to top of the rankings. While presence in the rankings is in itself a way to acquire users, many consumers are under the illusion that rankings are a measure of merit. In fact it’s often a measure of marketing dollars.

• Punctual rankings are misleading: Although refreshed regularly, App Store rankings are merely a snapshot and not a measure of quality (as discussed above). An end-user has no idea which apps have shot up the rankings merely via marketing channels. Apps which remain atop the rankings over a sustained period of time – because they’re good apps – should be rewarded.

• Ratings are irrelevant for new apps: It takes some time until you gather enough traction and ratings/reviews from users to find out to build a base of reviews that accurately informs potential new consumers (for better or wrose). A user exposed to a new app has scarce information in deciding whether or not a new app is high-quality.

• Ratings and reviews are also gameable: Many apps use third-party services to rate their app. That’s disingenuous and overtly misleading.

• Ratings are local, not gobal: Ratings are attributed per geographic store (there are 123 stores). If a user gives rates an app in the US App Store, it will not be exposed to users in the French App Store. A great app could have a wonderful rating pattern in one country (say the USA) but none in another.

Does this mean that rankings, ratings and reviews are irrelevant? Not at all. But this is how the App Store has educated users to evaluate apps. And it just doesn’t work.

Ratings and reviews are relevant, but to derive value from them you need to see the forest through the trees – weeding out apps which have gamed the system while rewarding apps which have generated genuine, positive ratings and reviews around the world and around the web. Not even the most discerning consumer can collect or process this information, and most average consumers don’t have the time to browse reviews in making their purchasing decision.

Simply put, users need a clear signal: something that inspires the thought, “I should download”, or the thought, “I’ll pass”.  The App Store is not built to help users make an easy purchasing decision.

THE APPSFIRE APP SCORE: THE QUALITY SCORE FOR APPS

When we created Appsfire, our mission was to help users find the great apps because they’re great apps. Not because they’re highly rated, highly ranked or highly marketed. Since Appsfire’s inception, we’ve been building AppGenome, our app metadata engine, as the quantitative foundation for this discovery experience. In that time, we’ve also served users over 1 billion app recommendations.

:: Introducing App Score :: App Score is a dynamically computed and frequently refreshed score that synthesizes numerous sources into a single quality score, emerging from three primary components:

• Rankings Score: App Score evaluates the ability of an app to sustain its rankings in the App Store over time. We call that “stay power”. Apps which market their way to the top of rankings typically exhibit poor stay power. Apps which top the rankings based on merit – Angry Birds, Instagram – typically sustain their rankings through massive consumer interest.
• Ratings Score: App Score evaluates the consistency, frequency and velocity of good and bad ratings that an app generates across stores and versions.
• Developer Score: App Score evaluates the reputation and success of a developer across the apps he has created over time (a Klout for developers, if you will). This way we can spot from the very first moment after an app goes live whether the app is promising or not. In exceptional cases, both good and bad, we expose some aspects of the Developer Score to inform users:
• Top Developer: Developers who have built at least one highly successful, high quality app [Android identifies this information as well, but this is most likely editorial]. A “Top Developer”, by our measure, represents the top 1% of developers in the App Store.
• Dodgy Developer: Developers with a track record of building at least one app exhibiting suspicious rating/review behavior.

App Score also incorporates data from sources beyond the App Store: Mentions on Twitter and Facebook (for reference, Appsfire invented AppTrends), mentions on key publications and review sites (like Macworld, TechCrunch, The New York Times) and many more (we’re not going to reveal everything!) in search of quality signals (whether positive or negative).

That’s it! No more need to read all the reviews, check ratings and rankings accross stores (who has THE time for that?). One all-encompassing score will tell you if this app is worth your time.

Bottom line: App Score looks at the big picture and identifies the patterns that reveal an app’s quality, not just the basic rating and review parameters. Ratings and reviews exposes just the tip of the iceberg; App Score exposes the iceberg.

SO HOW DOES IT WORK FOR USERS?

It’s super, duper simple. Mobile users require simple stuff.

Film buffs have Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. We wanted something as simple for apps from a user’s perspective (especially considering that there are many more apps and parameters for apps than for movies). We also wanted something that paralleled PageRank, Google’s initial method to rank search results based on quality and relevance.

App Score is a single number between 1 (Cr-app) to 100 (Masterpiece), which defines the quality of an App. Users don’t have to know all the details behind it – the same way they don’t have to know why a search result appear #1 in Google’s search engine. They will know instantly if an app is good. We crafted beautiful badges to display this information clearly and cleanly..

[91 >100] : “Red hot”

[80 > 91]:  ”Super”

[70 > 80]:  ”Good stuff”

[60 > 70]: “Promising”

[30 > 60]: “Hmmmmm”

[10 > 30]: “Cr-app-y”

SO HOW USEFUL IS THIS, REALLY? CASES AND MORE CASES

Well let’s take some examples. All of them were computed automatically by App Score.

