Isabella Leland, Friday 1 August 2014

How to Build a Community Around Your App

Be it a real or virtual, it's not easy to create a community! It takes time and a lot of dedication... When it comes to apps in particular, a strong sense of community among users is necessary, but also focusing on the right kind of features to make your app social. But before telling you how to achieve this goal, let's focus on the meaning of community, and why it's so important.
Safa Amari, Thursday 31 July 2014

Let's talk about technology in Arabic! Short geek English-Arabic glossary

In recent years, the internet has come a long way in the twenty-two Arabic-speaking countries. Arabic is now spoken by over 422 million people, and over 140 million internet users use Arabic as their main language on the web. They are increasingly using different applications, and regularly look for translations of various technical terms. However, their success is hampered by the fact that only 3% of content is available in Arabic. I also noticed a growing demand for definitions of technical terms from users, which in most cases are inaccessible in Arabic. Because of this, I wanted to participate in filling this gap by translating GoodBarber into Arabic. I also compiled a glossary of technical terms in the field of mobile applications, translated from English to Arabic. By speaking directly to Arabic readers, we want to facilitate their access to content.
Written on Wednesday 30 July 2014

Useful Tips to Start Developing on Android

According to Mobile Statistics, the number of Android devices sold reached the 156 million mark in the first quarter of 2013 alone, and there are now more than 1,3 million apps available on the Google Play Store. (source: Statista ). Have you ever wondered how to make an app? The web is full of tutorials where people share their knowledge about different subjects. As we have a team of app developers working daily with programming, we decided to ask two Android experts a few questions about Android Development. We already talked about iOS before, but today it’s Android time! Say hello to our special guests: Sérgio and Guido !
Written on Friday 18 July 2014

10 Ways to Get Good Reviews for Your App

For anyone who publishes an app, getting good ratings in the stores is important. Ratings play a big part in where the app appears in the rankings of the stores. Even if you’re not interested in rankings, you still don’t want your users to start out with a poor first impression of your app even before they’ve started using it.
Dumè Siacci, Thursday 26 June 2014

How I'll Buy my Next Car, or Why I Love CarPlay

A few months ago, Apple unveiled its strategy for conquering the in-car entertainment market. Even if we don't yet know very much about CarPlay , it's still interesting to think a bit about the perspectives it will offer, both from the point of view of the final user as well content creators.  Speaking with Jérôme and Arianna , I realized that this could radically change the way I think about cars.
Written on Thursday 19 June 2014

The shift of habits can hide new opportunities?

I grew up in a relatively big family. And I remember I had this period of my life, being a child, where I competed with everyone else at home in the marathon to pick up the phone that was ringing. It was a real thrill for me, having this feeling that someone on the other side of the line was going to speak with me, even if most probably I was not the person they wanted to talk with. On those days people communicated and related mostly within the reality of a local reach. The fix telephone had its own moment of glory in my life, so much, that it printed in me this feeling that turned into this happy memory that I share with you. This makes something very clear, all of us were made to relate, to communicate.
Written on Friday 13 June 2014

The Golden Rules for a Food and Recipes App

Who, if not me, the GoodBarber with the chef hat, could have written this article?! I remember standing in the kitchen about four years ago, surrounded by pots and pans, with my little booklet with recipes handed down for generations in my family, and also with those gathered at parties, dinners and birthdays. Who could have imagined that this little booklet could have been the prelude to a mass phenomenon, called Food Blogging. Once I became a vegetarian, though, my collection gave me little satisfaction, since it was full of recipes with meat sauce, ham and steak. Following the traditions of my mediterranean origins I started to eat only salads, until, out of desperation, I began searching for inspiration on the web.   During the last 4 years, things have changed a lot. Once upon a time, the web was something exclusive and the recipes you could find were mainly high cuisine, and too difficult and complicated for everyday cooking. No longer! The web, but also mobile apps, have something to offer for everyone. Finding recipes from countries on the other side of the world, or easy and original ideas for making the most out of what you have in the fridge, has never been faster and easier.    Starting a food blog now is very different now than it was 3 or 4 years ago. The competition is fierce and it’s no longer enough to segment your audience by choosing a small niche. If you already have a blog, my advice is to complete your offer by creating an app, complementary to your website. This will allow you to increase your audience and traffic, and become more competitive in the eyes of potential sponsors and investors. If this is an adventure you’re just starting, perhaps the smartest choice might be to go straight to mobile, avoiding the never-ending war between the giants of the virtual kitchen. Let’s find out why!
Erik Rossen, Wednesday 11 June 2014

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Use Push Notifications

It's important to understand what's unique about push notifications in order to be able to truly leverage them. If you think they’re just text, think twice. Misunderstanding the specificities of push notifications can not only make you miss out on their potential, in some cases it may even be damaging.
Written on Monday 2 June 2014

Crowdsourcing: How to tap into the knowledge of your users

As we know, crowdsourcing is an increasingly used problem-solving method because it is one of the most reliable, fast and cheapest ways to get a job done. Instead of spending massive amounts of money on R&D, many companies are now using online communities to solve tricky issues, discover fresh ideas, eliminate the need of market studies to find out what their customers want and increase customer loyalty. In this article I’ll explain how this is possible.
Jerome Granados, Thursday 29 May 2014

Native Advertising in Your App

Have you ever considered inserting native ads in your app? Native ads are an open secret when it comes to monetizing content. So much so that brands are shying away from traditional advertising. Why? Because this marketers' favorite tool makes for more efficient ad placement, with messages tailored to the target audience.
Jerome Granados, Tuesday 20 May 2014

7 tips to market your mobile app

You spend a lot of time and energy to create your app. But what do you do to promote your mobile application? In this article, we'll review 7 actions you can take to market your app on the App Store and Google Play.
Deb F-P, Wednesday 7 May 2014

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. 
Written on Monday 5 May 2014

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%.
Jerome Granados, Friday 2 May 2014

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.
Written on Wednesday 30 April 2014

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!
Written on Monday 28 April 2014

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.  
Arianna Testi, Friday 18 April 2014

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.
Written on Monday 7 April 2014

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.
Jerome Granados, Monday 31 March 2014

News apps keep user's interest more than others

Recently, I fell upon a very interesting article written on Flurry's blog  about the decay of apps. Every app has a lifetime cycle where it reaches the top, and then monthly active users (MAU) start diminishing. Flurry focused on what happens after the peak ... and did you know what they discovered? News apps are decaying slower than other types of apps! Sounds good for you GoodBarbers, right?
Dumè Siacci, Wednesday 26 March 2014

How to create CNAME record to install your HTML5 webapp on your own domain

That was one of the great features that came with GoodBarber Salvador back in September. Every GoodBarber account has a great web app associated, in addition to the native app for iPhone and the native app for Android.   Your natives apps are distributed in the App Store and in Google Play. But what about the web app?    By default, your web app is located on http://<appname>.goodbarber.com/m/. But you can (you should?) change this URL and choose your own.   For instance, you can decide to link your web app to http://m.yourdomain.com That will be far more convenient for your users to access your html5 web app, right ?   That's what we're going to do together in this post.