Stuart Hall

New Blog

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I'm writing over on Medium these days.

Check out my latest blog posts.

I'm writing a book!

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I'm writing an eBook called "Secrets of the App Store". It's going to be totally free and available very soon.

Join the mailing list below to download it first.

An App Store Experiment Part 5 - The Finale

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you need to catch up first, here are the previous posts:

A bunch of interesting things have happened since part 4. Why is it the finale? Read on.

All The Things

In part 4 I added ‘All The Things’ as an in app purchase option.

This resulted in an overall increase in revenue compared to before 'All The Things' was introduced and it also became the major revenue stream.

I’d call that experiment a success, and I highly recommend you consider adding an option to bundle in app purchases to your own apps.

HealthKit

As Apple describes it : "HealthKit allows apps that provide health and fitness services to share their data with the new Health app and with each other. A user’s health information is stored in a centralized and secure location and the user decides which data should be shared with your app." - Sounds like something that would work in 7 Minute Workout.

I wanted the app to offer HealthKit support as soon as Apple released it, so I made sure I added iOS 8, HealthKit and iPhone 6/6 Plus support well before launch and submitted to the App Store.

iOS 8 rolled out during the night in Australia and I woke up to this:

I also had a missed call from a U.S. number. After some frantic Googling I found some headlines like this one suggesting "Apple reportedly has pulled HealthKit-compatible apps from the App Store" and that "Apple appears to have discovered a significant last-minute issue with its HealthKit services". Phew, at least it wasn't just me.

Apple were actually amazing during the process, constant calls keeping me up to date and getting my app (sans HealthKit) approved and back on the store within 36 hours with no loss of rank or search position.

I had a bunch of confused users who had the app update with HealthKit, only to have it removed soon after. Luckily being able to add a FAQ remotely via (shameless plug!) AppbotX dried up the support requests.

App Preview

Even though HealthKit didn't come through for me on the iOS 8 launch I did manage to get my App Preview live and Apple Australia were kind enough to feature it.

A big shout out to fellow Perth app dev Adam Shaw who helped me create the App Preview. You should checked out his app called Dressed, it's very cool.

HealthKit Take 2

With iOS 8.0.2 came the actual launch of HealthKit.

I was away speaking at a conference in Melbourne (and then for two weeks of travelling with my family) when the app was featured in a special Apps For Health promo on the App Store home page in the US:

Which resulted in the following sales:

The best ever days for the app, bigger than even the New Years.

It also generated a bunch of press over the next few days like this, this, this and many more.

Getting Featured

A big lesson from both adding HealthKit early and the App Preview was that you need to give Apple every opportunity to feature your app. Believe it or not Apple are on the lookout for apps to feature.

What better way to stand out than being one of the first to get behind a feature that Apple is about to launch.

How is your WatchKit integration going?

Acquired By Wahoo Fitness

Wahoo Fitness produce great app-connected sensors and were featured at the 2014 WWDC Keynote. Their new TICKR X sensor is a heart rate monitor and it can also track exercise repetition movement.

So when Mike at Wahoo emailed me back in May about 7 minute workout, and how it might integrate with their suite of products, I was intrigued.

Over the next two months we had a few discussions, but it stalled as I didn't feel finished with the app, and they weren't quite ready with their device.

Fast forward to November and things changed. I'd been head-down working on Appbot and Wahoo came back with an offer to buy 7 Minute Workout. The timing was right and I'm confident it will be in good hands

Everyone I have dealt with at Wahoo has been amazing. From Chip and Mike early on, JP and then Dave and Ben during the handover, thank you.

They have big plans for the app: there are already multiple custom workouts, new videos and integration with TICKR X to count repetitions. I know later this month there are some more great features coming, and even an Android version in the works.

I can't wait to see it develop over the next year.

Final Stats

2.3 million Downloads
7.7 million Updates
$72k Profit
Dozens of amazing emails, Tweets and messages from people who were in part inspired to start developing apps thanks to these blog posts. Thank you to everyone that sent feedback or read the posts.