Case 1: An app with no rating in a given store

Here is the case of an app that has no rating in the App Store because it doesn’t have enough traction yet. If you were to view MoveTheEggs from here Israel, which is not a major geography in the App Store, you see this: No ratings. There’s no way to know if the app is good or not. And this is what App Score says (83 – Super). So you go from “no clue – how good or bad is the app?” to a clear signal saying you should not be disappointed by this app and that it therefore worth it.

Case 2: A bestseller, but low in quality

Let’s take a super famous app: Facebook. Yes, it is a really great service. But how good is the app? App Score says it’s bad (32/100). And apparently there are many good reasons for that. On the other side Facebook Messenger (which is less buggy) has a very high score (92/100).

Case 3: An unpopular app that is actually worth your attention

This app - Mr Chiizu Plus –  has never been highly ranked in the US. It is a very nice Photo Collage app and has a very high app score because the high ratings are consistent, as is its position in the App Store rankings, and it has receive very favorable reviews across many sites. By our measure, it has an App score of 83 – Good Stuff.

Case 4: A great and very popular app with high App Score

Apps like Angry Birds [99 - Red Hot] and Infinity Blade [95 - Red hot] are great examples of great apps with a very high-quality score.

Case 5: How the App Score considers developer reputation and automatically rewards that developer’s apps

In the hours after Rovio released Angry Birds Space, the app naturally had fews ratings, little history, and scarce reviews. App Score knew it was from Rovio – the developer behind the successful Angry Birds – and it instantly attributed an App Score of  (67 – Promising). Later in the afternoon it was already boosted to an appscore of 94 (due to massive popularity and good reviews). The day after it stabilized to 95.

Case 7: How great apps are spotted quickly and gain a higher rank

Snapguide – a great how-to guide for iPhone – got a 80 (Good app) score 1 day only after its release. Today after several more reviews Snapguide is at 87. The best part? Snapguide is a wonderful app and is not at all in the rankings – not even in the top 50 of its own category (Lifestyle, in the US).

Paper by fiftyThree (iPad only), a wonderful note taking app, less than 24 hours after its release had a very high App Score of 82.

Case 8 : An app can be highly rated, but of very low quality

Take this app showing over 4 stars review. It’s tempting to buy it. Well don’t! Its App Score suggests that it’s low quality – yep, another fingerprinting app with limited value (App Score = 13).

Case 9 : Some apps have no ratings over time. 

How do you make a decision in this case? On the iPhone, the reviews are 2 clicks away – most people don’t even get there –  and the ratings are non-existent. App Score would tell you it’s not worth wasting your time

Case 10: Being a good developer does not guarantee you a good App Score for your next app

Chillingo, who is famous for publishing many bestseller games, released this Volley Ball game. It could not escape a low App Score (19), as the game is not so great and their Developer Score did not help them on that app.

Want to try for yourself ? open Appsfire Deals (soon in Appsfire, our original app discovery app, too) or run a search on our web site to find out the App Score on any app.

FAQS

CAN THE APP SCORE BE GAMED?

Nothing is impossible. But it would be really, really, really hard. A developer, especially if he has several apps, would have to game consistently the rankings, ratings, reviews, Twitter mentions, Facebook likes, review sites of his or all his apps on a consistent manner over time. You can game a ranking for a day or two. It is really difficult or near impossible to game all those paramaters at once – all the time. App Score is built to withstand this..

In addition, we created special safeguards/detectors that highlight suspicious activity around an app (e.g.,: a 1-day-old app suddenly receiving thousands of ratings). We also identify apps that have a limited value or that are clones (Temple what?).

Example 1: Copycats can be popular

If we re dealing with the number 10th clone version of Temple Run or Angry Birds, users will be able to spot it with a special label. Like here.

Example 2: Apps with low utility can be popular

This app – A Lie Detector – has been quite popular but App Score reveals it has a low utility. Save you a few clicks.

This other app is also consistently popular but has really low value for users – it catches the eye but not the fingers. App Score will attribute to it a “Low utility” label

In both, the apps were detected automatically but were validated  manually.

Soon more safeguards will be added and make app score even more reliable: For example, a special badge will highlight apps with an unstable pricing policy (meaning they change their pricing up and down too frequently).

WHAT AND WHO IS APP SCORE GOOD FOR?

• Good for Discovery and mobile users: We use it first to provide a greater discovery experience: in Appsfire we won’t show you the crapps and showcase only the best. Unless you really want to see everything (there is a search for that). This is why our users feel compelled by appsfire and its discovery experience. The day we introduced quietly the app score as an automatic filter in our apps the stickyness and satisfaction have nearly doubled. Users “felt” the difference. Specially comparing to other discovery services which use only the ratings as a filter or have no quality filter at all…
• Good for Developers: you can use it to benchmark their apps vs their competitors or the apps or their own portfolio.
• Good for Journalists and Bloggers who can use to find out whether this is worth their attention
• Good for Investors can use for due diligence or tracking the performance of their investment (instead of a complex method...)
• Good for Ad Networks or Advertisers who can use to find whether this is worth promoting an app or not or whether you buy media on a good quality app

CAN APP SCORE BE USED BY OTHER SITES/APPS?

Yes but not yet. Eventually we’ll allow third party services to use and display the App Score via a private API.

WHAT ARE THE LIMITS OF THE APP SCORE?

