The digest of news from the world of mobile development in the last week # 3 (February 17 - 23, 2013)
This week is rich in new tools - they opened the Tizen 2.0 SDK, updated the Google Maps SDK for iOS, opened TestFlight for Android, released Xamarin 2.0, Marmalade Quick and DevKit from Game Closure to create mobile games in HTML5. But there is plenty of other interesting information: Distimo's study that there are only 2% of new developers in the App Store, an interesting story of the promotion of Juggernaut from Mail.ru and a comment from Bill Gates, that Microsoft was mistaken in choosing a mobile strategy.
')
iTunes In-App Purchases from server side
Rus
Payments through iTunes are actual leaders in monetizing content provided by mobile apps. In one of the applications I know, the income from them is 3 times higher than the income from Google Play users, while the attendance of the latter is 1.5 times higher. Thus, from one iTunes user you can receive up to 5 times more money than from one Google Play user. This argument is sufficient to integrate iTunes payments into mobile applications.
NASA announced a competition for the best iPad-application for astronauts
Rus
NASA's Food Biochemical Laboratory staff believe that a special iPad application will be useful and necessary for the members of the space team so that they can keep track of their diet. The mobile program will prompt astronauts if they consume enough calories while in space.
Steve Wozniak thinks Apple is losing its steepness
Eng / Rus
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is still impressed by the company's latest devices, but worries that the company "is beginning to lose ground as the coolest company in the industry." Wozniak founded the company that created the Mac and the iPad with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne in 1976 and held the post of vice president before leaving in 1987. Woz has since worked as the chief scientific adviser at Fusion-io Inc, and, despite the fact that he remains a devoted fan of Apple products, he begins to doubt that Apple is as good as before.
Updated Google Maps SDK for iOS
Rus
The Google Maps SDK for iOS has been updated and now it supports overlays, gesture control, and geodesic lines. In addition, developers can no longer wait for an app to receive API keys, but to receive a key for working with maps immediately through the Google API Console.
How Google changed Android with your brain
Eng / Rus
In the latest version of the Android mobile operating system, the web giant Google has made big changes in how the OS interprets your voice commands. The company has made a voice recognition system based on what we call a neural network — a computerized learning system that behaves like a human brain.
Android: [DirectoryBind] A simple way to link an external sd card and internal memory to make room
Rus
Many owners of Android smartphones or tablets with a small built-in memory probably faced the following problem: a large sd card was inserted (for example, 16, 32 or even 64 GB), but after installing several heavy programs our device or another program with arrogance declares that it’s not Enough space. Sometimes the program itself is small, but after installation it climbs the Internet and pulls gigabytes of data onto a smartphone. Once again, having received the message “No place” and looking at the card we see that it is practically empty, but the internal memory of the device is packed to capacity.
Best Android Mobile Development Apps
Rus
Fortunately, we live in a time when mobile development is becoming the norm, and more and more truly user-friendly applications are entering the market, with which you can not just fix the line of code, but also fully continue working on your project.
Cross-platform mobile game and stick in the wheel from Android
Rus
When the team and I started developing this project on a large and very cross-platform Unity engine (which also supports Win, Mac, XBox, PS3, PSP, etc.) - we hoped that Unity would take all the care cross-platform on ourselves, and our task will only be to press “publish” for different platforms and drink coffee. Yes, of course, we knew about the fragmentation of the platform, but for the most part we expected to see the sharpening for android in the graphics area (adaptation for different resolutions, diagonals and dpi) and performance (it is clear that something that one droid pulls to another force). But not everything is so simple.
TestFlight opens for Android
Rus
In recent years, TestFlight has become the main service for finding beta testers and getting the earliest access to new mobile apps. It worked only for iOS, but today the service has been launched for Android.
Bill Gates says Microsoft was mistaken in choosing a mobile strategy.
