TeamPlay has created an SDK that will easily allow developers to add the TeamPlay group leaderboards as a built-in experience for gamers. The website promises that it takes minutes to get things up and running, as well as lower level API support to customize the integration.

If your app is TeamPlay enabled, you’ll be able to send your players’ score points, object collections, and other actions to the TeamPlay system in the cloud. These things are then added to the team totals. The concept here is simple – when people feel like part of a team, they’ll likely play longer and more intensely than they might as an individual.

This is a niche that’s been sorely needed since iOS gaming became a “thing.” The Portable Gamer (a 148Apps Network Site) put together something similar (yet horribly manual) back in 2009 with ClanWars, a way for players to sign up as a member of a competing website “clan” to compete as a team. It’s great to see something like TeamPlay now, as it will allow a much more user-friendly experience, handling all of the back end organization so developers and players don’t have to. While it’s surprising that Apple hasn’t added something similar into its own Game Center system, it does allow a third party like TeamPlay to come in and make some waves.

To sign up as a TeamPlay developer, head over to the TeamPlay website, or email developer@teamplaysdk.com for more details.

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The 148Apps team will be covering the Game Developers Conference again this year, and wanted to let you know about it.

If you’re a publisher or developer of iOS (or Android!) games, and you’d like to schedule a meeting with us, shoot an email to us at editor [at] 148Apps [dot] com and we’ll figure out a mutually beneficial time to meet up.

The conference is scheduled for March 7 – 9, with some pre-show sessions on the 5th and 6th. It’s a fantastic time for developers, vendors, and press covering the games industry to get together and talk about games. Game developers and publishers go to present on their latest game ideas and upcoming releases, gaming hardware and middleware companies go to show off their wares in the exhibitor hall, and the press gathers like excited gadflies, tweeting, posting, and emailing with abandon.

Keep an eye on this space and on our twitter accounts (@148Apps, @portablegamer) for all the important news from the show floor.

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“For so many app brands, December is a strategically critical month for app discovery,” said Micah Adler, Fiksu’s CEO. “What we witnessed during the month was a ‘land rush’ in which advertisers earnestly spent marketing dollars in order to achieve ranking before the traditional App Store freeze which then would generate substantial organic downloads through increased visibility.”

In other words, the higher the rank before the freeze, the better the visibility during the days when many folks are looking to put apps on their new iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads.

The chart above shows that cost in marketing per loyal user – someone who opens an app more than three times – peaked in December at $1.81 per. The chart below shows a similar high in December with 6.04 million daily downloads of the top 200 free US iPhone apps.

What we can glean from this data is that there is a circular activity loop here, in that mobile advertisers spent heavily, which in turn drove their exposure and rank on the App Store, which, in theory, will drive sales and/or in-app purchases (along with in-app advertising) during the freeze and beyond, thus giving them more money to spend on advertising. For more in-depth analysis from Fiksu themselves, see their indexes page. Data for their indexes come from over 11 billion moviel app actions (launches, tegistrations, in-app purchases) and more than 200 million downloads recorded by apps marketed with the Fiksu platform.

Fiksu, Inc. is a mobile app user acquisition platform that purports to intelligently raise an apps visibility in an over crowded and multi-marketplace market. It is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and was founded in 2008. For more details about the company, see their website.

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“Acquisition focused companies fit nicely into the typical accelerator models since that is what VC and angels fund, and of course we do want those kind of game companies and we do have the best well known VC’s and Angels coming to help in the game space,” said Burkett in a phone conversation last month. “Games are different, though, in that many times the dream of the a studio is simply to be a great long team studio and partner with great distribution, cross promotion and publishing networks when desired. We want an option for those studios too, and deals for revenue share from games does fit that option,” she continued. “What better way for them to become aware of a studio than to meet them face to face in a workshop?”

Game Dojos wants to connect the best of the business with the newest to the business, helping find some micro funding and even office space for program participants. “We’d love the game companies to come here,” Burkett said, referring to San Francisco, where Game Dojos is based, “but we’re also looking into the virtual thing. We’d prefer teams to relocate to SF if they can for the three months, however we are not going to refuse to take a strong talented team based elsewhere, and will talk to them individually for consideration.” They’re not just looking to fund the studios, then, but actually nurture them to help create “longer term companies,” she said.

