arielm

I’m not sure if this is an attempt to troll the thread or your legitimate point of view. If the latter, ads play a major role in the success of man (most?) great products you are currently using because without exposure most people wouldn’t know of their existence.

Sadly, that power clustered towards Google with no oversight whatsoever.

Google will continue to be opaque unless they have oversight/regulations. Something I imagine they spend quite a bit* to prevent in any way possible.

I’m pretty sure banks and credit card institutions, aka those paying, regulate what their services can be used for. So it isn’t strictly PayPal.

PayPal just needs to be more clear/transparent about that.

Same! And it’s definitely sketchy, but...

PayPal could have at least pointed towards the clause in their terms that is being used for the rejection.

We use PayPal as “another” way to pay and withdraw money either weekly or when it reaches a very low set amount. It’s kind of a hassle, but if this happens at least we don’t have to worry about money we already earned.

In general, PayPal has been losing a lot of traction over the years, and is one of the reasons eBay spun them out a while back. Lack of “decent” support and a week to reply to a critical email just isn’t acceptable in 2019 + the UI really isn’t that user friendly when you look at Square Cash or Apple Pay in iMessage.

I won’t be surprised if they don’t exist within the next five years. Sure, they’re still integrated into a lot of things, but one competition becoming much bigger can change all of that quickly.

I don’t think they’d be missed...

What is Mozilla’s incentive to push for this? I get that tracking is a big deal these days, but other than to get some press how is Mozilla related to all of this?

There are so many 3rd party tools to help you build and make money with apps, but it's hard to tell which are the more popular ones.

We've (Appfigures) been scanning iOS and Android app's for SDKs as part of our platform, and we now make the market share data public.

Looks great. There have been a few projects like this that I’ve seen but yours has a good amount of flexibility.

Do you intend to monetize this somehow? I imagine that throwing a few million daily requests on something that renders images (fast) isn’t exactly free to host...

I completely agree with all the comments that suggest a time-based licensed or paying per major version/updates. But have a small suggestion.

In addition to offline functionality, can there be any type of online functionality built-in as a convenience? I’m thinking automatic backups when an event ends, sharing results to a portal for competitors to log into later, etc.

If there is, you can use a hybrid model and offer those as a subscription with a fixed license or (depending on price) a more expensive monthly that will bundle the fixed license.

Good luck!

This is a really misleading title!

I don’t normally leave negative comments but how did this article even break the top 10? There’s no correlation between this formula and reality.

99% of ad campaigns have negative ROI, and those that don’t need massive scale, not a small seed tranche.

Advertising is a powerful but expensive tool, not a solution to becoming an overnight unicorn.

Ad SDKs have gotten much better about size. We show a decrease of roughly 5MB after the change. The real "hit" comes in the form of battery and network usage.

I disagree with this view completely.

Companies like MailChimp and Atlassian are great examples of bootstrapped companies that became very successful. There are more.

Money is great to have at any stage of a company, and bootstrapped companies prefer to trade stability and time for the freedom of not having money (and those who only focus on it) control decisions.

You can build a great company with and without investment, but you can fail with either just as well.

Agreed on subscriptions. While paid and freemium apps benefit from being in the store (discovery, etc), recurring revenue models are much more difficult to optimize and maintain. That’s not something the store really helps with.

This is why both Apple and Google introduces the reduced rate after the first year of subscription, which in my opinion will eventually become the norm from the get go. It’s only a letter of time.

Ultimately, even such seemingly large losses are still a really small fraction of Apple’s bottom line. Once more apps find ways to do this is when Apple will start noticing.

> How does the company collect feedback from customers?

I’ve read quite a few of these guides and they mostly focus on equity/benefits but I think product/market fit and feedback loops are a treasure trove for job seekers because they can show you the future as well as how focused the founder(s) are.

As a founder I’ve never been asked about feedback loops and rarely get asked about product market fit. We’re not technically a startup anymore, so that could be why. But I think those are useful questions for any company that isn’t a household name like Facebook or Apple.

What you should be looking for in an answer is whether it sounds like the company knows who it’s serving and is actively working to understand that audience even better.

Regardless of valuation, rounds of VC, or the flavor of popsicles you can find in the fridge, fit is what will ultimately get success. In my opinion/experience.

P.S. - understanding everything else is also super important for _you_, but this is important to understand to tell if there’s a future in which those would be worth anything.

Glad you like it :)

That's good feedback! We'll look into optimizing that.

We released a (free) page that shows the top apps for every country and category in both the iPhone and Android markets.

