thijser

It looks like this right now: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14185619/adwords.png (checked on 3 different IPs and the image is generated by https://screenshotmachine.com/ )

Makes me wonder how this can effectively be monitored when also doing A/B experiments.

AppBrain (AppTornado GmbH) - http://www.appbrain.com/ | Onsite: Zürich, Switzerland or Utrecht, the Netherlands | Software Engineer or Business Developer

AppTornado is a technology startup that provides apps to millions of Android users. AppBrain is a platform for promoting and monetizing Android apps, used by over 50,000 Android apps with millions of daily active users.

The hiring process consists of a phone screen followed by on site interviews.

Our company is technology driven, and we encourage our engineers to take ownership from end to end. See http://www.apptornado.com/jobs-software-engineer for more information or email jobs@apptornado.com

We have built appbrain and launched a bunch of apps with more than 100M+ installs: http://www.appbrain.com/dev/AppTornado Our experience is that you need to generate at least a couple of thousand (better, tens of thousands) of installs by yourself before Google's discovery mechanisms kick in and allow your app to be discovered withing Google Play. Cross promotion is a good tool for that, but if you don't have apps yet, then you have to find other ways (paid cost-per-install promotion is a commonly used tactic).

This is very similar data to what's available on our site, AppBrain. If you're interested in more like this, the top ad networks and developer tools are updated daily at http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries and each individual app also shows the SDKs it uses at bottom of the app page, eg. Instagram: http://www.appbrain.com/app/instagram/com.instagram.android

It seems in the dataset from OP more different SDKs are detected than we do at AppBrain. We invite anyone to report missing SDKs will definitely review the current presented set to add our omissions!

AppBrain (AppTornado GmbH) | Onsite: Zürich, Switzerland or Utrecht, the Netherlands | Software Engineer

AppTornado is a technology startup that provides apps to millions of Android users. AppTornado was founded in 2009 by two former Googlers. We've developed more than 30 Android apps which in total have been downloaded over 80 million times. We also develop AppBrain, a platform for discovering, promoting and monetizing Android apps, used by over 50,000 Android apps with millions of daily active users. As part of a small team you will be working on exciting and challenging problems: - Creating great mobile apps that our users love. - Writing fast and robust server code that scales to millions of users. - Building simple, intuitive yet powerful user interfaces.

Our company is technology driven, and we encourage our engineers to take ownership from end to end. See http://www.apptornado.com/jobs-software-engineer for more information or email jobs@apptornado.com

AppBrain (AppTornado GmbH) | Zürich CH or Utrecht NL | Software Engineer

AppTornado is a technology startup that provides apps to millions of Android users. AppTornado was founded in 2009 by two former Googlers. We've developed more than 30 Android apps which in total have been downloaded over 80 million times. We also develop AppBrain, a platform for discovering, promoting and monetizing Android apps.

As part of a small team you will be working on exciting and challenging problems: - Creating great mobile apps that our users love. - Writing fast and robust server code that scales to millions of users. - Building simple, intuitive yet powerful user interfaces. Our company is technology driven, and we encourage our engineers to take ownership from end to end.

See http://www.apptornado.com/jobs-software-engineer for more information or email jobs@apptornado.com

It's interesting to see the consolidation in this space. HockeyApp is the #2 most used crash reporting library for Android according to our stats: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/crash-reporting/... The #1, crashlytics, was acquired in early 2013 by Twitter, and BugSense was acquired by Splunk.

I would rather ask the opposite question: Is it possible to develop a fast growing mobile service without developing an app on iOS/Android? How could Instagram have grown the way it did without their iOS and Android apps? I'm sure people occasionally post copyrighted content as a picture on Instagram, were they just lucky not to get pulled by Google for copyright infringement?

I don't think the question why we develop for Android is relevant here. The fact that the two most important smartphone platforms are walled gardens is interesting in itself. (Google has for long claimed that Android is more open than iOS, but with the current state of things where not being published on Google Play means your app doesn't exist, this claim is not really valid anymore).

Same here, Google unpublished one of our 10 million+ downloaded apps without warning. I appealed using the option to upload a PDF file to have a 2 page description of our processes and efforts to deal with user generated content, only to get the standard canned response "We (...) will not be reinstating your app. This decision is final (...) We are unable to comment further on the specific policy basis for this removal (...)".

Needless to say, this is a very disappointing way to be dealt with when this concerns a significant revenue stream.

I'm the creator, thanks for the insights. This was really just a fun project to explore the Stellar API (which is really good, and I hope they will reach their goal and transform international payments).

It seems the attention on hacker news drew quite some payments into the system, whereas I had thought that it would just stay in the play money range forever. The lottery aspect I hadn't thought about. I'm eager to transform the model to make it less lottery like as I certainly don't want to violate any laws, but am a bit unsure about exactly how. There could be a small chance that 100% of the money goes to a charity, or that there is somehow a matter of skill involved in the exact amount you send. (FYI, the only other piece of information that can be sent along with a Stellar payment is one 32-bit integer ID). Any suggestions are welcome.