How do game companies apply for admission into the program? There’s a simple form to fill out, and a website and FAQ to visit to get a sense of what Game Dojos is looking for. In our conversation, Burkett mentioned wanting to find studios that had already put together a game concept or demo, at least, to show that “they can produce.” The website now says that in order to be considered, studios must have a “working demo of a current or past game, gaming platform, or gaming tool to illustrate that your team can develop and execute an idea.”

Who are the industry vets that Game Dojos is working with? How about Disney Interactive Studios, PopCap, Glu, EA, IGN, TapJoy, and the Silicon Valley International Game Developers Association (SV IGDA), for starters? The list is only growing, according to Burkett.

Game Dojos is a new venture, but the staff are no strangers to the business. Burkett has been involved in game development since the early days of Macromedia and Shockwave. She also founded the HTML5 Developers Conference, Bay Area Game and App Developers Group, Games.js, SF Mobile Dev and chairs the Silicon Valley IGDA. Simon Amarasingham, COO of Game Dojos and pictured at right, and his brother, Kemal, founded dSonic, now one of the leading game audio companies in the US with credits on over 100 titles from AAA console titles like Bioshock and Brutal Legend to mobile and casual titles like Farmville and Gumdrop.

Be sure to head over to the Game Dojos website for all the specifics on the program, its partners, and links to forms and FAQs.

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In the chart above, Flurry shows the fact that developers are making more money on iOS than on Android, even as the numbers of Android OS enabled smartphones continues to increase, commanding as much as 53% of the market, according to an NPD Group study released yesterday as well. Here’s how Flurry puts it:

“Anecdotally, developers consistently tell us that they make more money on iOS, about three to four times as much. To be sure, we pulled a sample of in-app purchase data from a set of top apps with versions on both iOS and Android, comprising of several million daily active users (DAUs). Running the numbers, we find that, on average, for every $1.00 generated on iOS, the same app will generate $0.24 on Android.”

Which brings us to the next point. Flurry notes a definite discrepancy in the number of new projects by developers for iOS vs those for Android. The graphic below shows that developer support, as measured by the projects committed to on each platform, has declined from over a third to under a quarter of all new projects. Flurry attributes this to expanded availability of iOS devices on networks like Verizon and Sprint, as well as successful flagship product launches in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. They also note that Android does not have this kind of product focus, with a ton of different competing handhelds in the market.

Does this mean that Android is losing? Far from it, says the Guardian, quoting a post by Great Little War Game developer, Paul Johnson, in which he discusses the lucrative nature of developing on both platforms, especially with the recent $.10 sale on Google’s Android Market. Said Johnson,

“We’re on track to have taken around $125,000 by the end of this first sales quarter and that’s not too shabby a return in my book,” writes Johnson. “If you have an iOS game that’s pretty decent and you’re wondering about porting to Android, just do it.”

Bottom line? Seems like most developers are looking to iOS for their winter holiday income, while adding Android to the picture just makes good business sense. If developers can only commit resources to one or the other? Looks like iOS is the clear winner, at least for now.

Source: Guardian UK

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In a world where app development is by necessity becoming more cross platform, being able to access the top apps in a global market becomes more and more important. The developers plan to add Apple App Store next, hoping to be the first app to show the data of both markets at once. This can only help developers whose apps are on both stores. In addition, they plan on adding Verizon, NTT Docomo, Tstore, and Vodafone Android markets, more discovery features and a graph to help visualize accumulated rank and price change data.

For more details, see the App Rank for Android page on Facebook.

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The following two most popular items are, somewhat intuitively, watching video clips from a site like YouTube, and then listening to downloaded music, with 65% and 62% of surveyed tablet users, respectively. Reading electronic magazines and listening to streaming music are next on the list, each with a 57% score. Which, really, is pretty amazing in and of itself. Over half of the tablet users surveyed admit to reading, and more folks download music than stream it. Interesting.

Of course, the survey didn’t ask tablet users what they did with their devices in non-entertainment categories, so developers of productivity and business applications won’t be able to use much of this data. In the entertainment area, though, we see that smartphone users and tablet users surveyed listen to music about the same amount. The similarity ends, however, when looking at TV shows/Video, with the tablet users reporting a much higher percentage of watching. Maybe that bigger screen is in fact important?

