Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The Big List of Android Sub-Reddits


The Big List of Android Sub-Reddits
Sweet, I just hit the jack-pot on android sub-reddits. Here they are.
http://www.reddit.com/r/anddev/new/?sort=new (Please post here, new community I created for us devs.)

Note: Some of these sub-reddits may be useful to you, while others may prove useless. Don't expect all of them to be worthwhile. However, I have provided many links so you can weed through them very quickly and find the ones most relevant to you/your app.


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Promoting Your Android App Part 2

As we have seen, there a literally dozens of ways to promote an app. Some of the ways we have talked about so far are: mass distribution (through many stores), promoting your app in forums, creating a website, hosting your app on fileshares, distributing apps as torrents, and starting a blog. We have also talked a wee bit about social sharing, but today I'd like to talk about that a little bit more. The importance of social sharing is phenomenal when it comes to marketing your apps. The other day, my brother in-law came over and told my wife and I that some girl made a video of herself playing our game on Facebook. Sometimes, we tend to overlook some of the obvious things: start a Fan Page, etc. What I am saying is, you really SHOULD have a fan page for your business, at least, and maybe even a few for individual apps. Creating a Facebook fan page can be huge for business. You can find out more about fan pages here: https://www.facebook.com/pages. Another, possibly even more powerful than Facebook pages, useful tool is Google+/Google Pages. Create a page on Google+, you won't regret it. You can even link it to your Blogger account so when you blog it automatically gets posted to your page. More information about Google+ Pages can be found here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/pages/manage. Also, if you are trying to make it big in Android, you shouldn't spend all your free time blogging about developing. Haha. Jk. Anyway, some other things you should consider are: posting links to Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Pinterest, RebelMouse, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Blogger, etc. One more thing I'd like to mention, which of course most of you have probably heard of, is cross-promotion. One of the BEST ways to promote your app (or anything for that matter) for free, is to exchange advertising for advertising, of course, our good friends at TapForTap can surely help you out with that. I will write an article about them later. They deserve it, if you haven't seen it yet, check out TapForTap, now. There is also a Mega-Post of all android/r/ developer's apps on Reddit, which can be found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/rdfdn/megapost_of_all_apps_created_by_randroid/


Links For Promoting Android Apps
http://gplus.to (shortlinks for google pages)



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Location: Sheldon, IA 51201, USA

Monday, September 10, 2012

Promoting Your Android App Part 1

Today I want to talk a little about promoting your Android app in general. I will also provide links to many valuable resources for promoting your apps. There are loads of ways to promote your app. One way I have talked about previously is to submit your app to alternative markets (markets other than Google Play). I posted a massive list I have accumulated while searching for alternative forms of distribution. The list can be found in the original post,  which is available here: http://anddev.blogspot.com/2012/09/big-list-of-app-markets.html. Another form of promotion is to submit your app to forums. I have also written a previous post about that, as well as distributing through fileshares, torrents, etc. However, there are some other ways I haven't discussed. Some of them being very important to promoting your app. One of the most important ways to promote your app that every developer should definitely have, at least one of, is a website. Having a website helps promote your app, helps users find to your app and information about all of your apps, and helps increase SEO of your app on the web (and by SEO I, of course, mean search engine optimization). Also, if you have a website, you can promote the website, which in turn, promotes your app(s). One the absolute BEST ways to promote your website is through StumbleUpon and also their su.pr shortlink service. Another one, that will also help with SEO, is to submit your site to Digg and Reddit. There is one more great way to promote your app that I'd like to talk about before I give you the list of sites to help with your promotion, and that is, through a blog. Having a blog can, easily, be one of the greatest ways you can promote your app for free. If you want to see an example check out our "Poke My Gummy Blog", a blog based off our simplest game on which we now post information about all of our gummy games.

Promote Your App/Site


more to come....






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Location: Sheldon, IA 51201, USA

Sunday, September 9, 2012

5 Reasons To Use AppLift

If you haven't heard of it yet, where have you been? Everyone knows about AppBrain by now right? How could you not? Well, if you haven't go check it out now http://www.appbrain.com/, otherwise continue reading. So, I'm assuming we've all heard of AppBrain at this point, but what you might not know, or maybe you just don't know that much about it yet, is the AppLift SDK. The AppLift SDK is an amazingly powerful set of tools for your android apps. Here's why:

#1. Track your downloads - Track your downloads across all markets, stores, even fileshares, personal websites, you name it; all in one place. Once you have integrated the AppLift SDK, which requires merely importing the .jar file, adding it to your build path, adding an activity and a few permissions and slapping in one measly command in your java file and your all set; then you can track all of your downloads on 50 different markets (or however many you're on) without having to go from website to website, dashboard to dashboard, logging in over, and over, just to check your stats... and then try to do what? Write them all down and add them all up? Are you freakin' kidding me? No way! AppBrain is essential to keeping track of your download progress and so, so easy to integrate. Get it.

#2. Monetize your app - There are many ways to monetize your app now, one of them being AppLift. Their interstitials, I'd say, beat their banners for sure, however their banners can be integrated with AdMob which, of course, is always a plus. One of the great things about their ads is also that they have a nice selection of apps for users to choose from, many of them being pretty decent games. Putting their interstitials in your game at various intervals has proven to be the best way to get revenue for me so far.