The limit is simple: The less data, the less the score is relevant…  (makes sense no? ) If, for example, an app is live without any track record, rating record, or developer record, there is no way to evaluate the quality of the app. The only way is to try it. But very very few apps stay without track record  for long. Within hours, apps usually start to collect some interesting data points which we capture.

The other limit of App Score is that it is algorithmic, just like the Google PageRank. A few apps could be trapped by mistake within our Crapp filter as we have limted information on them, but that will be soon completed by a crowdsourced system in addition to more safeguards detectors that will be added.

For most apps the App Score is rather static and won’t change from one day to another: it is unlikely that an app goes from RED HOT to “Hmmm” or that a crappy app becomes RED HOT. But certain events like a major update can affect the App Score of an app. We track those events and obviously the App Score gets updated.

TWO MORE THINGS

We’re not done yet with the App Score.

1. We will unveil many innovations over the next few weeks and we’ll extend it to Android as well.
2. We’ll include many external new parameters and will open it to crowdsource for improvements and fine tuning.

You can find the App Score of any app either by searching on our site Appsfire.com or by browsing and searching apps in Appsfire Deals (soon also in Appsfire)

Hope you will like it!

UPDATE 

Check out the excellent coverage on GigaOm.

We’re thrilled with the result, and we hope, you, our users, are too. iOS Inspires Me, a terrific catalog of beautiful (and indeed inspiring!) app icons and user interfaces, seems to think so.

What you see above are the outcome of many months of starts, stops, restarts, and throw-your-hands-in-the-air bouts of frustration. We drew on paper, on whiteboards, on our iPhones, in Omnigraffle and Photoshop. We went high-concept and low. We worked with designers and showed our ideas to colleagues and friends. And for months, the best place we ever got was, “not bad”.

But we wanted, “Wow.” We wanted something that made us want to put our finger on it and launch something awesome.

We’re not alone with this frustration. Developing a great icon is really, really hard. Apple gives you a mere 114×114 rounded rectangle to represent your app and your brand on Retina iPhones, which is the most common place your app icon will be seen.

In interviewing top-shelf designers, we heard a common refrain: “I worked on the icon for [INSERT NAME BRAND APP], but they went with something (or someone) else in the end”. Translation: There are lots of companies out there churning through iteration after iteration of app icon ideas.

Looking back at some of the icons we tried and failed with is like revisiting photos of yourself in your high school yearbook. You look at your haircut and outfit and think, “How did I ever think that dressing like this was a good idea?”. We look back at this icon concept, and this one and this one and this one and wonder, “What were we thinking?!”

In the spirit of nostalgia, we put together this little retrospective for your viewing pleasure. Perhaps there are a few other developers out there who once felt our pain. To those developers, we also hope you feel what we feel now that we’ve found an icon we love: pure joy.

We’re thrilled to see the engagement (and thousands of 5 ★ ratings) with our apps and our partners using Appbooster SDK and even more excited to launch what’s will be launch soon (expect an announcement in the next couple of weeks max).

When the trend is to talk about engagement and quality metrics and not just download, here is some more facts about we wanted to share with you.

You know what’s even cooler? our next announcement. Stay tuned

More than 300 developers expressed their interest, so the competition is going to be fierce. Are you ready to show your mettle with your great, new app?

Here’s a quick rundown about how the App Star Awards work:

• You only need to submit a link to a video demonstration (around 30 – 45 seconds) of your app
• The app cannot be live in the App Store when you submit it, though it’s okay if it’s already been submitted to Apple for review.
• 15 apps will be selected as finalists and announced on the Appsfire blog on May 29
• Three winners will be selected by our all-star panel of judges and announced on June 5.

Ready to go? Go ahead and submit your app. You can read more about rules and guidelines here.

And of course, we’re giving away over $10,000 to our three lucky winners. We’re very excited to see some great, new apps and to reward some ambitious and talented developers!

The last reason to participate is to being reviewed by our awesome jury:

• Sarah Perez at TechCrunch
• Ryan Kim at GigaOM
• Laurent Gatignol at iPhon.fr [no typo]
• Jeff Scott at 148Apps
• Jamie Young at AppAdvice
• Jon Jordan at Pocketgamer.biz
• @Zee at TheNextWeb
• Orli Yakuel From Go2Web20

The picture featured on the OpenUDID GitHub (below) shows a variety of known industry players that have adopted the initiative: analytics companies, advertising networks, authority bodies as well as other value-adding SDK publishers. Others are in the process of integrating OpenUDID.

OpenUDID Known Supporters

This is good news for the industry because it means that some sort of “common” ground and exchange token can be used to resume business as usual. But not only: OpenUDID is putting the user back in the middle of the discussion; debates about the opt-out and parallels with the do-not-track web initiatives. OpenUDID is open-source, so please join and contribute!

Other notable developments include a port to Windows Phone 7 and Windows Desktop (thank you Jason). This means that OpenUDID now supports 3 mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Phone) and 2 desktop platforms (Mac OS X, Windows .Net). Blackberry, anyone?

Also, note the newly created @OpenUDID twitter account. Follow this account to be kept in the loop!