Eng / Rus
Bill Gates made a frank statement in an interview with CBS, saying that Microsoft was not innovative enough and made a mistake in choosing a strategy for the mobile market. For two years, the Microsoft Windows Phone platform did not manage to win a significant market share and it still lags far behind iOS and Android, controlling about 3% of the market. The company highlighted the mobile sector as a priority for 2013, but the company's initial mobile strategy was poor, Gates says.
Kolobok on a visit at Windows 8: development diaries (part 1)
Introduction / Part 1
“Some kind of crazy visualization with the smilie syndrome without particularly valuable information that a schoolchild can come up with from the very beginning. What is the value of fasting? ”(C)
Free Windows Phone / Windows 8 Developer School in St. Petersburg
Announcement
The set of the fourth free school of e-Legion developers in St. Petersburg is starting. From March 13 to April 10, in our office a dozen students will learn to create mobile applications for Windows Phone and Windows 8 platforms.
Porting Android apps to BlackBerry 10
Rus
There are also several ways to turn an Android application into a BlackBerry version: using re-packaging tools, repacking an existing apk, or using the Android application source code for a more thoughtful and thorough porting and then building under BlackBerry using the BlackBerry Native SDK. Consider the first option, as the fastest and easiest.
Xamarin 2.0 released
Eng / Rus / Rus
Xamarin is a company created by the developers of Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, a cross-platform implementation of the .NET platform.
Humble Bundle Mojam 2, making games live
Officer site
For the next 78 hours, independent developers from Mojang, Grapefrukt, Ludosity, Oxeye Game Studio, Vlambeer and Wolfire Games will be making their games live for the second time. Mojang, unlike the others, promise to make 3 games instead of one.
Marmalade released Quick for the rapid development of 2D games and applications
Eng / Rus
Marmalade Quick was created for “high-speed” development of 2D games and applications and it is built on already existing open source components, such as Cocos2d-x and Box2D, using the Lua language.
Construct 2 game. Part 2
Part 1 / Part 2
The first part of this article was about getting started with Construct 2. In this article I would like to bring the started development to a logical conclusion: the game menu will be added, and we will turn the resulting HTML5 game into a cross-platform mobile game.
Game Closure releases DevKit to create HTML5 mobile games
Eng / Rus
StartX graduates who declined to buy from Zynga and Facebook received funding of $ 12 million from an impressive list of investors (including SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Yoi Ito, CRV, Benchmark, Greylock and General Catalyst), and spent the last two years creating own game development engine, trying to make it easier for developers to create, publish and deploy HTML5-based multiplayer games for iOS, Android, and Facebook.
Alawar Engine. Part two. Features cross-platform game engine
Part 1 / Part 2
“The article is interesting. Only absolutely meaningless. Alwar Engine - closed development. "(C)
New API lessons in Codecademy
Eng / Rus
Codecademy has announced a new partnership with a number of popular web companies and will start offering new lessons focused on using their software interfaces. Codecademy now has tutorials for the Twitter, Evernote, Box and Gilt APIs. Very soon, we should see new ones - WePay, Microsoft SkyDrive, 23andme, Mashape, Ordr.in, Firebase, Easypost, Github, MailChimp and Dwolla.
Website development for mobile devices
Rus
I was looking for a new book on mobile web development, and suddenly the work “Mobile Web” from the “Head First” series, written by Lisa Danger Gardner and Jason Grigsby, came to my hand. After reading the book, I was literally amazed at how wide the subject is considered in it. Without exaggeration, the reader can get acquainted with almost any aspects of mobile web development.
The market is full: 2% of publishers in the top of the App Store and 3% in the top of Play are new
Eng / Rus
An illustration of how hard it is to break into the crowded application market was the new Distimo report released today. According to the analytical company, only 2% of the leading 250 publishers in the iPhone App Store in the United States are “newbies”, on Google Play this figure is 3%. In small countries, the share of new companies is usually slightly higher - 6% for Google Play and the App Store for the iPhone. Indicator of how small the market has become and the indicator that only 0.25% of the total income of the Top 250 applications on the iPhone is moving away to new publishers, on Android - 1.2%. Thus, it is a little easier for new developers to break through and make money on Android than on iOS.