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Air Sharing is a file sharing app, allowing users to interact with a large list of different file formats. It can connect to computers, create a wireless hard disk with your iOS device, share file with other users, and even print documents. It connects to many cloud services, like FTP, the now defunct iDisk, Dropbox and Box.net, among others.

Howell suggests that iCloud is now allowing developers like him to reduce costs, and use iCloud to store information for app usage, including Key Value Storage. This allows developers to leverage the free nature of the basic iCloud service instead of incurring server costs, or using higher priced options like Dropbox and Box.net.

Of course, developers will need to consider the down side of iCloud as well. There is no Windows or Linux support, yet. Many users may opt out of using iCloud, even for the basic 5G. If developing a game, for example, and storing a user’s high score on iCloud so it’s available to all copies of the game across iOS devices, developers will need to make sure there is a secondary system in place to meet the same needs for users without iCloud.

Are you planning on using iCloud in your app development workflow? Let us know in the comments below, or email us at editor at 148apps dot com with your story.

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Xylogic hopes to support app developers and publishers with this unprecedented type and volume of data by providing them with information on the type of apps that are being downloaded the most in the various markets around the globe.

As a quick example, their data show that Apple leads Android with 1.45 billion app downloads in August, globally. Android shows .64 billion app downloads in the App Market. Also, that iPhone and iPod touch consumers downloaded 8.7 apps on average in the month of August. However, in terms of growth, the Android Market is showing an incredible increase over a short period of time. Developers and publishers, while focusing on the huge iOS market, may be well served by having apps in the Android Market as well. This is the kind of strategic planning that can happen when data of this sort is made available. Xylogic will do so today.

Xylogic is based in Berlin, Germany, and bills itself as an app search company that helps users find the best apps across mobile platforms.  http://xyologic.com/ Their website allows users to use regular language expressions to look for apps across Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 7. Read more about the company and their process at their blog. Developers and publishers wanting to read the reports directly can download them from the website here: http://xyologic.com/app-downloads-reports

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Owen says,

“The goal is to get an idea of what the App Store economy looks like for games. The term “average” (or mean) gets thrown around a lot, but if you’re an iOS developer, you know that average is almost meaningless, because the massive hits on the App Store distort the mean. What is more important is the median, or what the middle game in the pack is making. I am hoping that, if enough people take the survey, we can start to get an idea of what that median is.”

Now, we all know that math is hard, but you can’t really do any kind of development without it. Owen plans to release the data in aggregate to help all independent iOS developers have a better sense of the market for their efforts. That sounds win / win to us.

A direct link to the survey is here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8BZFHRX

Head on over to Owen’s blog for more details or to contact him directly.

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The PhotoAppLink Initiative attempts to solve this problem via the open-source PhotoAppLink library, a mechanism by which apps incorporating the library can send photos from one app to the next without all that annoying save and re-launch. Created collaboratively by PocketPixels and CodeCrop, the feature is available right now in their and other photo editing apps: Snap!, Color Splash, Simply B&W, PicTools, AutoStitch, TrueHDR, Juxtaposer, Click! and Photogene.

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PhotoAppLink apps automatically detect other apps with the same library, and allow users to choose another compatible app with the PhotoAppLink interface. The second editing app is launched automatically, and the image is transfered in the background to the newly launching photo app, which frees up the user to continue to edit the photo. This allows for a much nicer user experience, and prevents the camera roll from becoming cluttered with several versions of each multi-app edited photo.

PocketPixels and CodeCrop both develop photo editing tools, so developing this initiative and code base together was a natural fit. The code is available on GitHub, a secure yet social coding hub that developers can use to share and disseminate code. The code is distributed as open-source, and includes good documentation to easily implement within any other photo editing app.

The developers hope to add more photo editing apps to the initiative in time, with several prominent photo app developers already on board to include the code in future releases, including PaperCamera, PhotoToaster, ColorBlast!, Color Range and MobileMonet.

