raphael_o

1099. Payouts happen globally. Once you reach your first 400 hours building with A.Team, you unlock guaranteed, bi-weekly payments without the need to wait for the payment from the company you work with.

You have a point here. A lot has been done in the Android framework to enable developers to build app that will scale up and down elegantly. However, keep in mind that there is more than supporting the physical form factor to it. To build for tablets vs phone is a different product mindset, with different goals and user experience. I don't expect people to open BillGuard every day on their tablet, rather to take their time on weekends to go deeper into the more advanced tools for example. Since the app is used differently, the UX has to be thought through specifically to take advantage of the specific platform you're building for.

Look - it's really what business comes down to. Most of what seems to happen organically was actually facilitated by creating and maintaining relationships. But that's not the main point I was trying to make, rather that as developers, we need to understand the mindset of the team behind it. They think of themselves as store managers and they want to bring the apps that will do well with their users above revenue. Another point to seriously consider which I didn't incorporate in this post is that both Apple and Google will push forward apps that make use of their latest APIs in a way that they approve of, to serve as examples to other developers and increase traction of the new OS features (example: material design, Wear SDK, Apple Watch, etc.)

Totally agree with that. The key with the App Store is to get a perfect storm of PR and feature to rise above the noise at least for a few hours/days. Then it's up to the product. Without this storm, even a good product (unless it has an immediately high viral coefficient) risk oblivion.

BillGuard indeed has only access to data in a read-only fashion. Yodlee does have a mix of web scrappers as well as data feeds for certain financial institutions. They power different features for banks such as bill payment and others but companies like BillGuard don't have access to these APIs.

On its end, Yodlee is heavily regulated. Like a bank and sometimes even more: http://www.yodlee.com/yodlee-security/

Would love to get your thoughts about Israel Tech Challenge. Would you apply?

Would love to know if you like the new design. More info on how we interpreted iOS 7 change: https://medium.com/design-ux/d768bede7d6e

It's not only about reduced visual clutter. It's about speed. You tend to use certain mobile apps dozens of times a day. A light, fast experience is crucial in this context

good point. Clearly it also has its benefits!

I think that when you repeat that for every non core element, you end up providing a much lighter, cleaner look that allows you to focus on the core content. Check out the app now and wait a few hours for the iOS 7 version, I'd love to know if you disagree

It's not about not being intuitive. It's about the trade off that leads to an emphasis of the design elements for the content. Then functionality.

A way to think about it is that iOS 7 gets closer to real world interaction. You don't press a button to sit in your chair, you just sit on it because you know how to do it.

The Zappos methodology is the best I've heard so far:

Every new hire spends at least 2 weeks answering phone calls. That's how they get everybody in the company to actually care about their customers.

Agreed, especially loading time to encourage repeat use.

Background fetch actually provides a solution this exact use case. If the user uses your app enough for iOS to let you run in time, the app should be able to "get ready" before the user opens it.

Although you're right that iOS7 also introduces silent push notifications to wake up the app in the background to let it fetch what's needed.

Right, not new to iOS 7 but this time Apple took the time to make a nice mock of what we shouldn't do!

There is a new settings screen in iOS7 called "Background App Refresh" (under General) which allows users to disable app refreshes altogether or to turn off the ability for specific apps