What’s Next For Me?

My plan now is to concentrate on Appbot full time, which is something I’ve wanted to do for some time. We have so many exciting features coming soon, many of which have been inspired by this experiment like the new Sentiment Dashboard. The excitement of an early stage startup, the highs of adding and serving a new paying customer, talking to customers and building what they want is amazing. It's pretty addictive.

There will definitely be more app experiments ... in fact maybe they are already happening :-)

Final Words

One thing that Chip (the CEO of Wahoo) said to me on the first call we had will stick with me for a long time ... "We probably wouldn't have considered buying your app if we hadn't read the story".

I was just looking back at the first point in the first paragraph of part 1 of the experiment

"How important is it to create a story around your product?"

I think I'll call that a 'very important'.

Thanks Bernadette.

App Store Rings in 2015 with New Records

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Apple came out with some pretty remarkable numbers in their latest press release.

"the first week of January set a new record for billings from the App Store℠ with customers around the world spending nearly half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases"

"These milestones follow a record-breaking 2014, in which billings rose 50 percent and apps generated over $10 billion in revenue for developers. To date, App Store developers have earned a cumulative $25 billion from the sale of apps and games."

So the App Store is still growing at 50% year over year. Amazing.

Forbes also have a detailed write up on the press release.

You Can Ignore Your Competitors, But Don’t Ignore Their Customers

Sat, 10 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

When I was building Appbot to track my own app reviews I never imagined that a few years later many thousands of apps would be using it, nor that the customers would teach me so much.

Much has been written about wether or not you should worry about your competitors or completely ignore them. A quick Google search brings ups many opinions one way or the other. Every business has its own strategy with regard to this and of course it’s your call.

It’s also widely accepted that watching and listening to your customers is critical to building a product that people want. Many of us who are working to create products and services people love in order to build sustainable businesses, spend a lot of time and money getting feedback from potential customers.

When we do it right listening to our customers helps us to find our difference. It’s a lot easier to refine your product to more closely align with what customers want if you know what they want. And it’s a lot easier to fill the gaps that your competitors are leaving wide open by listening to their customers.

The Internet has given us all this golden opportunity to listen. Your customers are showing and telling you what they want and your competitor’s customers are showing and telling you how to be better by leaving reviews.

So why not start listening to your potential customers? Chances are your competitors aren’t.

How Not to Treat Your Customers

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was hanging out with my wife and kids early on Sunday morning (I try and leave my phone out of reach to disconnect, have some family time and not be tempted to check emails).

In the distance I heard a new message come in, my wife looked at me and said "you better go check that, it must be important for someone to be messaging at 8:14am on a Sunday morning".

Here was the message from my telco Telstra (the biggest Telco in Australia).

So Telstra decided to spam me at 8am on a Sunday to say I can bar spamming? Brilliant. So I Tweeted them to see how I can opt out of this.

@Telstra how do I bar you from spamming me at 8am on a Sunday? pic.twitter.com/LwwcANWwap
— Stuart Hall (@stuartkhall) November 30, 2014

Six hours later they had still ignored me, even though I checked their account and they had been happily replying to others. So I followed up again and this time success!

@stuartkhall Hi Stuart, sorry about that. Are you referring to your tweet re the SMS you received? - Patrice
— Telstra (@Telstra) November 30, 2014

Derp. Yes.

@stuartkhall Texts are automatically generated by our system. No avenue to stop the texts atm however I will forward on feedback for you-P
— Telstra (@Telstra) November 30, 2014

Wow.

I read that Tweet as "No you can't opt out and we don't really give a shit." Plus, as someone pointed out on Twitter, I'm not sure it's even legal with the Spam Act.

I realise Patrice is just doing their job and replying to hundreds of annoyed customers a day, but this is an attitude that spreads from the top.

Looking the stream of their Tweets every second tweet is them asking for something, saying you have to phone up or them advertising.

Luckily for those of us trying to grow small companies, the contempt towards customers from companies like Telstra leaves the door open for us to care and make a difference.