When Appsfire was in its early days we organized a contest for App developers that got a lot of success. The App Star Awards were born with the objective to highlight brilliant upcoming and unpublished mobile apps. [check edition 1 and edition 2]

Getting noticed in the app store is insanely hard, even with a great app. And this challenge starts from the first second an app goes live.

This is why we recommend to try and get any quality opportunity to get noticed before you launch. This is what the App star awards is designed for.

Get famous before you even start. because EVERY GOOD APP deserved to be discovered!

We have gathered some of the best mobile app experts in the world from leading publications like 148Apps, Techcrunch, Gigaom and more (see below for more details)

Any iOS developer will be able to apply. We will review every single app submitted. We’ll preselect a few and our experts will vote for the 3 bests

In addition to the glory you will win some cool prizes we’ll announce soon (the big winner we ll get away with a free ad campaign and an iPad[3])

When will it start? For now we ‘re pre announcing the contest. You can pre register here and we’ll notify you when the contest goes live

Ok, but when will that be starting? May 2012

Should i get ready for it? If you re working on an app and planning to publish it end may, YES

To participate what will i need to submit? A video demonstration of your upcoming app will be enough. The site to submit your video will soon be live.

Who will be the judges?

• Sarah Perez at TechCrunch
• Ryan Kim at GigaOM
• Laurent Gatignol at iPhon.fr [no typo ]
• Jeff Scott at 148Apps
• Jamie Young at AppAdvice
• Jon Jordan at Pocketgamer.biz
• @Zee at TheNextWeb
• Orli Yakuel From Go2Web20

So, if you are interested > pre-register here

Some people will point to the fact the search experience is broken. But search is only a minor element of discovery. On the mobile where it matters people are more sensitive to curation and passive discovery where recommendations are served to the users without searching.

One of the main driver to discovery is the ability to stimulate the trial of paid apps. Just look at iOS, about 3000 apps go from paid to free or cheaper every day. And users love to feel they can access those deals (Appsfire Deals grow insanely on this). Apple allow this. Google does not.

Why? hard to know. All you can do as an app developer in the Play store is reduce the price of a paid app to a cheaper price (eg 2.99$ to 0.99$) but you can’t make your paid app free and then put it back to paid. Google forces you to stay paid forever or free forever. If you decide to make your paid app free, it will have to stay free or you will need to resubmit your app fully and lose your history (download, ratings, reviews,..)

This is a big miss, because developers can’t allow users to try their apps for free and generate enough buzz around it. It helps accelerate adoption, rating collection,…

But most importantly Google should aknowledge, like Apple did, that an important part of the discovery will take place outside of the play store and should incentivize publishers to track and cover their play store. This already happens : many android app review site exists, but far less than iOS app site and far less well executed. Why? Because there is no affiliation program.

Apple’s affiliation program (managed by Linkshare and Tradedoubler) allow publishers to make some money out of app they cover or review if a transaction happens. Since the transaction includes the session, it also stimulates the review of free apps which can generate to the discovery of paid apps in the App Store

Google has no affiliation program. We hear they have no plan to have one (no confirmation on that). Right now if you recommend a paid app and it gets downloaded you get nothing as a publisher.

But most importantly, and beyond the incentive, Google would allow publishers to access the Play store data in a uniformed structured manner. Right now there is no official feed to enable publishers to gather the metadata of the play store. Every one is using its own cooking (mostly scrapping)

Conclusion

Google would dramatically boost app discovery outside of the play store if they allowed Developers to really drop the price of their app to FREE without constraints and create a true incentivized affiliate program.

It would improve options for discovery for consumers, interest more publishers and enable the deep curation Google can’t handle by themselves.

Consumers want trusted 3rd party recommendations and this is a good way to start..

Back to the origins

When Apple announced the deprecation of the UDID almost a year ago, we were amongst the first to set time aside and start building an alternative. We wanted it to be open source and Appsfire would support it.

It was announced publicly and it instantly attracted the interest of hundreds of developers, including some nice brand names. Crashlytics was one of them – they wanted to contribute and also be part of the launch operation PR. We announced then publicly that OpenUDID was supported by a few organizations including Crashlytics.

Nothing wrong up to that point. Or so we thought!

“New” code suddenly appears

Yesterday Crashlytics announced SecureUDID on Techcrunch, claiming it was built from the ground up to address an app-specific ID. This came as a surprise to us.

Not because those guys have decided to do something different, but because of the way they decided to do it.

They declared on Techcrunch that they felt the project was inadequate:

“When Apple announced its intentions to deprecate the UDID, everyone began scrambling for solutions. AppsFire was one of the first companies to launch an alternative – an open source solution called OpenUDID. In fact, Crashlytics’ own Sam Robbins was a contributor to that initiative. But over time, the company grew to believe that the OpenUDID solution was not ideal. ” TechCrunch

It’s weird for a “contributor” (one who contributed ta very minor part of the code…see below) who reached out to us and became a launch partner to then go silent and never share his vision or concern about the project. Isn’t it?

When we reached out to them on Github, they explained they had to rebuild the code from the ground up for their purpose. Let’s assume this is accurate. But then they suggested to “merge” both projects.