It's main benefits are:

1. You can see the top 1,000 iPhone/iPad apps and top 400 Android apps (where other free resources are limited to < 100) 2. All lists update every hour (where others update daily, and with a delay).

I'd love to hear what you think about this.

A minor note about marketing — it took me a while to find the link to the app in the post. I was about to give up but ended up finding it just before so I got to the App Store.

I’d suggest adding a “get on App Store” link somewhere prominent so others don’t give up before at least seeing the app.

Nope

This data is for all new apps released and has nothing to do with our user base. In fact, we don't have an SDK.

The report uses data from our SDK identification engine, which works for all apps.

Good catch. Thanks!

That’s definitely a large contributor, but if you look at the number of new app releases you’ll see it went down quite a lot when compared to previous years. That’s the other side of the equation for the decrease.

We (Appfigures) looked at the SDKs that apps use to determine what's native vs. non-native. This method will catch "partially" non-native apps as well as fully non-native apps as the former will need to have the non-native SDK even for a single module.

Looks like an interesting service, but...

1. Testing isn’t always as easy as following a list of steps, and when it _is_ those get to be technical. Explaining those as text instructions could get harder than what most expect if they are to be useful.

2. This is a lesson learned from experience - unlimited plans rarely scale. Instead, they make those who would fit into an entry level (aka just a few tests) feel like they’re paying a premium and those who will fit a large plan not pay nearly as much as what they consume.

Not only that, but when the founders realize this they’ll have to change it and users will be upset, so they’ll grandfather them and we’re back to the beginning.

Side note: I love “breaking” new features personally and know it’s not a straight forward process. If all this aims to do is replace selenium I don’t see the need for it — selenium tests are very predictable where text-to-human isn’t. If it aims to go beyond, that can’t happen without real knowledge of the application.

To have an ad network control so much of web traffic and then decide which ads to block is just absurd.

If the chrome team and google’s ad teams were not controlled by the same unit that primarily makes money from ads it would have been ok, but given that they do, what incentive will they have to block their own ads and how much more powerful is it making their own network?

Sadly, chrome is still the easiest browser to use, especially as a developer

I use Apple notes as well for its simple UI and limited options (which I find a plus).

I jot a lot of notes though, and still prefer revising on pen and paper so I wrote an Apple script that prints all notes in a given date range and I then review/consolidate them.

I try to do it once a week, and it works pretty well.

This is a beautiful way of looking at the X from a very zoomed out perspective. To an extent, I agree with much of what’s said and felt the same way when starting to use my X.

But, and this is the important but here, we’re existing users. I saw iPhones develop over time, so for me this is evolution and I put up with it. But what about new users, that are new to the platform.

Apple made some interactions so unintuitive that even I was confused. One example is purchasing an app. Pre-X, you’d tap the “get” button and place your finger on the home button or enter your password. With the X you have to tap the button, look at your device, and then follow the most unintuitive animation to actually press the physical side button.

That’s where I think we start to see the difference between evolution and compromise.

Unfortunately raising money isn’t a proxy for profitability. In many cases it’s the opposite. It could be seen as a proxy for potential, but potential alone doesn’t pay the bills.

This fee feels a lot like the fee a merchant would be charged for a credit card transaction, so in essence Patreon is passing on their fees.

I wonder why they don’t have a structure akin to micro transactions, where there is no fixed fee but a slightly higher variable fee. I’d guess most of their transactions are probably small enough.

Do apps really sell themselves? Not really. Plus, with so many apps, the real challenge is getting visibility.

In that sense, I think search ads could offer a ton of potential, but don’t think it’s running correctly now/yet.

I don’t think we can hold Apple responsible for 3rd parties like Flurry. Those companies will always find a way to do what they do because there is incredible value in having access to such data (as a developer).

Its definitely fast, but... is it actually going to be effective for the cost? Probably not in the long term.

Having used this “one click” setup on Twitter and Facebook before I know these campaigns are increasingly ineffective.

That said, the App Store is a different kind of ecosystem so things could go differently.

We do a lot of technical interviews and have seen enough candidates skip on many of these, so in that respect I like that there is a list they can reference. However, doing for the sake of following a list can come off as inexperienced/dishonest (or creepy, like one of the comments suggested).

Having seen those first hand as well I can tell you I really dislike such interviews and that they always make me and whoever else is interviewing with me uncomfortable.

My advice is to go through this list and reflect on your last interview. What did you do, what didn’t you do, why? And try to practice some of the things you didn’t.

Also, keep in mind some of these are double edged swords. Example, speaking with enthusiasm. Don’t do it at all and you’ll be boring everyone, but do it too much and you’ll look like you can’t concentrate.

Practice makes perfect, so work on it.