Thanks Telstra.

The Best iOS Libraries

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone has their favourite iOS libraries that they drop into all their projects, here are mine.

Networking - AFNetworking - there aren't too many projects that don't require some sort of network communications and AFNetworking is king.
Blocks - BlocksKit - UIKit is still missing a bunch of places where blocks are super useful (hello UIAlertView & UIActionSheet), and BlocksKit is my go to library.
Support/FAQ/Feedback - AppbotX - No other choice, of course :)
Analytics - Google Analytics - again there are heaps of options for analytics, but I stick with Google Analytics for the price and integration with your website.
Side Menu - ECSlidingViewController - another one with heaps of options, but I have found this on the most reliable.
Core Data - MagicalRecord - Core Data requires a lot of boiler plate, which MagicalRecord wraps up nicely. Great if you also use Active Record with Ruby on Rails.
Progress - MBProgressHUD - a nice easy was to drop in a progress dialog.
Images - SDWebImage - a nice easy way to fetch (and cache) remote images.

What are your best iOS libraries? Tweet me and let me know what I am missing out on.

Why 60 percent of your users opt-out of push notifications, and what to do about it

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This was posted recently on Andrew Chen's site.

"In some product categories, over 60% of their users turn off push notifications. In others, a mere 20% do. That’s a huge difference when we’re talking about the primary method of retaining and engaging your mobile users. Recent data from Kahuna reveals that push opt-in rates vary widely across industries – ride sharing being the best performing, and social being the worst. Here’s a comprehensive look at the state of iOS push opt-in rates, as well as a roadmap for getting back on track if your app is trailing behind."

Fascinating read, if you are using (or plan on using) push notifications you must read this.

An App Store Experiment - Part 4

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Seven months have passed since part 3 was published. Here's what has happened since.

If you need to catch up first, here are the previous posts:

More IAPs

Part 3 left off where I had just submitted an update with some extra workouts as in app purchases.

By March everyone was over their new years resolutions (Unfortunately mine finished on January 1).

Ignoring the spikes (I'll explain them in a bit), downloads returned to where they were leading up to the silly season, between 2k and 2.5k a day.

Adding the new IAPs had almost zero impact on the original Pro upgrade (staying around $50-60 profit a day), but they did help to lift daily revenue to around $70 - $80 profit a day. Around a 40% increase in profits compared to late last year with similar download numbers, not bad.

If we break it down individually you can see the Pro upgrade was still the major income stream, but the workouts help supplement it.

Educational Downloads

The big spikes you saw above were educational downloads, 25k, 25k and 5k. I believe it is part of Apple's education program. I love the thought of entire schools out there doing the 7 Minute Workout. If you know any of the school please reach out to me.

All The Things

One thing I had noticed in a number of apps with IAP is their top download was an option to buy everything, forever.

So I tried it (this is Australian pricing, US it's $4.99 / $1.99).

And people seemed to like it:

Except it's meant the other in app purchases have taken a nose dive. But overall profit is up to around $145 per day for the first week or so. Update spike or long term trend? I guess we'll see by Part 5.

Reviews & Feedback

One problem I've always had is after an update is the reviews reset and I am stuck back at square one.

I recently launched AppbotX to help developers get app better app reviews and communicate with their customers.

I put in the FAQs, Feedback, Notifications and Review Prompt from the service.

Thanks to the FAQs general support has dropped from ~2 a day to 1 in a week.

I put the review prompt after a positive interaction, in this case when they finish a workout.

If they like the app it asks them to leave a review:

Otherwise it asks for feedback:

The results are awesome, here's the current reviews on the US App Store:

And here is an example of some of the reviews Appbot sent through in it's daily digest.

I've also received great feedback, 80% of which can be grouped into two things:

Lots of people want an abs workout.
They want an easier way to review how to do each exercise during the workout.

I may be a little (a lot) biased, but you should check out AppbotX.

Indie Development

Much has been written about being an indie developer on the App Store recently, with not much of it positive.