In-game purchases on tablets will reach $ 6 billion by 2016
Eng / Rus
According to Juniper, smartphones will remain the main suppliers of in-game purchases. On phones, mobile players in 2016 will spend more than 6 billion on in-game purchases.
4 trends in payments that will determine the future of game development
Angl
Every tenth American bought digital goods last year. Today, players have an unprecedented choice of platforms and payment options, and there is no doubt that the digital economy will continue to grow.
Mobile free-to-play games in numbers
Eng / Rus
The numbers associated with mobile games are amazing. Of the 7.1 billion people on the planet, about 4.3 billion have mobile phones. About 1.3 billion of them use smartphones. Thus, there are about 1.2 billion mobile gamers in the world! For comparison, 1.2 billion personal computers are used worldwide. The economics of applications create jobs for small developers against the background of how large studios involved in console games roll up.
WeLike received $ 7 million from a development company
Rus
A strange story about how co-owners of the Regions development group Amiran and Alik Mutsoeva together with Timur Tukayev invested $ 7 million in a service for communicating and sharing photos with WeLike. At the same time, this is not a share capital, but a loan that the company will have to repay in the future.
Application economics: 7 ways to get money from apps without ads
Rus
Monetization for us (mobile developers) is not an easy process. Advertising, paid installations, in-app purchases - all this can bring mobile application developers to come, but these are not the only methods available. Our industry friends have taught us a lot of innovative monetization strategies for mobile apps. Here are 7 favorites.
“Juggernaut: Revenge of Sovering”: mobile game development and promotion to international markets
Rus
At the recent Winter Nights 2013: Mobile Games Conference, I talked about the success story of our mobile game “Juggernaut: Revenge of Sovering” - about the creation, the pitfalls of the development process, the launch of the project in different territories and how the game was able to reach record positions on downloads in Russia and come out on top in the ranking of applications in Korea. Today I want to share my report on Habré.
6 ways to stand out in the crowded app market
Eng / Rus
Since we announced our MarvDev development program a few months ago, we have been fortunate enough to talk with hundreds of developers looking for partners to publish their games. We signed the first games for participation in the program and got the opportunity to watch various games - both from talented teams and from individual developers from around the world. But more than 100 applications are released per day, and to stand out from them is, in fact, a big task. Having considered so many games in such a short period of time - and thinking about them from a commercial point of view - we have gained invaluable experience and we think that it would be useful to make a list of common features in games that we liked.
Facebook as an important tool for promoting mobile applications
Rus
About promotion on Facebook'e Russian-speaking specialists on SMM (or just the people who are faced with this) have already written, perhaps, the whole Talmud. But is there any benefit from this? Hundreds of articles retell the same thing: invite friends, order advertising, buy a couple of thousand bots ... Many of the usual recommendations are completely ineffective in practice. And Russian companies very rarely boast an active social life in the Facebook community.
Chartboost and Execution Labs have opened a cross-promotion service for indie developers.
Rus
Execution Lab called its “dating service” for Lab Partners developers. It should help indie developers find similar studios with which they can partner and show their ads in their applications. Developers can search for other companies by platform and genre.
Ubuntu Touch ported to Galaxy S III + Canonical instructions for other devices.
Rus
Ubuntu Touch Preview is a pre-release version of the operating system for tablets and smartphones from Canonical. The company introduced the builds that can be installed on smartphones Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4, plus on the tablets Nexus 7 and Nexus 10.