#3. Use remote settings - This should probably be #2 on my list, but I haven't really used this feature to it's full potential, yet. AppBrain's remote settings feature allows you to set values as strings in your developer dashboard and retrieve them for use in your app. This is such a fantastic feature they offer and so easy to use. You can set custom messages that you can change daily in your dashboard on all your apps across all markets without even releasing an update. There are, literally, thousands of ways you could make use of this feature. This one is definitely worth getting.

#4. View detailed statistics - The charts for AppBrain's reports are awesome. There are graphs of daily downloads for each game. They also have ad reports and stats. Another thing hey show is your active users for the day and the percentage increased (or decreased) from the week prior. It's great to see how many downloads you get on each app, each day, along with the number of active users. It also shows total installs for the day among all apps and total revenue from AppBrain. Basically, the statistics in the AppBrain dashboard are more detailed than any others I've seen.

#5. Integrate with AdMob - I know I already said this earlier, but this deserves to have it's own section on the top 5 reasons to use AppLift. You can show AppBrain banners using AdMob, including them in your rotation of regular banners. Integrating with AdMob is everything. Seriously, if you are using one ad network for banners, you're doing it wrong; get AdMob and throw in several different ad networks. That way you get better rotation and better variety. The best part is, you can just watch how your apps are doing and adjust AdMob accordingly. Thus, you can make adjustments to your app without releasing updates. AdMob is another great thing. Maybe I should write the top 5 reasons to use AdMob. Anyway, I'll leave it at that. Get AppBrain AppLift SDK.

Get it here:: https://developers.appbrain.com/info/sdk
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Location: Sheldon, IA 51201, USA

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Alternative Forms of Distribution

There are many forms of alternative app distribution. I would like to talk about a few of them here: the first one (one I like best) is SourceForge. SourceForge is an amazing site for distributing free software. You can upload your .apk file and you can also push your code to a repo using git if you choose to. You can even upload screenshots and provide other metadata such as description and icon. It creates several very nice pages for you, including: a summary page, code page, download page, and wiki page. Some examples are shown here: summary, files, wiki, code. There is even a page for reviews! SourceForge is great and it is a wonderful distribution channel. Sign up at https://sourceforge.net/. Another thing you can do is: if you are already pushing your source code to SourceForge, you might as well go ahead and push it to github too. All you have to do is change the remote url and push again. e.g. git remote set-url origin https://brandonlnelson@github.blahblahblah.git, then git push origin master. You can take a look at my github projects here: https://github.com/brandonlnelson. There are a couple decent fileshares out there as well. I put some of my apps on 4shared and Uploaded. Another way to distribute your apps is through torrents. This could, potentially, work quite well, however you have to be able to seed well enough to spread the apk out there. Unfortunately, my internet sucks, so it doesn't work that well for me. If you make a torrent of your .apk, you can upload the torrent and post a screenshot/description on The Pirate Bay. Oh, I almost forgot, you can also paste your code on sites such as PasteBay and PasteBin. I'm trying to start a small dev group on PasteBay at http://android.pastebay.net, so check that out, if you would, please. It would be great if I could get some people to start sharing code on that sub-domain. Sort of a public/private kind of thing. A small inside group of developers brought together through means of public access, that is my goal. So, now you have several more distribution channels. Get to work, bitches. Hahaha. Just kidding. Hope this information is helpful to you all. :)
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Promoting Free Apps

As many of you may know, promoting your apps can, easily, be the most difficult part of success in the app industry. There are many ways to promote your app. I'd like to talk about one of those ways and give all of you some links to help you with the process. What am I talking about? Forums. Promoting your app in forums can drive just as many downloads as some of the markets themselves! And, even if it doesn't drive a huge number of downloads, it will DEFINITELY get you a whopping number of views. Views are also very valuable, in case you didn't realize. The amount of views you get determines the amount of people that KNOW OF your app. Of course, it is only common sense that the more people who know your app exists, the more downloads you will, probably, get (unless you have a really shitty app). Seriously though, come on... who has an app that bad? Almost all apps get downloads, unless they are REALLY bad or unless they utilize not well-known tools/etc. For instance: I have an app called 'Folding Stats' which checks your statistics for Folding@Home. There are a few people who find it useful (although it needs an update), but most people don't even know what Folding@Home is, therefore it doesn't get all that many downloads. In this case, it doesn't really matter that it's not getting many downloads since I just made it for a school project last year anyway. Not to mention it only supports Android OS 3.1+ which is pretty high compared to the devices I usually support but it's not an app for phones and no tablets were made before Android 3.1 (that I know of anyway).

So, getting to the point, here is my list of forums that allow you to promote FREE android apps. Some of them allow you to promote paid ones too, but beware, you could easily get banned if they do not allow paid promotion and you post a paid app. Anyway, I've done all the work for you guys and weeded out the ones that ban you for advertising you app, period (including free apps).

Android Forums Big List

I guess that's it... holy s#!t, I guess I've got banned from a bunch of forums. I don't know why, but oh well... f*** it. You should be able to promote in more forums, apparently I just don't know what I'm doing or something. You can find many more Android forums on Google.






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