Wait, “merge”? If the project required a different architecture, why do they now believe the two projects can be merged? In addition, if this is the case, why not just contribute to OpenUDID in the first place?

Looking at their site, there is absolutely no reference to OpenUDID as a source of inspiration or architecture in anyway. And yet they use the core mechanisms “pioneered” by the OpenUDID code. Worse, they peg their initiative against OpenUDID claiming that it does more, while in fact, it does less (i.e. it does NOT allow cross-app id sharing, which was a fundamental use case for the original UDID and certainly the main driver to create OpenUDID). In short, their effort and marketing clearly piggybacks, adds confusion and misleading arguments to the developer community and then amplifies it with top-tier blogs.

Here is the reality

SecureUDID actually serves a different purpose than OpenUDID: it helps developers create a unique and persistent UDID, shared within the same namespace (app or developer): ok for analytics. What SecureUDID doesn’t do is let this token be accessed by a 3rd party app: useless for advertising.

Let’s be clear: the code looks decent. There is little to say about it, nor any rocket science to it. Except that it uses encryption which may require to tick that tick box when submitting to Apple…

What’s lame about it all is how Crashlytics has managed the approach: Not informing us about their intention or vision, using part of the mechanisms that were in the original code (UIpasteboard, Opt-out) and not attributing any credit, but worse not even communicating the limitation of what their code does. Here is a visual of how the landscape looks like today:

So let’s summarize the situation here

1. Sam Robbins, a Crashlytics developer/employee was a one-time contributor, added a few compile flags to make it work on Mac OS X (not a key platform)
2. Crashlytics requested explicitly that “their” contribution be mentioned
3. Crashlytics, quoted on October 18th 2012: “We’re big supporters of openUDID here and we’d love to be a part of your press release [..] our goal is to help […] including contributing to openUDID and making it better”
4. SecureUDID borrows all clever mechanisms from OpenUDID: UIPasteboard for persistence, Opt-Out
5. SecureUDID does not solve the inter-app/ad-network UDID replacement need, but rather creates an cloacked UDID for each developer
6. SecureUDID uses CommonCrypto lib and AES-128  which may require to declare that the app uses encryption (this creates additional friction during app submission)
7. SecureUDID is NOT an alternative to OpenUDID, it serves a different purpose. In some ways, it does NOT compete (see point #5)

One of the thing we observe is that many apps who run advertising do not stand by what is considered now a standard practice on the web. Advertising should be marked as such and users should know when an ad is an ad.

Would you imagine Google display sponsored search results and mixing it with its own search organic search results? Would you like to see Facebook ads not marked as Facebook ads and make you believe this is a native information brought to you by Facebook?

How can users know advertising is advertising if they are not told so by the publisher?

Take those examples below. How can you say if those are ads (in other words if the app publisher is paid to promote them) or not? Are those ads or not? They are. Wait there is more..

You see ads up there? But how can you be sure those are ads? Not convinced? Try the one below we spotted in the popular Draw Something App.

Really looks like an ad? Nope. Looks like a notification message (which is actually an ad for a dating app and points directly to the App store when you click on it – great user experience)

Open your iphone. Open a free app. It is very likely you will see something like that. Making an ad looking like a feature is just wrong. Wrong for the users, who believe this is part of the flow, wrong for the advertiser who is likely to attract confused users to his page/site/app

Sometimes this is worse, like this ad displayed in a very popular game presented as “news”. See below

Sometimes it is even more subtle as it is presented as a “more apps” or “virtual shop”. Those are ads as the App publisher gets paid for it. But the user doesn’t know it.

Some ad networks clearly mark the difference. Apple and iAd mark the Ads with an iAd label. Google with Admob (labeled Ads by Admob).  See example below

So why is this happening?

Why do app publishers behave like this with advertising? Mostly because they don’t know they have to. Sometimes because they prefer to leave a blank space and because it is in their business interest: specially in the recommendation space (music, movies, apps). Does an app recommend a product because it is really good or because you get paid for it? Impossible to guess if this is not clearly marked.

Next time you open a free app and something that looks like an ad, ask yourself this question.

The same problems rose at the time, when paid blogging landed and brands started to pay bloggers to cover their product, but that this was not disclosed properly.

Advertising is a contract between an advertiser a publisher and a user. The frontier can’t be just burried under.

So what are we going to do with that? Nothing

It is about time the IAB and other advertising organizations take a look at the mobile ad space and bring some clarity on this.

It is good for consumers, good for advertisers. It’s all about trust. But app developers can also do something about it and ask to the ad networks they work with to become clearer about their practice.

Broadcasting advertising and not saying this is advertising is just wrong.

Some reports have emerged that Apple is now massively rejecting apps that still use the “[UIDevice uniqueIdentifier]” a.k.a. the UDID (Unique Device IDentifier).
This means that developers have two choices: drop using this entirely, or find a replacement.

Some have gone the MAC address way, which we strongly advocate against because it is an even more sensitive unique identifier typically used to authenticate devices on VPNs and other private WLANs. So it too faces the risk to be deprecated. And rightly so!

