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.

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?

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.

Today I’m going to explain you how to create a Flurry account, to have more analytics data of your app.   First of all go to www.flurry.com  and sing up, entering all the information required and accepting the terms and the conditions.

If you read carefully tuesday's update, you saw that we enabled Disqus comments on GoodBarber. Many of you had requested this feature, so we set aside our developments on GoodBarber 3 for a few hours, in order to bring this feature to GoodBarber 2. It's now ready to be used. Let me explain how to turn on Disqus comments into your app.

Big news today. Since yesterday's update, revision #1900, 2 new templates have landed in your back office. They are called Minimal color & Minimal photo. They have been designed for the article section and the video section.  It raises to 8 the number of templates you can choose to display a list of articles (or videos). But Minimals are a brand new kind of templates. As suggested by their name, they are sleek and simple. Let me show you how beautiful they are. With minimal photo and minimal color, no doubt you are going to create a stunning article or video section. 

The technologies are far from opposing. Rather, they complement each other and will continue to recombine in the near future.

Today, we're going to have a look to some deep features that you can use to customize your app a lot more! It can be a little technical to manage, but that's worth it. You may have noticed a section of the backoffice called Settings API. Trust me, that's where the best features are hidden ;)

In the era of the Web 2.0, the real life overlapped the virtual one, making crucial for any business, the study of the habits of their users while they are surfing on the web.   Thanks to web analysis became possible not only to analyze your target customers, the access, the traffic, etc ... but there are also offered the tools to optimize your investments on the web advertising, to improve conversion rates and the results of your business.

We have already talked about it in the past, now we will resume what has been said and delve further into the subject. As you all know, an app can help you to increase your customer base and your traffic. But before this can be possible is important that your new app is presented to the world! You must to expect a normal period of transition in which you will try to redirect the users of your mobile website to your app. At this point, it is usual to undertake marketing strategies to promote the app and make it known to the world.

We have discussed many times the "benefits" that the creation of an app can bring to your brand, not only as a commercial brand, but also as a blog, a VIP, a radio, a club, etc.   Nowadays, native apps provide a better user experience and improve the way content is made available. The experience that a mobile application offers to users is much more rewarding than the one offered by a mobile web app.

Trees decorated to the nines, sparkling lights, smell of hot chocolate down the streets and soft white snow that covers everything. Christmas is coming! Every city, with all the christmas decorations, is so much beautiful in this period. And what about your app? Is it maybe less important? Does not deserve to be decorated? Your users will appreciate that you want to support the Christmas mood! :D Here some advice to design your app for this period of festivity!

Your GoodBarber app embeds social sharing features that will help your users to spread the word about your content. It means that almost everywhere in the app, your readers have access to a "share" button that will lead them the sharing screen.   You've probably already added such features to your website: you can easily understand that the more the process will be easy for your users to share your posts or videos, the more they'll share it :)   Since the GoodBarber 2.5 Salvador release, we've also integrated Facebook likes into the apps. It means that once your reader is logged in your app with his Facebook account, he'll just have to click on the "heart" button to like the post he's reading. It's not exactly the same action than a real Facebook share: a share will create a new post in the user's timeline, and a like will just appear in the Facebook ticker feed.   To be honnest, as a Facebook user, I prefer most of the times to just "like" a blog post than to actually "share" it to my friends: the two actions are totally different and apply in different situations.   GoodBarber also allows you to ask your users to login using Facebook or Twitter to post a comment, to bookmark a content, or to submit a picture/video/text from a Submit section. You should enable this feature if you don't want the comments on your website to be anonymous.

Since we launched GoodBarber, our goal has always been to offer applications with the best user experience. Beyond the interest that they can present for the final users, our approach — which is mainly shared by the industry — is to estimate the user experience of an application by the design and the fluidity (speed) of the interface. Our second goal is to give our users the maximum flexibility in the management of their application with the diversity of the settings, and by modifying it easily. It's the reason why we created a system of remote control for the applications updates. As fast as possible, this tool helps you updating all the base installed (design for example) on your app without an other submission to the stores. The combination of these various constraints created a complex equation to be solved. Because the largest the flexibility of the settings is, the most complicated it is to keep the speed and  fluidity of the interface. And conversely, the more we look for speed, the less settings we can propose. We dedicate a big part of our work to keep on improving GoodBarber and make it the sharpest DIY software to create beautiful app (especially through the GoodBarber 2.5 Salvador update). In parallel our team works on the optimisation of the application after every release. 