Announced a new version of the mobile OS Tizen 2.0 and the new SDK
Eng / Rus / Rus
As already mentioned earlier, this operating system is designed for mobile devices, including phones, tablets and other types of devices. Among other things, this OS is “sharpened” for web applications, including those written in HTML5. In Tizen 2.0, APIs have been added that allow developers to work seamlessly with Bluetooth and NFC modules (of course, on devices that are equipped with these modules). Plus, improved tools for developers.
iOS
')
iTunes In-App Purchases from server side
Rus
Payments through iTunes are actual leaders in monetizing content provided by mobile apps. In one of the applications I know, the income from them is 3 times higher than the income from Google Play users, while the attendance of the latter is 1.5 times higher. Thus, from one iTunes user you can receive up to 5 times more money than from one Google Play user. This argument is sufficient to integrate iTunes payments into mobile applications.
NASA announced a competition for the best iPad-application for astronauts
Rus
NASA's Food Biochemical Laboratory staff believe that a special iPad application will be useful and necessary for the members of the space team so that they can keep track of their diet. The mobile program will prompt astronauts if they consume enough calories while in space.
Steve Wozniak thinks Apple is losing its steepness
Eng / Rus
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is still impressed by the company's latest devices, but worries that the company "is beginning to lose ground as the coolest company in the industry." Wozniak founded the company that created the Mac and the iPad with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne in 1976 and held the post of vice president before leaving in 1987. Woz has since worked as the chief scientific adviser at Fusion-io Inc, and, despite the fact that he remains a devoted fan of Apple products, he begins to doubt that Apple is as good as before.
Updated Google Maps SDK for iOS
Rus
The Google Maps SDK for iOS has been updated and now it supports overlays, gesture control, and geodesic lines. In addition, developers can no longer wait for an app to receive API keys, but to receive a key for working with maps immediately through the Google API Console.
Android
How Google changed Android with your brain
Eng / Rus
In the latest version of the Android mobile operating system, the web giant Google has made big changes in how the OS interprets your voice commands. The company has made a voice recognition system based on what we call a neural network — a computerized learning system that behaves like a human brain.
Android: [DirectoryBind] A simple way to link an external sd card and internal memory to make room
Rus
Many owners of Android smartphones or tablets with a small built-in memory probably faced the following problem: a large sd card was inserted (for example, 16, 32 or even 64 GB), but after installing several heavy programs our device or another program with arrogance declares that it’s not Enough space. Sometimes the program itself is small, but after installation it climbs the Internet and pulls gigabytes of data onto a smartphone. Once again, having received the message “No place” and looking at the card we see that it is practically empty, but the internal memory of the device is packed to capacity.
Best Android Mobile Development Apps
Rus
Fortunately, we live in a time when mobile development is becoming the norm, and more and more truly user-friendly applications are entering the market, with which you can not just fix the line of code, but also fully continue working on your project.
Cross-platform mobile game and stick in the wheel from Android
Rus
When the team and I started developing this project on a large and very cross-platform Unity engine (which also supports Win, Mac, XBox, PS3, PSP, etc.) - we hoped that Unity would take all the care cross-platform on ourselves, and our task will only be to press “publish” for different platforms and drink coffee. Yes, of course, we knew about the fragmentation of the platform, but for the most part we expected to see the sharpening for android in the graphics area (adaptation for different resolutions, diagonals and dpi) and performance (it is clear that something that one droid pulls to another force). But not everything is so simple.
TestFlight opens for Android
Rus
In recent years, TestFlight has become the main service for finding beta testers and getting the earliest access to new mobile apps. It worked only for iOS, but today the service has been launched for Android.
Microsoft
Bill Gates says Microsoft was mistaken in choosing a mobile strategy.
Eng / Rus
Bill Gates made a frank statement in an interview with CBS, saying that Microsoft was not innovative enough and made a mistake in choosing a strategy for the mobile market. For two years, the Microsoft Windows Phone platform did not manage to win a significant market share and it still lags far behind iOS and Android, controlling about 3% of the market. The company highlighted the mobile sector as a priority for 2013, but the company's initial mobile strategy was poor, Gates says.