It was always possible to see an install referrer if you set up the right listener in your AndroidManifest. It seems that the link between the market and analytics will now give you more funnel like stats, as it includes views of the app details page in the market itself. (It's interesting to see what this will do to competitors of analytics, it seems it's not possible to get this information in any other way than connecting with Google's product).

This is quite significant as some of the bigger ad networks focus almost exclusively on these kind of ad units and have reasonable market shares (Airpush and Leadbolt are good examples): http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad

This is quite significant as some of the bigger ad networks focus almost exclusively on these kind of ad units and have reasonable market shares (Airpush and Leadbolt are good examples): http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad

This update bans ad notifications and homescreen icons: " - Apps and their ads must not add homescreen shortcuts, browser bookmarks, or icons on the user’s device as a service to third parties or for advertising purposes. - Apps and their ads must not display advertisements through system level notifications on the user’s device "

This is significant as some of the bigger ad networks focus almost exclusively on these kind of ad units and have reasonable market shares (Airpush and Leadbolt are examples): http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad

Utrecht, The Netherlands - Java/Android Software Engineer

http://www.apptornado.com/jobs

We build the AppBrain app discovery platform, the AppLift app promotion network and a bunch of fun Android apps that have been downloaded tens of millions of times.

For Android we've built AppBrain (which is also included in the Google application search engine).

We filed a more concise bug report too: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8...

This is a daily outage that affects all our master/slave appengine applications. We know these applications are 'deprecated', but we're still paying significant money for the service and therefore hadn't expected 'deprecated' to mean 'won't be fixed when there are problems'.

Migration to HRD is not trivial even with the tool provided by Google. HRD has a different consistency model, blob keys and associated image serving URLs will change by migrating, and last time we checked any deletes that happen during migration (which can take days) will not make it into the migrated app.

I'd advise you to try our AppBrain Ad Detector also mentioned in one of my other comments on this post. It shows you for all apps which common libraries are included in them. And as a bonus for developers we aggregate the stats anonymously such that you can see which libraries are legitimate and not on the "android library statistics" page on AppBrain.

There are a number of apps that detect which apps do this, we have made one ourselves too that even scans every new app you install and immediately warns you if there is some intrusive ad network present in there: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appspot.sw...

I think it only means you can't show an offer wall and say "you have to perform at least one action to continue". Showing offer walls that leave all actions voluntary is still fine, the way I read it.

It will be interesting to see what this will do to the push ad craze on Android (http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad : the #2 and #3 ad networks in terms of apps are push ad networks. This is measured by total number of apps, these ads do much less well on installs as professional developers know better than to include this in their apps.) The new terms only say that it's not allowed to imitate system notifications, but it also says that it must be clear to the user from which app an ad is originating. This is currently not the case with most push ads.

Is there a reason you're only interested in iOS?

We do Android apps only and have completely been focusing on free apps in the Google Play market with in-app ads. Our own systems evolved into an SDK that anyone can use now and we just announced standard format banner-ads that tie in nicely with Admob mediation today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4295631

We're 4 people at the moment working only on our own projects and we're in the process of hiring more engineers.

Great advice! I just changed it for our blog, we had the big logo at the top linking to the main page already, but I realized we didn't have a short description of what we do. Blogger allowed this to be easily added to the sidebar.

Yes, and the licensing service is actually one of the most used developer libraries embedded in Android apps ( http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev ), although it's quickly being overtaken by the free + in-app billing model at the moment.

The momentum of Unity is quite amazing, one out of every 20 installs of new apps on the Google Play market is using Unity 3D currently: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/unity/unity-...

(as found on the comment thread of https://plus.google.com/113026104107031516488/posts/2RCyK3Gb... )

The AppBrain library stats page for phonegap lists the top Android apps that are based on Phonegap: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/phonegap/pho...

This is an interesting development, where better search/discovery technology gets acquired and (hopefully) integrated into the main platform. Apple was able to acquire a company with proven technology, because Apple provides plenty of hooks for third party services to allow them to innovate much faster on search/discovery technologies than iTunes itself can.

Unfortunately for Android Apple is way ahead of Google here, with the iTunes store having an affiliate model for all paid apps, and ways to get the actual appstore listings programmatically. AppBrain and other services that want to provide Android app discovery services have to go through a painful process of getting information about Android apps, and even then it's nearly impossible to know whether a particular app will be available to a certain phone model X running in country Y. In addition, there is no direct way to monetize the leads that can be generated through good discovery algorithms. It's ironic how the more iTunes store in this sense is more open than the Android market.

There are alternative frontends to the Google market, such as AppBrain, of which I'm one of the co-founders. Exactly due to the problems you describe, we have been able to get a loyal following of both users and developers, for whom we develop better tools to browse through the Android market. Your app is actually listed #10 in our all-time popular shopping charts: http://www.appbrain.com/apps/popular/shopping/

You might also be interested in our developer stats, which also update daily: http://www.appbrain.com/info/developer-dashboard

Any suggestions of what you'd like to see more (if it's available for us to engineer) are welcome!