And, what about Groupon and Living Social? All they do is promote a different business every day... If Apple is going to make rules like this, they need to be consistant on how they enforce it.
For a lot of reasons. First, if I'm spending time creating an app, it would be nice to know with 100% certainty that it will be accepted in the app store. Second, it's unfair if competitors don't have to run by the same set of rules. Third, because it's extremely confusing and could turn developers off from creating on their platform.
That is a very good question. Their rules, their interpretation. I could see that line of thought.
I guess it would help me as a consumer from the standpoint of any confusion. I don't develop IOS apps, so I can't speak to the fairness of the process. I am an IOS user and it would irritate me if an app I like, such as Southwest's, is pulled all of the sudden for a rule that wasn't enforced consistently.
Completely different to AppGratis. Facebook allows you to target (based on gender, location, likes, workplace) and advertise your app. Users have no incentive to DL your app and actually have a need for your product.
I've had a lot of success on FB mobile install ads.
This isn't quite the same thing. Facebook is letting people advertise apps on news feeds, they're not forcing downloads via a game mechanism.
What GP is talking about is the much sketchier model of blocking (or greatly slowing down) access to an app unless the user goes and downloads an affiliated app. This is artificial download inflation by bending the user over a barrel, not advertising.
I don't think Apple will approve an app that blocks a user or slows them down unless they install a 3rd party app. What usually happens is an advert pops up during normal app usage, the user has to exit or let the ad go away, then they can continue using. It's a normal advertisement. Its not unlike when the NYTimes does a full site takeover for some Buick commercial and you have to minimize the ad before you can continue reading. But going out and buying a Buick certainly doesn't decrease your access time to NYTimes articles.
I've seen many games that let you "earn" ingame currency by downloading apps or completing surveys. A few of these games _indirectly_ require you to download the incentivized apps by providing very few coins in the actual game, or making the ads the only way to get coins (other than with real money). Apparently that's sneaky enough for Apple.
For iOS apps there's something called "custom url schemes," which is basically a string that every app is self-assigned (if at all) that can be used to open up the app from within another app (or check the app's existence).
I'm not sure if this is how the specific ones being talked about might be working, but a simplified way of doing it would be that when APP A is installed it connects to a server and tells it that it has been installed with UNIQUE DEVICE ID, that way APP B can connect to the server and see if APP A has been installed on UNIQUE DEVICE ID. You can imagine ways to do the same with viewing ads etc.
This won't work - Apple no longer allows access to the unique device ID. You can generate your own random ID and register it with a server, of course, but this ID will not persist between apps.
More commonly this is done by IP tracking.
- Device taps on button/ad in app A to download app B.
- URL is specially encoded to identify app A.
- Server registers some unique information about the device.
- Server redirects to app B's app store page.
- User downloads app B.
- User launches app B, which reports back to Server. Server recognizes device and is able to associate this install event with the original tap from app A. App A's servers are contacted to this effect.
The trick here is that the uniqueness of the device here is pretty limited and temporary. If the user downloads app B, then does not launch it, their IP address will soon change (cellular networks and the such). It's not a foolproof system.
It reminded me of Sublime as well and I must say that the fuzzy match saves me a lot of time when switching between files. Having this functionality built into the OS could be very beneficial.
Ah, forgot to say where the drop-off is. We lose most people on the gift selection page.
- 60% make it from the homepage to the gift selection page (not bad).
- 3% make it to from the gift selection page to the billing page (eeeeh).
It's a huge drop-off and we are trying to pin-point why. It may be a product issue, but most people have given us good feedback on our selection of products. We are going to mix in some other brands to see if it helps at all.
We have split tested the landing page and were able to increase the click-through rate by 20%. No other split tests are running at the moment.
This was very helpful. I agree that there are a lot of decisions to be made that don't seem necessary for something so far in advance. That may be a tough nut to crack. I'm going to dig into this more and see if the feedback is consistent.
Great response, and good luck! If it helps, I would be interested in getting reminded that you have these products closer to the actual dates I need them.
I'm from the US and know the term. I was merely giving a first glance impression. This is all very relevant to conversion... Even on the homepage.
Perhaps the wording on the submit button is what's throwing me off. Something more explanatory like "View our gifts", etc. that would help drive the point home to the visitor about what clicking that button will actually do.