When you are considering how to make an app for iPhone, Android, or any other platform, you must add a killer splash screen if you want to ensure a good launch experience for your users. After all, the splash screen is the first image that is seen when your app is opened. So, let's review some tips that will help make your app a success, shall we?

In your GoodBarber backend, you can find several types of usage statistics for your app. In this post, we are going to review the traffic statistics (that you can find in the Audience > Statistics > Traffic menu). These stats will help you to measure the numbers of your app's readers, and their loyalty. Here are some definitions, and some ways to analyze them. Keep in mind that you can consult your stats specifically for iOS or Android, or for both platforms. You can also choose the time range to analyze.

The new version of the My GoodBarber app is available on the stores since last week. We designed it to be your best companion, all along your app lifetime.   You'll discover some useful features to manage your app on a daily basis. 

Your app is designed to give access to your content in a fluid, efficient, mobile-friendly user interface. So, what you want to do first, when you put content into your app, is to sync the last published posts of your website.   We also already talked about adding filters to show categories or on predefined searches, in order to refine your app's content.   But, do you think you really know what really catches your readers attention? GoodBarber knows :) A good way to enhance the user experience in your app is to push content that has already been proven to be popular content!   You've probably already noticed the Popular section in your GoodBarber backend. Its goal is exactly to display your most popular content. We'll review together everything that you should know to use it efficiently.

Next feature comes from GoodBarber Salvador : CMS.

We always talk about the dozen of connectors GoodBarber provides you to publish your content in your app. To this day, there are more than 30! But now, you may be wondering what a connector is? You might also be disappointed to see that your favorite platform isn't in our connector list.  We do our best to offer a native experience, synching content from the most popular solutions in the market, but there are thousands! Today, I'd like to introduce you to our custom connector. This connector makes GoodBarber compliant with all existing services to publish content. Of course, the downside is that it involves work on your part... but, by the end of this post, you'll see that it's not that difficult. Let's discover together how to create an app for your Joomla, Drupal, ezPublish, Spip ... or any other solution, even one created from scratch.

With the rise of app builders, making an app has never been easier, but creating a successful app is a whole different ballgame. In a market where we count published apps by the millions and their downloads by billions, it is certainly not a piece of cake. Here are 3 points to focus on when making an app.  

Have you ever wanted to have someone do some stuff for you? When you're too busy to do it? GoodBarber thought of you, with the automatic push notifications, you'll be serene ;) If you don’t have the time to send a notification after you wrote your last article on your blog, turn on automatic notifications to trigger one as soon as your article is online. Make automatic notifications recognizable by adding a prefix to your messages in order to give your users a clear information.

Hi everyone, we hope you had a great weekend! Let's start this week with one of the new features coming with the release of GoodBarber Salvador : Live+ Live+ is a new section inspired by our community. More and more radio stations use GoodBarber to create an app. With this new section, they can display the meta information when they stream their music. Among the informations displayed while you listen to music, you can find the artist name, the track cover, and some other useful details. Users have a direct link to buy a track or share what they are listening to.

That's one of the great features that comes with GoodBarber Salvador. Every GoodBarber account has now a great web app, in addition to the native app for iPhone and the native app for Android! While the iPhone app is written in objective C, the Android app is written in java, this web app is written in HTML5. The web app runs on every browser, no matter the phone or the OS you use, that is to say that, now, your readers on Windows Phone or Blackberry can access your content from their mobile phone.  The web app is truly fantastic. It has the same look and feel as the native app. Our engineers made a great job because it was a big challenge to obtain such a result. Why? Because contrary to many app builders who run HTML5 apps encapsulated in a native shell, we decided to make the opposite. We looked at the native apps generated by GoodBarber and we ask our engineers to reproduce the same in HTML5. When you know GoodBarber's passion for native apps and the elaborated features and UX we provide in our apps, you assess the challenge :)