Kolobok on a visit at Windows 8: development diaries (part 1)
Introduction / Part 1
“Some kind of crazy visualization with the smilie syndrome without particularly valuable information that a schoolchild can come up with from the very beginning. What is the value of fasting? ”(C)
Free Windows Phone / Windows 8 Developer School in St. Petersburg
Announcement
The set of the fourth free school of e-Legion developers in St. Petersburg is starting. From March 13 to April 10, in our office a dozen students will learn to create mobile applications for Windows Phone and Windows 8 platforms.
Blackberry
Porting Android apps to BlackBerry 10
Rus
There are also several ways to turn an Android application into a BlackBerry version: using re-packaging tools, repacking an existing apk, or using the Android application source code for a more thoughtful and thorough porting and then building under BlackBerry using the BlackBerry Native SDK. Consider the first option, as the fastest and easiest.
Instruments
Xamarin 2.0 released
Eng / Rus / Rus
Xamarin is a company created by the developers of Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, a cross-platform implementation of the .NET platform.
Humble Bundle Mojam 2, making games live
Officer site
For the next 78 hours, independent developers from Mojang, Grapefrukt, Ludosity, Oxeye Game Studio, Vlambeer and Wolfire Games will be making their games live for the second time. Mojang, unlike the others, promise to make 3 games instead of one.
Marmalade released Quick for the rapid development of 2D games and applications
Eng / Rus
Marmalade Quick was created for “high-speed” development of 2D games and applications and it is built on already existing open source components, such as Cocos2d-x and Box2D, using the Lua language.
Construct 2 game. Part 2
Part 1 / Part 2
The first part of this article was about getting started with Construct 2. In this article I would like to bring the started development to a logical conclusion: the game menu will be added, and we will turn the resulting HTML5 game into a cross-platform mobile game.
Game Closure releases DevKit to create HTML5 mobile games
Eng / Rus
StartX graduates who declined to buy from Zynga and Facebook received funding of $ 12 million from an impressive list of investors (including SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Yoi Ito, CRV, Benchmark, Greylock and General Catalyst), and spent the last two years creating own game development engine, trying to make it easier for developers to create, publish and deploy HTML5-based multiplayer games for iOS, Android, and Facebook.
Alawar Engine. Part two. Features cross-platform game engine
Part 1 / Part 2
“The article is interesting. Only absolutely meaningless. Alwar Engine - closed development. "(C)
New API lessons in Codecademy
Eng / Rus
Codecademy has announced a new partnership with a number of popular web companies and will start offering new lessons focused on using their software interfaces. Codecademy now has tutorials for the Twitter, Evernote, Box and Gilt APIs. Very soon, we should see new ones - WePay, Microsoft SkyDrive, 23andme, Mashape, Ordr.in, Firebase, Easypost, Github, MailChimp and Dwolla.
Website development for mobile devices
Rus
I was looking for a new book on mobile web development, and suddenly the work “Mobile Web” from the “Head First” series, written by Lisa Danger Gardner and Jason Grigsby, came to my hand. After reading the book, I was literally amazed at how wide the subject is considered in it. Without exaggeration, the reader can get acquainted with almost any aspects of mobile web development.
Money
The market is full: 2% of publishers in the top of the App Store and 3% in the top of Play are new
Eng / Rus
An illustration of how hard it is to break into the crowded application market was the new Distimo report released today. According to the analytical company, only 2% of the leading 250 publishers in the iPhone App Store in the United States are “newbies”, on Google Play this figure is 3%. In small countries, the share of new companies is usually slightly higher - 6% for Google Play and the App Store for the iPhone. Indicator of how small the market has become and the indicator that only 0.25% of the total income of the Top 250 applications on the iPhone is moving away to new publishers, on Android - 1.2%. Thus, it is a little easier for new developers to break through and make money on Android than on iOS.