I think this experiment has shown us a few really important things.

Go with pricing models that are being proven to work.
As much as we all hate it, market is more important than product (but both are extremely important).
SEO and ASO are extremely important, and often overlooked.

I been doing a bunch of consulting recently where I go through apps for developers and give them feedback on how to improve their downloads. Many of these apps are getting only a handful of downloads a day. They have the same thing in common, they have done no work on SEO/ASO and if you look at their App Store page you'd have no idea what their app does.

You know how much development work you put into the app? Put at least half that again into your communication, visiblity and story.

The Stats

1.95m downloads.
5.5m updates.
$60k in revenue.

What's Next?

Next I want to experiment with the pricing of All The Things, are people willing to pay more? I'll also add an abs workout and better prompting based on the AppbotX feedback.

What to know what happens next? Join the mailing list below.

What Makes A Successful App Store Name?

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

You can find an update of this blog post here

I was recently discussing app names in the App Store with a fellow app developer. I'm not talking about that awesome 4 letter name with no vowels that you spent three weeks debating and looking up domain names. I'm talking about the name you choose to show at the top of the app store.

Only Apple knows exactly how the search algorithms work, but it's widely agreed that the app name gives us the opportunity to sneak in a few more keywords and help sell our app.

Some examples are:

Flipboard: Your Social News Magazine
Minecraft - Pocket Edition
SoundCloud: music & audio - discover and stream songs, artists, podcasts and news
TracknShare - A universal life management diary tracker to journal, track, analyze, improve & share chronic health symptoms, such as pain and sleep, my work life, food, weight, wellness & the Quantified Self.

You get up to 255 characters on iTunes, and some developers manage to use every last one of them, a skill in itself.

However, many products are big enough to just use their name like Twitter, Vine, Facebook, Pinterest etc.

Some products choose to just add their main keyword Spotify Music, Pandora Radio etc.

So what do the top ranking apps do?

Names

I looked at the top 200 apps in each category for both paid and free iPhone apps, 8400 apps in total.

Although some developers use up to 49 words (and all 255 characters), the majority are around 4-5 words (24-35 characters).

Around one third of apps use a delimiter / separator like 'Flipboard: Your Social News Magazine'.

Word Count

Looking at the distribution of word counts it looks similar to what our median revealed above, most apps are using 1-5 words.

Character Count

Most people will only see up at ~30 characters (depending on the wrapping) in your name when viewing it on an iPhone, so it's not suprising that most apps try and stay within this limit. You only get a maximum of 30 characters on Google Play.

Keywords

Next I looked at the main words that are used in the names.

Words you would expect like Free, Pro, Weather, Calculator etc appear often.

The one that jumped out at me as suprising was 'tracker', but sure enough there are a lot of tracker apps in the top charts.

Another one that surprised me was just how many third party Instagram apps there are.

Other popular apps like Minecraft (my son has probably downloaded all of these), Facebook and Youtube are also heavily targeted.

Words vs Ranking

Unfortunately there is no magic bullet, there's no clear stand out about what works when you look at the number of words against ratings.

My Tips

As expected there are no easy ways to the top of the charts. However, using a name around 4-5 words long gives us the oportunity to sell our story, not look too spammy and sneak in a few more keywords.

My Tips:

Pick a name that looks authoritive. Using 255 characters doesn't make me think you are the number one app for the job.
Don't add too many words, stick with 2-7.
Use your name to tell us your story, why should I download it?
Pick a name that grabs my attention without seeing the icon or screenshots.

Looking through the top charts I picked out a few apps I thought were named really well.

Tell your app name to a stranger and ask if they know what it does. If they look at you like you're a complete idiot because it's so obvious you're on a winner.

What's Next

Next I am looking into app store descriptions, icons and screenshots, join the mailing list below to get the details first.

Developer Economics Q3 2014: State of the Developer Nation

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Really interesting report came out recently about developer economics.