So, if you haven’t done so already, go and check the open-source drop-in replacement, an effort we participate in: OpenUDID.org

The title is already a top paid app in many countries just a few hours after launch and will probably steal the #1 Top paid spot to Draw Something in the next hours

Precisely it is #1 global paid app in France and Germany, #2 in the US and UK. Boom!

This is a stunning performance but reveals also how hard this has to become to compete in the App store even with a great app. Angry Birds is such a massive game, that the fact of releasing a new version is already creating its own download pattern: cross promo, teasing,..

App Discovery is not just about doing what you need to do for your app. It’s also competing versus massive blockbusters. Just like in the movies industry.And there are more and more massive blockbusters in the App store: meaning more internal forces pushing apps to users. Wait to see what Draw something comes up with next.

PS: Note the inconsistency in pricing

• Paid on iOS
• Free on Android
• Paid on Amazon App store

We’re not used to write a lot about how we work with our customers [ we just prefer to work], but recently we received a few inquiries from our (potential) customers  and naturally we are compared with some other services doing similar things that we do. A lot of confusion is going on.

So we wanted to bring some light on what we do and how we do it.

1. App developers do not pay to get listed in Appsfire recommendation engine

Our mission is to bring the best recommendations to users. We created a variety of discovery mechanisms that are able to surface only the very best apps in a nice interface. Those mechanisms are either based on

a. algorithms (eg: recommendation based on your tastes) and device parameters like your location or device type

b. our users activity – eg your social graph (apps of your friend)

c. the developer’s activity (freshest apps, price drops for promotions,..)

d. Crowdsourced metadata: we crawl the web in real time for top quality signals (twitter post, facebook like, review sites, …) check AppTrends for example

We created an internal score (called AppScore) which indicates whether an app is a quality app or not and allows us for example to detect apps that fraud the rating system or plays the YoYo with their pricing activity to fake promotions etc etc…

What users see is an objective, non paid rendering of Appsfire recommendations, whether in our streams or search results. Users don’t need to care about our sausage recipe. They only care about the taste.

What we care about though, is that they know when a paid promotion takes place [read more below on that]

2. How our paid promotion works for both developers and users

• Once a day (maximum), we highlight an app. Sometimes this promotion is paid by advertisers. How does that work? How do users know about it?
• we are approached every day by many developers. Although we would like to work with all them we are very selective about who we care to highlight
• We match their apps with our internal AppScore. Only great apps pass the filter.  Yes, we refuse to work with some potential customers
• If an app is new, we use the app for a few days and inquire about the developer before making a decision
• We use a series of non intrusive ad placements – including push notifications (which is Opt in only) to promote our partners – once a day
• How do users know about it? We mark that the app as promoted, so that the users can make the difference between organic recommendations and advertising

This last point is critical. Many app discovery services, and even some large ad networks do not make the difference between an non paid and a paid recommendation. Between paid promotion and organic recommendation. Some services are only recommending apps based on the fact developers will pay. Except it’s impossible to know about it.

There is nothing wrong with “paid promotion only”- apps [although this is not exactly recommendation] but Users need to be able to know about this. They need to know whether the app they are “recommended” is promoted because they paid (or compensated in some way) or not. User need to be able to make a difference because it can affect their judgement and decision

There is a major difference between the app discovery business and the paid discovery business. The same major difference exist on the Web. On Facebook with Social ads, on Search with AdWords, on Blogs and Sponsored post. Can you imagine a Google or a Facebook not telling that what they show are ads? Would you still trust them?

The industry needs a lot of upgrades on that side. We even know that some App review sites ask to be paid for reviews, but fail to explain that in their site or post. And some app discovery sites are only build on the fact that advertisers pay them to promote them. Can we live with that? Yep.

But this is just wrong. This needs to change.

3. We do not reward or pay users to download apps

Unlike many services, we do not reward or pay users to download apps. Users chose whether they trust our recommendations or not and they will download an app with no incentive. Even if an app is promoted users will make a choice whether it’s worth downloading or not based on what the app is.

We do not force users to download another app, review, rate, or even open the app after they download it to get a reward, which is a fake motivation for downloads. It is only high intent (people come to discover apps) non rewarded and Opti-in downloads

Some people may consider that promoting an app which price is reduced *is* an incentive. This is wrong. There is a big difference between stimulating the interest and reduction the friction to download an app by reducing the price and giving something away that is unrelated to the app (money, points,…) just to obtain a download.

We provide high quality recommendations and that our apps, are good enough to generate downloads. We send millions of people to the App Store or Android Market every month.

4. We do not promote fake deals

One of our most popular apps  - App Deals – brings the best selections of apps in promotion every day. There are tones of deals apps in the app store. But there are important differences.

On a daily basis thousands of apps are made free or cheaper by developers. This is a famous marketing trick to get your apps some traction. We help surface that. You Won’t see all of the deals available. Here is what we don’t do. We do not promote fake deals.