In-game purchases on tablets will reach $ 6 billion by 2016
Eng / Rus
According to Juniper, smartphones will remain the main suppliers of in-game purchases. On phones, mobile players in 2016 will spend more than 6 billion on in-game purchases.
4 trends in payments that will determine the future of game development
Angl
Every tenth American bought digital goods last year. Today, players have an unprecedented choice of platforms and payment options, and there is no doubt that the digital economy will continue to grow.
Mobile free-to-play games in numbers
Eng / Rus
The numbers associated with mobile games are amazing. Of the 7.1 billion people on the planet, about 4.3 billion have mobile phones. About 1.3 billion of them use smartphones. Thus, there are about 1.2 billion mobile gamers in the world! For comparison, 1.2 billion personal computers are used worldwide. The economics of applications create jobs for small developers against the background of how large studios involved in console games roll up.
WeLike received $ 7 million from a development company
Rus
A strange story about how co-owners of the Regions development group Amiran and Alik Mutsoeva together with Timur Tukayev invested $ 7 million in a service for communicating and sharing photos with WeLike. At the same time, this is not a share capital, but a loan that the company will have to repay in the future.
Application economics: 7 ways to get money from apps without ads
Rus
Monetization for us (mobile developers) is not an easy process. Advertising, paid installations, in-app purchases - all this can bring mobile application developers to come, but these are not the only methods available. Our industry friends have taught us a lot of innovative monetization strategies for mobile apps. Here are 7 favorites.
Marketing
“Juggernaut: Revenge of Sovering”: mobile game development and promotion to international markets
Rus
At the recent Winter Nights 2013: Mobile Games Conference, I talked about the success story of our mobile game “Juggernaut: Revenge of Sovering” - about the creation, the pitfalls of the development process, the launch of the project in different territories and how the game was able to reach record positions on downloads in Russia and come out on top in the ranking of applications in Korea. Today I want to share my report on Habré.
6 ways to stand out in the crowded app market
Eng / Rus
Since we announced our MarvDev development program a few months ago, we have been fortunate enough to talk with hundreds of developers looking for partners to publish their games. We signed the first games for participation in the program and got the opportunity to watch various games - both from talented teams and from individual developers from around the world. But more than 100 applications are released per day, and to stand out from them is, in fact, a big task. Having considered so many games in such a short period of time - and thinking about them from a commercial point of view - we have gained invaluable experience and we think that it would be useful to make a list of common features in games that we liked.
Facebook as an important tool for promoting mobile applications
Rus
About promotion on Facebook'e Russian-speaking specialists on SMM (or just the people who are faced with this) have already written, perhaps, the whole Talmud. But is there any benefit from this? Hundreds of articles retell the same thing: invite friends, order advertising, buy a couple of thousand bots ... Many of the usual recommendations are completely ineffective in practice. And Russian companies very rarely boast an active social life in the Facebook community.
Chartboost and Execution Labs have opened a cross-promotion service for indie developers.
Rus
Execution Lab called its “dating service” for Lab Partners developers. It should help indie developers find similar studios with which they can partner and show their ads in their applications. Developers can search for other companies by platform and genre.
Other
Ubuntu Touch ported to Galaxy S III + Canonical instructions for other devices.
Rus
Ubuntu Touch Preview is a pre-release version of the operating system for tablets and smartphones from Canonical. The company introduced the builds that can be installed on smartphones Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4, plus on the tablets Nexus 7 and Nexus 10.
Announced a new version of the mobile OS Tizen 2.0 and the new SDK
Eng / Rus / Rus
As already mentioned earlier, this operating system is designed for mobile devices, including phones, tablets and other types of devices. Among other things, this OS is “sharpened” for web applications, including those written in HTML5. In Tizen 2.0, APIs have been added that allow developers to work seamlessly with Bluetooth and NFC modules (of course, on devices that are equipped with these modules). Plus, improved tools for developers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/170505/
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