Key takeaways for me were:

"Third party tools are a critical part of successful app businesses. There’s a strong correlation between tool use and revenues, the more tools a developer uses, the more money they make."
67% of mobile app developers primarily target consumers and 11% target professionals directly. The 16% of developers who target enterprises are twice as likely to be earning over $5k per app per month and almost 3 times as likely to earn more than $25k per app per month.
2% of all app developers pull in over 50 percent of all app revenue.
47% of devs either make literally no money.

Pretty damning stats.

Check it out here

Big thanks to Claire for pointing it out to me.

AppbotX - Your Mobile App Customers Deserve Better Communication.

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I'm really excited to announce AppbotX is here. It's the culmination of all the things I have learned about keeping customers happy and getting better reviews.

AppbotX provides feedback screens, FAQs, inline downtime & news notifications, version updates and review prompts for your mobile app. All built natively and specifically for mobile, controlled remotely from the AppbotX servers.

I'd love to hear any feedback you have.

Find out all the details

App Review Word Clouds

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

After being prompted by a support email, I started wondering what words people use in app reviews. So I thought I'd dig into the Appbot data and see what I could find.

Note that this data is only for reviews in the past week of the 34,000 apps that Appbot collects reviews for (approximately 200,000 reviews). The most common words appeared up to 80,000 times.

So armed with the cool jQCloud jQuery plugin here is what I found.

I present them without much comment, I'll let you make your own conclusions.

All Reviews

I did remove a number of the most common (and I thought uninteresting words) like 'the', 'a' etc. You can see the raw image here.

5 Star Reviews

Given the majority of reviews are 5 stars I didn't expect this to be a lot different, and it wasn't. A few words like 'awesome' become a little more prominent.

Raw image here.

1 Star Reviews

What does the other end of the spectrum look like?

This was probably my fav, I found myself trying to recreate reviews in my head with the words.

Raw image here.

3 Star Reviews

Now for middle of the road. 'But' made me laugh, I imagined "It's great, but...".

Raw image here.

It would be an interesting experiment to try and repeat the test for phrases, something for another day.

Hope you found it interesting.

Which Languages Should I Localize My App Into?

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A question I wanted the answer for AppbotX recently was : "Which languages should I localize apps into?".

After a bit of Googling I couldn't find answers with data to back it up, nor could I find much good data around where apps are being used.

So I turned to the Appbot data to see where reviews are coming from. I believe there would be a good correlation between usage and number of app reviews left.

Looking at the last month (approximately 1 million reviews for 34,000 iOS apps) here was the top countries and their major languages:

Collating that together I got:

Conclusion

Languages You Must Do

You really should localise to English and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), this will get you 53% coverage by my numbers.

Second Round

Next look at Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Portuguese and Korean, this will get you to almost 85% (probably even higher, I didn't look at all the countries of in long tail countries, many more of them probably also speak these languages).

The Long Tail

I didn't take the time to look beyond these top languages, but some other languages like Thai, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish, Malay, Danish, Vietnamese etc (this list could get really long) will help you get closer to 100%.

If you are looking to localize I have always been happy with ICanLocalize.

Did I miss anything? Let me know on Twitter.

iOS 8 App Reviews

Sun, 06 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I wrote about the bad reviews developers were receiving while iOS 7 was in beta. Unfortunately with iOS 8 it's happening again.

Here is a selection of reviews from Appbot that mentions iOS 8 and 'crash' or 'bug'.

I feel for these devs.

Surviving Working From Home (Even With Kids)

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I've been very lucky throughout my career to have a lot of flexibility in where I work. I've tried everything from a few days a year to full time from home.

I'm currently in my third stint in working from home the majority of time, and I think I've finally started to get the hang of it. My perspective is as a developer with kids, but many of the thoughts below apply to any situation.

Firstly, be honest with yourself. Is it for you?

Working from home can be fantastic for introverts like myself, but if you are an extrovert that thrives on being around other people and lots of background noise then it may not be a wise decision.

Have a dedicated space.

It's an obvious one, but many people still overlook it. Have a dedicated room where you can shut the door and block out everything else.