• We won’t make you believe that you have to download Appsfire to access a given deal – because this is wrong – although we prefer if you do. If you want to get it directly from the store, go ahead. And if you see an app that claims “you can access this app promotion only through us” this is plain wrong and abusive.
• We will always show you the latest price before the promotion to avoid any confusion.
• We won’t announce or make believe that an app is made FREE, when it always was. A Deal *is* a Deal.
• We won’t promote an app that has been free all the time, then suddenly raised artificially its price say for a day and then became free again just to get spotted by services like us. We filter them. Not all App discovery services do.
• We put away YoYo apps: paid apps that become free suddenly every week in the hope to get the attention of companies like us. For example, this app becomes free nearly every day
• If an app is becoming cheaper too regularly we’ll attribute a low weight and it will probably never show up in our recommendations. Like this app, whose price is changing to cheap nearly every day
• On Android developers can’t just make their paid app become free: it then has to stay free or the app needs to be resubmitted (and loose the review history). So the price shifting activity to free is nearly none existing. This is why we have not replicated App Deals on Android and this is why we’re not trying to create unnecessary confusions for users to believe this is possible [until Google changes something about that]
• We will not take credit for a deal we did not negotiate with a developer or rewrite the app description to make users believe we negotiated that deal or create a confusion by not saying anything about a deal. If we negotiate a deal, users will know if because it will be written in the page description of the App itself and we’ll mention it too in our app.

You think that those are uncommon practices? Well, dig in the App discovery space…you ll be surprised.
The same way we created an AppScore for app quality, we have a DealScore which indicates whether the App is offering a real deal or not.
Most users don’t need to know about this. They need to feel we provide quality recommendations
They need to trust us. Because trust is what this is all about.

So What’s next?

We hope this post will open the eyes of many of our partners or potential partners but will also comfort our users that we’re bringing the best possible recommendations and elements of transparency in our products

In the meantime we hope that:

• App discovery services should be more transparent about what is advertising and what’s not for users and also for their customers.
• Developers should be more demanding about their providers for transparency in advertising
• We wish the same as IAB rules applied to the mobile app discovery space. Maybe someone is listening

NEW DESIGN

After designing the iPad version of Appsfire & App Deals, and redesigning the iPhone version of App Deals, it’s Appsfire for iPhone’s turn to be updated!

PRICE ALERTS

Like App Deals, Appsfire now allows you to set a price alert on the paid app you want. Just track as many apps as you’d like !

How to set a Price Alert:

• Search for an app by clicking the search icon in the top left (or spot it in one of our streams)
• Select the app (a paid one of course :p)
• Click on the bell next to the price button

See how it works on App Deals in the video below, it’s the same process on Appsfire

OTHER NEW FEATURES

We worked a lot to improve our app detector, and now we are happy to announce that My Apps is much, much sharper at detecting which apps you have installed. Last but not least, you can now check out the apps you’ve viewed or you’ve clicked in the past in the My Apps tab.

 

We selected for you a few apps you can download to enjoy your stay at barcelona and make the most of the conference. Specially if there is a public transport strike!

So what are we up to in Barcelona

Come listen Appsfire on Stage (Feb 27th, 2pm)

Appsfire won recently the MobileMonday contest in France and with other 3 startups will be presenting our activity Monday 27th at 2pm Hall2 E47, At the French Pavillon

If you want to know all there is to know about Appsfire in 10 min and want to ask us questions about app marketing, promotion and engagement here is your chance

The Appsfire TAPPAS meetup (Feb 28th, 7pm)

Appsfire is organizing a small local developers meetup on the 28th at 7pm in a very cool bar. Beer and Tapas are on us. Guess what we’ll talk about

Already 30 spanish developers have registered. If you are interested, fire us an email [contact AT appsfire dot com] – places are limited

Appsfire@WipJam (March 1st, 2pm)

We’ll have to honor – along with Bob Duffy from INTEL – to animate a WIP session on App Monetization on March 1st, in the App Planet Hall from 2 to 3.30pm.

So you have no excuse. We’ll be all around

Want to meet? Contact us on [CONTACT AT APPSFIRE DOT COM]

But how can you grow your app without really know who your users are?

Apps Stores are built in such a way that you don’t know the identity of your users. Only the App stores do. You may use some analytics service but they only tell you about how your app is used. Most app developers don’t bother with a registration form, because it causes friction with adoption and when they do, it is only [name. nickname.email.password] – meaning not helping you out.

Who really are your users? Are they male/female? what age group? what do they really like? What is their occupation?

The only way to know that is to ask about it?

This is important because it will help you improve your app in a much more compelling manner.

But how would you do it without being too intrusive? 

The answer is App Booster, our communication channel solution for apps. Use App Booster to broadcast a poll to your users in the app as they open it in a non intrusive way (in their inbox). You will get in a matter of hour a solid sample of your users population

We just ran it in our own app: 2 hours later we had 3000 answers which provided us deep insight about our user base. How could have done it differently? Hiring a market research company and paying lots of money for this. No way…

We used PollDaddy as a poll service. But you can use the one you want. Just display it as an in-app notification, choosing the in app browser option. And you’re done.

You really need to do that.

In anticipation of this imminent restriction (which in some cases already appears to be enforced as alluded to here or here), a number of actors have adopted a substitute open-source approach that Appsfire helped bootstrap: OpenUDID.

