App.io Ads – Your game becomes the mobile ad, with try-before-install
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app.io
Feel free to reach out to me (david@app.io) if you want to chat :)
But a couple things worry me about these ads.
- If the user isn't in a mindset to look at another app, then could it be a bigger barrier to have something 'interactive' if they need to spend time waiting for menus , loading etc. At least a standard popup can show a screenshot and get straight to the point.
- Not being able to control the experience. If all networks were equal would be great, but how many users might come away thinking your app is slow , unresponsive etc because it can't stream the app in time ?
Seems like it could be great for expensive pay to install apps, but if the app is free anyway maybe it's just better to put the effort into getting them to download that, rather than play the ad.
- We give the user the opportunity to download the app at any time. It isn't in the video, but along the bottom, a download button is available at all times so the user can get to the App Store as quickly as possible. On loading: We actively encourage all apps using the platform to bypass menus and get straight to the content. That converts much better.
- We do a few things to ensure every user has a great experience and apps are not presented in a negative light. As quickly as we can (generally 200ms), we run a speed test to ensure latency and bandwidth are sufficient for a good experience. We also allow advertisers to specify a fallback video or static image, so if we can't deliver a great interactive experience, we are able to offer an ad which is at least as good as the existing types.
I'll also mention that the video on the homepage is actually a live filmed demo of a trial campaign.
Apps are ran in a simulator, and screen caps is being streamed real-time to the client, then drawn on the canvas. Is that correct?
That's essentially correct. We do a bit of magic to stream the smallest amount of image data possible (sending mostly-transparent frames if pixel data hasn't changed, etc.). Put simply though: yes, you can think of it as a simulator being streamed to an HTML canvas. But it's taken a long while to get right!
Apple should buy these folks pronto.
Good point on having more info. What we've found is that developers will want to get into the nitty gritty details, whereas ads people will want easy to digest info about how it will benefit them.
If you're keen to find out more, we have some pretty good documentation: http://docs.app.io/
The API documentation is pretty dense! Sorry about that. To see the latency, check out: http://app.io/showcase. That's our technology in action.
We are running iOS in the cloud and streaming back graphics to the client. To get started, users upload a compiled simulator build of their app (http://docs.app.io/uploading/). It takes a few minutes. We automatically generate everything else from there.
It's a streaming tech, but we can target on the ad network level (wifi/4g/3g/etc). We only run ads on devices where we know they'll have a great user experience, since we hate crappy ads as well!
Either way it's done, it's a very impressive way to show off your apps and works suprisingly well.
Our previous/existing product enables apps to run inside any browser, and we have a lot of people using this platform for QA, customer support, etc.