Make the space you

Decorate the space so it reflects you, somewhere you would want to hang out. I love live music, so I've covered my walls with gig posters I have collected over time.

Have dedicated sub spaces within your room

A change is as good as a holiday, no matter how small the change. If I find I'm not being productive at my desk, then I move the one of the other spaces within my room like the couch, been bag or standup desk area.

Here is my little space. Simple, but I love it.

Remove distractions

If you're a gamer, like to read RSS, Hacker News, Twitter, Flipboard etc then make this very separate to your work laptop/devices. Have a dedicated iPad (or dedicated gaming machine) to use for entertainment. This device should live on the coffee table or in another room. Similarly your MacBook is only for work, not fun, and stays in the office.

Music

I find music a great way to block out background noise. Sometimes I even like to wear headphones to focus in, even though there’s nobody else in the room.

Here is one of my favourite artists to work to:

Open the window

Here is one you don’t get in most offices. Open the window and get some fresh air! It’s amazing how much better and more productive you will feel.

Be flexible

Kids leave for school at 8:30am and get home at 3:15pm, accept it and set aside 15 minutes around these times to hang with them. I drop off and pick up my kids from school a couple of days a week, not because I have to, but because it's amazing to see them in their element. I feel bad for those parents that work 8-6 and never get to see that.

Meetings

You can’t completely avoid meetings, well at least I haven't found a way to (yet). Instead of dreading them, use them as a way to get out and meet new people. I try and get all meetings on the same day every few weeks. I think its better to write off a day rather than be interrupted on multiple different days. Meet at coffee shops, at their office or even for lunch.

It doesn't have to be every day

I currently work at a clients office two days a week, it's a great way to break up the week. A co-working space, coffee shop or library is another great option for a change of scenery.

Exercise

The one I really fail at working from home is getting enough exercise. Walking to/from the bus or car, walking up the stairs at the office and so on really help and you miss out on these working from home. You need to keep this in the back of your mind, walk the kids to school and walk to the coffee shop, whatever you can to replace that lost movement.

Do it

Working from home can be fantastic, it can take time, planning, training and understanding from others, but is well worth it.

Lean Canvas

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently reading the fantastic book Running Lean by Ash Maurya and then did a great startup bootcamp with Pollenizer. Both preached the values of the lean canvas to model your product or business.

When using the tools to create a lean canvas like spreadsheets and pieces of paper I found them frustrating and clunky.

So Lean Canvas for iOS was born:

Here is how the app looks:

Now I create a lean canvas before all my apps and projects, it's a great way to flesh out the idea.

Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I've been an iOS dev for 5 years and have always managed to avoid Android, until now. But believe it or not it's actually a lot of fun, and not that big of a jump from iOS development.

Here is a bunch of things I learned building 7 Minute Workout for Android, I hope you find them useful. Note that not everything I compare below is an exact match and it's not a complete overview of Android developent, but it does cover everything I learned building a simple app.

IDE

I chose to use Android Studio, I'm taking a punt that this will become the standard once it comes out of beta. There are a lot of reports of it being unstable, but I only had one crash. Maybe I'm just used to Xcode.

Java

Say what you will about Java, in the end it's just another language. It does the job and if you are an experienced developer you are going to spend a lot more time getting your head around the framework than battling Java. Be thankful there is no J2EE in sight.

Simulator

I used to think the iOS simulator was painful, now I realise it's pretty awesome. Skip the Android simulator all together and deploy to a real device, or be prepared to spend a lot of time waiting.

Storyboards / NIBs

After bagging out Storyboards in my iOS development post and getting a few strongly worded emails disagreeing with me, I'm not going to go there again.

Android uses Layouts which are xml. They are completely independent from each other. Android Studio also has a nice WYSIWYG editor:

But you can still dig into the raw xml if you like (and I did more often than not).

Instead of Auto Layout you can choose the layout container, such as RelativeLayout, FrameLayout etc. There you can choose width / height / padding / margins / gravity based on either pixels (dp - device pixels) or things such as matchparent, wrapcontent.