In no particular order: Inneractive, Trustee, adFonic, Greystripe, Crashlytics, Lumi Mobile and us, Appsfire, among others, are supporting, have implemented or are planning to implement OpenUDID in their apps and their processes, with many more in the process of joining.

Why does a UDID matter? 

App publishers need a reliable, consistent and transparent way to measure conversion rates between the source of a click to actual downloads.  Typically, banner ads or even Apple’s own iAd for that matter, keep a tally of how many clicks lead to how many downloads. Since downloads could come from anywhere, then it’s important to match with the source. On the web, cookies are used to accomplish this sort of tracking. Native mobile apps use a unique device identifier – which Apple will be removing anytime. No device identifier, no tracking, and no way for publishers to check whether their advertising campaign is efficient and whether they are getting their money’s worth.

Enter OpenUDID

OpenUDID meets the industry need highlighted above, and will safeguard prior investments if and when Apple flips the switch. It’s a drop-in replacement for the native UDID: open-source, transparent, cross-app, and persistent across reboots and restores. Something that the original UDID lacks is an opt-out system; OpenUDID has opt-out built-in. As a bonus, the community has already expanded on the initial OpenUDID implementation, now supporting Android and Mac OS X.

Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7+ implementation is sure to follow.

New opportunities

Third parties can even probe the OpenUDID structure and create apps or services around the tracking topic:

• Apps to help users opt-out selectively on their own device
• A service that produces reports on apps that use OpenUDID
• A central authority that validates best practices and provides seals of compliance

How does it work? 

Technically, OpenUDID uses a mix of local app storage for cache and safeguarding, as well as inter-app storage (custom pasteboards on iOS). This means that the system is decentralized, neither controlled by Apple nor anyone else.  The more OpenUDID is used, the more robust and prevalent and tamper proof it gets.

Other than that, the OpenUDID looks and feels the same as the native UDID, a 40 characters long hexadecimal string. For instance:

369416e16c373b617b2e4d151e01244c748c7b3e

OpenUDID vs. the MAC network address

Other initiatives involving the MAC (network) address have sprung up. Indeed, the MAC address can be considered as a fairly unique device identifier. And yet, it is a very sensitive piece of private information, sometimes used to authorize devices on private networks. We are totally opposed to using the MAC address (and we think that Apple and other platforms will too). Using this key for tracking will certainly lead to yet more malpractice, hacking and therefore security breaches, and then more deprecation from Apple.

Our message here: DON’T USE THE MAC ADDRESS! IT WILL FIRE BACK ON YOU!

The way forward

Move to OpenUDID today. It’s a plugin replacement. All you need is download some simple code from github http://openUDID.org
Feel free to contribute code, unique key generation, porting, etc… it’s easy to branch-out and grow the effort on GitHub.

Next: We are in the process of contacting Apple to let them know what the industry needs, and how to fix it permanently. In fact, you already know where this is headed: an opt-in panel inside the systems preferences, just like the one that already exists for Location/Notification and soon Address Book and Calendar events…

Rankings – regarded as the most popular discovery mechanism – are limited and gamed: as we saw recently many companies are using different systems through bots and or incentives to reach top rankings. And many companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to reach the App Store top visibility.

But really. How many different apps get really discovered through what is considered to be the TOP 25 rankings?

This is what we (Appsfire) wanted to find out. We surveyed all the main stores (US, UK and FR) – the conclusions are in the same order of magnitude for most stores

We analyzed in the last 30 days how many different apps made it in the top 25/50 Global free and paid ranking. We did then exactly the same for the largest App category: GAMES.

• Basically at best 0.05% of all apps make it in what can be visible in a top ranking
• More precisely between 50 to 350 unique Apps are really visible over a period of 30 days
• If you filter that to games the proportion is even smaller, which makes sense given how agressive they are marketed. For example in the US only 50 different games made it in the top 25 Paid Games category.
• Numbers don’t really change from country to country. The same pattern is observed

50 to 350 apps out of Half a million! 0.0 something %

Rankings are a broken discovery mechanism because they are only giving visibility on a small portion of apps, many of which are often the same. This is what generates frustration among users. Not at first but after a period of browsing them regularly.

In other words if Apple was simply deleting the top charts off the app store (which could actually be a good idea) that would not change a thing for 99.95% of the apps present in the app store in terms of how they really get discovered.

This is frankly this hard reality which pushes many app developers to look for all sorts of ways to get visible. Sometimes crossing the limits of what is tolerated by Apple. This is also what pushes developers and users to search for alternative discovery and promotion solutions.

Some may say our reviews are gamed, biased, etc… but the fact is that our reviews come directly from our users, genuine comments, from real users, daily users; yes, we feel entitled to brag about that a little!
 
Here’s another quote received directly by email via our CRM SDK system (which we launched yesterday, and that we use in our own apps):
 

Trivia, not so Trivial!

Did you know that there is a very small elite club of apps with a perfect 5 score and at least that many reviews? 160 apps in total, out of 550000+, that’s the 99.97% percentile. Appsfire App Deals is in that club.
 
Yes, you can tell, we’re very proud.