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Typically, companies trying to deploy applications, for the iPhone especially, have to use a number of complex steps to move developed applications from the developer to testers or other enterprise users. The process can be confusing and involves many steps. AppBlade hopes to help manage this complexity from one simple, easy to use centralized location. The AppBlade folks believe that the best solution for using increasingly ubiquitous personal tools in enterprise environments is this more secure, company-focused service.

Here’s a handy video with more information.

AppBlade the company began in 2010 by a group in Boston, MA who found the app deployment and testing process difficult and labor-intensive. They decided to develop a deployment service from the ground up and offer it to other developers to benefit from. Pricing begins at $49 per month for a single development company and moves to a $49 per month per user for an enterprise solution tier.

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Competition for rank in the app stores indexes how many downloads are achieved per day by the top 200 apps in that store. The second index deals with the cost to acquire “loyal users,” those who open an app three or more times.

The data so far reveals that the top 200 iPhone apps in the U.S. averaged about 4.34 million downloads per day between March and June. The cost per user has risen to more than a dollar, to $1.08.

What does this mean to the app developer? According to Fiksu, developers and marketers can use the data from the top 200 iPhone apps to gauge how their own efforts to market their app stack up against the industry at large. In addition, the indexes can be used as a way to understand how variables such as iOS upgrades, sales of devices, advertiser demand and network advertising inventory can affect business goals. In other words, if there is a spike in downloads of the top 200, developers might expect a slip in downloads of their own non-top-200 app. Or, a lack of advertising space might help app publishers know that their per-user cost will be up within a current month.

More key data points from the March to June 2011 period include:

- App Store Competitive Index: April 2011 was the most competitive month–the Top 200 ranked free iPhone apps amassed an aggregate average of 4.610 million downloads per day. In May, this dropped to 3.78 million downloads per day but in June rose again to 4.505 million per day (a month in which Apple reported one billion total downloads).
- Cost per Loyal User Index: The index reported a steady increase: from $0.94 in March to $1.10 in May and $1.27 in June.

To read the full analysis and see the data, go to Fiksu’s Index pages.

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“Our goal at W3i is to provide app developers diversity in their options for getting their apps discovered,” says Andy Johnson, CEO, W3i. “We’re committed to constantly evolving our network and are excited to unveil this next step in the growing mobile economy.”

Developers interested in the W3i MAAP beta can apply to join the program by visiting http://www.w3i.com/maapbeta/

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In the creation of Lens•Lab, we had to figure out a way to create an art asset that contained visual detail that would scale from 10cm to 100m. we know Adobe Illustrator very well so we were hoping we could create the art asset there. The problem was this: we had to take this path in Illustrator and scale it programmatically in realtime over 4 orders of magnitude.

The solution we came up with is an Objective-C method that parses a specially prepared chunk of an Illustrator EPS file and creates a Cocoa CGPathRef object which one can then manipulate to one’s heart’s content.

If you’re a developer running up against a similar problem, click through to see the three step solution, and maybe even help refine the process a bit better as requested.

Got your own developer tip? Shoot an email to editor [at] 148Apps [dot] com with a link, and we’ll post it right here.

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“Ever since our launch six months ago our API has been our most requested feature,” said Todd Berman, VP of Engineering at Rdio. “Developers who have been looking for a way to integrate music into their web applications now have a way to do it easily, legally and accessibly. We’re also excited that our subscribers and the public will now be able to access Rdio content all over the web.”

Rdio’s API is currently being used at such diverse places as AOL, Grab.com, Tweetlouder, the Grammy Awards’ microsite and the MusicMapper app. To learn more about the API, developers only need visit http://developer.rdio.com . The affiliate program is managed through Linkshare.

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Equally stunning is the fact that the ads in the $500K figure are not even taking into account the many ads that up-sell customers to paid apps from the independent studio, either, further increasing their bottom line. “This is using only about 60% of those impressions for third-party mobile ads,” says CEO Julian Farrior. “The rest are used for house ads to sell premium product and further extend the free impression network.”

So, not only are these guys getting TONS of downloads across iOS and Android platforms alike, they’re getting their players to spend time within the free games, as well. That’s the lesson to developers right there – just because it’s a free game doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be fun. That may be too many negatives, but the point is that free games have to be fun. Yeah, that’s it.