Wrap-content is quite nice for text, it automatically sizes to the correct height and pushes the rest down in certain layouts like LinearLayout.

I didn't get to use them, but Fragments also look like a really nice way to re-use custom UI elements.

UIViewController

Android's equivialent to UIViewController is an Activity. Each screen / window is an Activity. Here is where you'll do most of the binding of data to the UI, handle events etc.

Transitioning Controllers / Views

In iOS we use segues, pushViewController, presentController etc to move between screens. In Android you use an Intent.

You can easily move to a new activity, and even pass some data through.

public void onItemClick(...) {
       Intent i = new Intent(getBaseContext(), MyActivity.class);
       i.putExtra("row", position);
       startActivity(i);
}

In your new Activity (MyActivity above) you can then pull out the passed data:

protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.activity_mine);

    Bundle extras = getIntent().getExtras();
    if (extras != null) {
        int row = extras.getInt("row");
        ....
     }
     ...
 }

You also use an Intent to trigger things such as sharing sheets:

 Intent sendIntent = new Intent();
 sendIntent.setAction(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
 sendIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "Share This");
 sendIntent.setType("text/plain");
 startActivity(sendIntent);

IBOutlet

If you are anything like me you forget to connect IBOutlets at least 50% of the time every time.

With Android every view/component has a unique ID, something like:

@+id/myButton

Which is then automagically generated into a class called R (learn more about R here), you can access the button in code then with:

Button button = (Button)findViewById(R.id.myButton);

Tag

A trick often used by iOS devs is to use the tag of a view to hold lookup information, such as offset in arrays. With Android you can shove the entire object into the tag; pretty useful.

row.setTag(data);

UITableViewController / UITableViewDataSource / UITableViewCell

Android's equivialent of a UITableView is a ListView.

The rough equivialent of UITableViewDataSource is an ArrayAdapter:

    MyAdapter adapter = new MyAdapter(this, R.layout.listview_item_row);
    listView.setAdapter(adapter);

Where listviewitemrow is a Layout of a row, roughly equivialent to a UITableVIewCell.

The adapter then creates / reuses rows through getView.

You can also set headers:

    View header = getLayoutInflater().inflate(R.layout.listview_header_row, null);
    listView.addHeaderView(header);

There are a bunch of good tutorials on the web like this one.

Images / Resources

Images have become much nicer to deal with since Asset Catalogues came about on iOS, and usually there is only retina and non-retina to deal with (unless you have iPad specific images as well).

Because of all the different resolutions of Android devices you have to provide 4 images.

These are : mdpi (medium), hdpi (high), and xhdpi (extra high), xxhdpi (extra extra high). I'm personally looking forward to the xxx version.

When you create the project in Android studio you can provide an icon and it will automatically create the different sizes. To any designers out there now having heart palpitations: it's ok, you can go in later and replace with pixel perfect versions.

So the basic idea is to create a version of each image for each density, name it the same and put it in the correct folder, then Android will pick up the correct one.

Custom Font

Custom fonts are pretty easy to do on Android as well: copy the font into main/assets, then you can load it up with:

        Typeface font = Typeface.createFromAsset(getAssets(), "Lato-Regular.ttf");
        textView.setTypeface(font);

The word is that this is unrelaiable on all devices, so you need a try/catch and fallback font, haven't seen it in my vast collection of two Android devices though.

NSLog

Log seems to be the go to solution here, you can specify debug, verbose etc. System.out.println(..) also seems to do the job.

Backwards Compatibility

We've all heard about how fragmented Android is. Turns out gracefully handling older versions is not very different to the tricks you have to use to use new iOS features while supporting older iOS versions. Although, you probably have to keep these tricks around longer and do them a lot more often.

