The GoodBarber blog

Product news, how-to guides and ideas to create, launch and grow your app.

Latest articles

  1 min read

Beautiful Apps Engine: Update #2319

Improve the quality of thumbs in article minimal templateBug fix: It's now possible to customize the background color of the header in the Swipe navigation mode

  1 min read

The frenchest of italians

Hi everyone! My name is Andrea and I'm from Milan. I've studied in Switzerland and in France, more precisely in Geneva, Annecy, Nîmes, Paris, and more recently in Aix-en-Provence, where I'm doing the last year of studies in software engineering. I speak french, italian and english, before coming here I worked on several projects: smartphone applications, robotics, but mostly on web development. What am I doing at GoodBarber? I joined GoodBarber's team in March to work on the new version of the engine for HTML5 Beautiful Apps, as well as on the real time preview for the new backoffice. What is my hobby? What I like to do when I'm not developing? At the moment I'm working on some projects about independent video games. I love my moto; I like to travel, to cook and listening to music (especially classic rock) and of course everything that has to do with High Tech.

  2 min read

How to distribute my app out of the stores

You are a small structure, and you don't want or need your app to be published on the App Store or the Google Play Store? It is possible to distribute your app internally, and we are going to tell you how. 

  5 min read

Gamification: A useful tool for your content marketing strategy

“It’s not about ‘gamifying’. It’s about driving revenue, saving costs, making people more efficient.” – Bob Marsh, CEO, LevelEleven Gamification is officially part of the set of marketing tools that every business should use to develop its marketing strategy. It is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game application to make them more fun and engaging. I’m sure that if you use even only social networks you know what I’m talking about. I spend so much time on internet and in the past months I found that many more brands are embracing a gamification strategy to engage their users and promote their products. The modality depends a lot on the brand, the platform chosen to gamify and type of gamification.  We can actually divide gamification into two big families: The first one is more visual and is closer to a real game, with levels, scores and social competition. It usually implies the development of a dedicated app or website and a higher investment.  We have an example of this with Nike  and the Nike+  app that they created. In 2011 they registered a 40% increase of subscribers of the app Nike+; this contributed to increase the business revenues of the running sector by 30%.

  5 min read

Facebook's f8 keynote: build, grow, monetize

This year's f8 conference was all about helping developers build, grow and monetize their apps. Facebook's main objective is to become a stable mobile platform for developers to build on top of.   I took the time to watch the keynote . It's a 1 hour video. If you have the time, go ahead, it's worth watching it. If you don't, I'll give here the main points covered.

  5 min read

User Engagement Metrics, going beyond the downloads

"Downloads only enable an app to succeed, they do not indicate actual success," says Brant DeBow , EVP of technology at BiTE Interactive .  As with every emerging phenomenon, the first studies are more simplistic, perhaps for a lack of data. At the beginning of the App trend, the studies made to understand and predict the user’s behaviour were essentially focused on the number of downloads. According to DeBow there’s much more to the success of the app than that.  With breakneck speed growth of the app industry, the available data increased and the studies of the metrics became more accurate. A few months ago we talked about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) on the “How to do the web analysis of my mobile app?” article.   Today the challenge is to relate some of these Indicators with app engagement. So I want to explore some of the metrics that I think are important for you to consider, to make your beautiful app interesting and engaging. Although there are other metrics I could mention, I prefer talking about the ones that are that are mainly used on all kinds of apps. So let’s start!

  4 min read

Useful tips to begin developing on iOS

The penetration of smartphones and number of apps in the market is growing more and more and at an equal pace the number of people who want to develop and build apps by themselves runs up.  The process of developing an App seems very complicated to most, for this reason I asked some questions to two members of our iOS developers team, Mathieu Fancello and Alex Manzella . The purpose of my interview was to find out the basic skills required to enter into the iOS development world, and then to share this knowledge with you.  

  1 min read

Meet us in Amsterdam this week :)

This week, I will be on the road again with Jerome. This time, we go to Amsterdam, The Netherlands to attend The Next Web conference Europe. Ping me @dsiacci if you are there (or if you live in Amsterdam ;) and want to have a coffee!

  1 min read

Happy Easter to all of you GoodBarbers!!

"All the GoodBarber's team wants to make their best wishes to all of you!! We are so attached to you that GoodBarber will be closed only tomorrow! Just the time to digest all the chocolate eggs we are going to eat today. But we will come back on Tuesday, stronger and ready for a week full of surprises!"  

  8 min read

How to create a good app for a news website?

A few days ago, I was talking with Jerome and Arianna about the frequently asked questions we receive from our users, and about the subjects we should handle on this blog to answer these questions. We've realized that you now have quite a bit of experience with our service and you have created apps for wide range of contents. So instead of talking about the technical aspects of the creation of an app, about which you surely already know tons, I decided talk about how to organize your contents in order to deliver the best possible user experience. In this article, I'll give you some insight on what is the best way to plan and design your app. The first and most important thing you should know is who your readers are, so you can find the best way to arrange and structure your app.

  3 min read

The Do's and Don'ts when turning your WordPress site into a native mobile app

Everyday, I'm in contact with people who have a WordPress site and want to turn it into a mobile app. It's not surprising since more than 19% of the web runs on WordPress   During the conversation, we always end up speaking about the best way to make this transformation, so I thought about sharing this with you in this blog post.

  1 min read

Guten Morgen! GoodBarber passed the German exam!

Hello everyone! We are very proud to announce that the GoodBarber Portal and Blog are now available in German! So, for all of you germans who want to create native apps, we now offer one of the most advanced platforms in the world in your own language. Now, we know that most germans have no problems understanding english. But to be able to better connect with you, and to make your user experience more pleasant we thought that GoodBarber must exist in german. ;) Let's begin! I can't wait to see what the combination between our Beautiful App creator and the excellent artistic talent germans possess will lead to!

  1 min read

Beautiful Apps Engine: Update #2198

Auto enabling of Right to left texts when the language is arabicNow title can be displayed in 4 lines in articles and videos lists

  3 min read

It's the Golden Age in this Mobile Data world

The past was dominated by voice. Now we have moved into another decade, where digital services take the lion share of industry revenues.   The mobile analyst Chetan Sharma  had predicted that voice data would leave space to mobile data, the new big revenue source.  Only during the past year, mobile data service revenues grew by 20% reaching $24.8 billion, and it has become the primary growth driver for US mobile industry.