According to the article, the developers say that their revenues have climbed quickly, with an expected doubling of the already huge $500K number in the next couple of months, for the holidays. It remains to be seen if this is merely a boast or marketing ploy, but we have to respect the current numbers alone, if nothing else.

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We’re proud to announce the launch of a new site, dedicated to archiving the very best in mobile apps, the App Hall of Fame!  We hope it will become the source for finding the very best of the best apps, long after their initial promotional buzz has died down.

With a voting process loosely modeled after the Baseball Hall of Fame, the <b>App Hall of Fame</b> will induct 12 new apps every month. The eligible apps are those that have been in the App Store for at least 6 months.  Initially we’ll be focusing on iPhone/iPod Touch apps, but we’ll open it up to iPad apps soon.  Next year? We expand further to cover other platforms.

Read the full announcement on 148Apps!

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Well, they’ve taken data from the use of their app, of course, which makes sense. What they’ve also put together is a little graph on the effect of getting featured in the store or marketplace of the respective devices. Waze runs on Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and iOS, and as such, has a pretty good perspective to compare stats from each service. Note the “Impact of App Stores on Daily Registered Users” below, to see that Apple’s App Store really brings in the registered users when the app is featured by Apple:

That’s pretty stunning, right? 230% increase in users, just from being featured by Apple on their App Store. Granted, the other stores and marketplaces have an increase, but not THAT much. See below for another sweet graph, this time showing the numbers over and above the average new registered users for *one week* after being featured. There’s a similar trend here, as well.

So, what’s the lesson here? Getting your app featured, in any marketplace or app store, is the way to go. If you have a choice as to where to direct your efforts, however, you’d be best served by getting featured in Apple’s App Store, for some obvious reasons.

Source: Waze Blog

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He used a fairly successful app, Audiobooks, about which he states:

“Our audiobooks app suite has generated well over 1.6 million downloads since it was launched and has consistently been in the Top 10 Book apps for its lifetime. The app provides the user with easy access to well over 3,500 public domain audiobooks as well as a few hundred modern titles available for In-App Purchase. While it may not be an Angry Birds, it is nevertheless a highly popular app with a well established user base.”

After a total of 5 days at the end of August, he found an average of approximately 1000 clicks per day, an average click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.24% and an average cost-per-acquisition (CPA) rate of $14.90. That’s not very good. In layman’s terms, that means it cost him almost $15 per sales of his $0.99 app. In comparison, he did a quick run on AdMob (another in-app advertising service) with the same banner, and got a 1.34% CTR and 1944 clicks in one day.

Smith attributes the low performance to the way Apps are typically found and sold through the App store, and less through advertising. Smith does not discernibly blame Apple or iAds. “I have tried just about every advertising platform around and have generally found none of them to be demonstrably effective,” he says. He goes on to praise iAds for creating a system with a more seamless purchasing experience than other ad networks, and also mentions how nice and professional the Apple representatives were throughout the process.

Source: CrossForward

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Backflip makes its money from a combination of in-game advertising and upselling players to paid versions of the games.

In May, AdMob’s Russell Buckley confirmed that Backflip was making $100,000 a month from using AdMob’s ad units in its games – which he said was half the developer’s monthly revenues.

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Over at Read Write Web today, we see a story that is sure to be of interest to developers of iOS applications and games:

Despite Antenna-gate and Android-boom, it appears as though venture capitalists and angel investors are still pouring money into startups developing iPhone and iPad apps. That’s the findings of a recent CB Insights report that examines the investment in the Apple ecosystem over the last 12 months.

According to CB Insights, investment in pure play iPhone and iPad startups has grown over 220% over the last year as compared to the previous year.

“Pure play” companies are those whose sole focus is building applications for iPhone and iPad. Between 2008 and 2009, there were 11 investment rounds over 10 companies, with almost $38 million raised. This year, over the same time period, there were 17 investment rounds distributed over 16 companies for a total investment of $120.6 million.

What this tells me is that the wave of iOS applications and games is still going strong, and that it continues to be a good bet to go into as a business. No, you won’t automagically make a billion dollars with a derivative game and some word of mouth promotion, but there are still many investors willing to give money to folks who solelyfocus on iOS apps.

(Source: Read Write Web)

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