There is a nice constant to check the current version:

if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= 11.0)  {
...
}

You can suppress the warnings for a function using:

@SuppressLint({"NewApi", "LocalSuppress"})
private void myFunction() {
...
}

Things That Were Just Plain Weird

CountDownTimer

CountDownTimer - I was pretty excited that this functionality was built in, it was exactly what I needed for 7 Minutes. Except it turns out that it doesn't send the last onTick before onFinish (link), totally bizarre bug that still isn't fixed. Weird, very weird.

Orientation

When the user rotates the device your activity is completely reset, meaning you have to store state and resume after it has reloaded. A weird one to get your head around coming from iOS where it continues to function nicely.

Kindle Fire / Amazon Store

Getting into the Amazon Store is pretty simple, I only had to tweak two things:

The YouTube SDK wouldn't work because it requires the YouTube app, which isn't available, but it does appear to support flash.
You'll need to swap out the in app purchase code for the stores.

You can detect manufacturer and model using android.os.Build.MANUFACTURER and android.os.Build.MODEL.

A list of the Kindle Fire model details are here.

What Next?

Hopefully I'll add to 7 Minutes and get to build some more Android apps in the future, I'm sure I've only just started to scratch the surface. Who knows, there could even be a part 4 to An App Store Experiment.

Difference

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I've often thought about how some products have that little something, a difference. How did they get that, and what makes it?

I was lucky enough to be given an advanced copy of a book last week by one of my favourite bloggers Bernadette Jiwa from The Story of Telling called Difference.

So many light bulbs went off reading this book and the Difference Map is genius, I hope a lot of accelerators and Startup Weekends start using it.

It's only a few dollars for the Kindle version so I highly recommend you grab a copy now.

An App Store Experiment - Part 3

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It's been over five months since I posted part 2 of this experiment, in that time I have done pretty much nothing on it.

It turns out that nothing has been pretty interesting.

Why Have I Done Nothing

The startup I was co-founder of Discovr went through a relaunch and eventual wind up. It's been a pretty draining and emotional time over the last few months. I love the team and expect them all to go on to great things.

Part 2

Part 2 of the experiment was really well received. Links from well respected blogs drove a lot of traffic:

Marco Arment - Stuart Hall’s App Store Experiment
Mac Stories - Stuart Hall’s App Store Experiment
iOS Dev Weekly - An App Store Experiment

Downloads

For the rest of 2013 the downloads didn't achieve the levels of the early days:

But if we look past the early craziness, downloads are still strong and flat, in the vicinity of 2,500 per day.

Note, that all these downloads were achieved by either App Store discovery or word of mouth. I didn't do any other promotion.

Sales

So with steady downloads I'd expect steady sales numbers, right?

Sales were in steady decline over 2013, which can be seen even more easily with a cumulative graph.

Almost 70% of the profit was from the US.

In App Purchase Price

Here is the one place I did a little bit of work, I experimented with the in app purchase at 99c, $1.99 and $2.99. I ran each of them for one week and as you can see from the profit charts above it was very flat. Any increase (or decrease) in price was offset be the number of purchases.

Australian Feature

Apple were kind enough to feature the app on the front page in Australia, which isn't the biggest store but this still had a very positive impact on sales and downloads. The app even reach number two overall on the free charts, just behind Apple's 12 Days of Gifts.

Christmas and New Year - Resolutions

Christmas saw the millionth download and some significant spikes in both sales and downloads. The new year took it to a new level. Profits were steady through most of November and December at $50 a day. During the first half of January that figure quadrupled to $200 a day. New year resolutions are definitely a positive for fitness apps.

The Stats

1,412,803 downloads (5,697 per day)
$27,317 in revenue

Part 4

Even though the stats look pretty healthy, the revenue per user is crazy low at at around 2 cents per user.

So the big unanswered question left for me is what would people be more willing to pay for? I've had complaints about having to upgrade for features, so would people be more willing to pay for more content instead?

As of today version 2 is available with two new workouts as in app purchases. The updated version also has some great new videos from efit30.com.au who are in the process of remaking all the videos for the app.

What will this do to sales? Stay tuned! You can follow me on Twitter - stuartkhall.

Continue to part 4