Google, Google Play and the future of mobile operating systems

Posted on by
Reply

There are a lot of Android devices out there. We can’t underscore this point enough, the total number of activated Android devices to date is somewhat in the ether and relies largely upon device activations (a metric that has some limitations) but roughly speaking it’s somewhere in the region of 900,000,000 and shipments for smartphones alone are expected to break the one billion barrier this year. Even accounting for a fairly large margin of error, these are huge numbers; numbers large enough to account for a fairly large proportion of the world’s population if allocated evenly.

Android: Future assured or looming doubts?

The vast majority of this growth is driven by Samsung’s ascendant rise as the master of the consumer electronic space, collecting 95 percent of all Android smartphone profits in the first quarter of 2013 as well as solidifying their status as the major competitor to Apple in the tablet arena by being the predominant source of Android growth in that sector, mirroring the early days of the smartphone market by eating away at iPad market share bit by bit. Additionally, the total number of Android tablets is expected to exceed the total number of iPads by the end of this calendar year.

At a certain level of device saturation it becomes hard for us to conceptualize the scale of what this actually means. Therefore this level of market penetration in the context of Google’s overall strategy requires some elaboration. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and currently acting Executive Chairman prioritized the growth of the Android OS (with particular attention to emerging markets), as a way of cementing Google’s position in what he sees as the future of computer devices. A way of out competing Microsoft without ever having to directly challenge their near-monopoly of the PC-space. Android dominance in the mobile market is therefore meant to ensure Google a Microsoft-like status as part of its wider strategy to branch out beyond web-services and diversify its business. On the strength of these above numbers Google seem to be well on their way to doing this with Android. One result of all of this is that many analysts now believe the future of the smartphone and tablet operating system markets will be in essence duopolistic, that is, a straight up fight between Apple and Google.

However, there are issues with this projection. For example, there’s the question of whether this explosive “Samsung-led growth” is dangerous for Google in the long run. Ever since Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility marked their entrance to the smartphone market as a consumer electronics manufacturers, Samsung have been dropping hints that they would develop their own OS, later revealed to be part of the “Tizen” project developed in coordination with Intel. Naturally, Samsung’s already massive install base and its status as an established global brand means this move away from complete reliance on Google seems, at face value, inexorable. However, for Samsung to be credible challengers to both Apple and Google in the mobile OS space they must address existing issues with their own software, which to date hasn’t been as well received as their handsets and tablets have (to be kind).

Unsurprisingly, Samsung aren’t the only established consumer electronics manufacturer with an eye on developing a native operating system for their own products. Emerging Shenzhen based Chinese tech-giant Huawei also has its own OS in the works, but Huawei bosses also insist this is merely an insurance scheme in the event of existing partnerships with Google and Microsoft breaking down. In spite of these assurances it’s not hard to see why the option could seem attractive, given Huawei’s increasing prevalence in what is now the largest smartphone market in the world. The prospect of Huawei “going native” also raises questions about the long-term plans of the two other Chinese consumer electronics’ giants, ZTE and Lenovo. This widespread interest underscores a crucial difference in the tablet and smartphone OS market when compared to the PC OS market, namely that the cost barriers to entry in the former are much lower than the latter.

The strategic long game for Google therefore seems more fraught with danger than initial Android activation numbers would suggest. For Google to compete effectively in a mobile OS market that could once again multi-polar in the near future, it needs to establish Android as something with more to it than simply “the alternative to iOS”. It needs to capture the imagination of people in much the same way iOS initially did on the iPhone, combining functionality and flair seamlessly, and delivering as near to native performance as it possibly can if it remains a cross-platform operating system at this point. Additionally, Google, having placed key executives in top positions at Motorola Mobility following its acquisition, will have to demonstrate whether they’re capable of delivering truly innovative, disruptive smartphones in the same vein as Samsung’s Galaxy Note and the iPhone, or at the very least steer the subsidiary away from its current predicaments.

The Google Play conundrum

There’s also a paradox at play as far as the existing Android numbers go, namely that these raw figures in terms of activated devices aren’t translating into dominance in web-traffic vis a viz iOS or comparable app store revenue (Apple accounts for somewhere in the region of 65% of all App revenue) through Google play when compared to Apple’s App Store. This has already been a topic that has received a fair amount of attention, but it’s worth briefly summing up some of the major reasons as to why Android still lags behind despite apparent sales at a device level.

Android holds most dominant sway in emerging economies like China and India, economies where the middle class, despite their nascent wealth, do not have the same degree of disposable income to spend on micro-transaction based products as consumers in the West do. Furthermore, repeated studies have shown that even within developed economies like the US, the demographic profile of an average iPhone or iPad user is generally wealthier than that of the average Android user.

Why Android is here to stay (for now)

Despite all of this, the current major smartphone and tablet manufacturers who are reliant on Android have too much to lose by moving away from Google. True, Android is heavily fragmented already and sacrifices performance to achieve uniformity across heterogeneous hardware architecture, but the manufacturers recognize that further fragmentation would be costly and dangerous, in that it could very well alienate markets that are becoming increasingly used to dealing with either Android or iOS as the two sole proprietors. On top of this, despite the aforementioned gap between App Store and Google Play revenues, Google Play is growing at a phenomenal pace and closing the gap on Apple, which is going to make consumers even more dependent on Google Play as a storefront. As a result, we’re unlikely to see major paradigm shifts occurring overnight; instead, we’ll see companies like Samsung testing the water with their own operating systems to gauge market reaction, and then planning long-term strategies off the back of the data they receive from those tentative forays. Therefore, any major change to the market won’t come unnoticed, and we’ll have advanced warning of it.

Mobile operating systems and platforms as a whole are an important topic for anyone in publishing, since tablets and smartphones have been key drivers of digital publishing growth and because the emergence of new software platforms would in the minds of many necessitate new delivery methods to reach those platforms, something that can cause headaches for many traditional publishers. This is something we’ve talked about internally, to our clients and to the wider publishing world many times at YUDU.

The conclusion we’ve reached is that cross-platform applications are going to become increasingly important in the face of long-term uncertainty. Creating, maintaining and building upon apps that work solidly around a platform agnostic runtime environment whilst maintaining feature richness is imperative for us hence the reason for our already successful cross-platform apps, alongside maintaining the option for native iOS or Android apps for publishers who may well prefer that option.

Allowing our clients to tailor their choice depending on their needs is an essential part of what we provide. Combining platform ubiquity alongside choice. As strange a phrase as it may be to use in this context, having the peace of mind of knowing your digital publishing needs can be met across all devices in spite of often frenetic technological change and development is a common concern amongst clients, and something we always aim to meet.

Our US team is growing

Posted on by
Reply

Last October our VP of Sales, Les Csonge left YUDU’s London HQ to head up our US expansion with the opening of our first New York office. It hasn’t taken him long to employ a couple of great new employees to join the team.

The US team now looks a little something like this……

Les Csonge: VP Sales

Les is Co-Founder, Director and VP Sales of YUDU and has grown the company from humble beginnings to a multi-million pound leading Digital Publishing organisation over the last 10 years. Les has left his beloved Portishead to live in the Big Apple where he heads up the US team.

Miranda Tadros: Senior Account Manager

Originally from San Francisco Miranda  has been working as part of the US team for more than 5 years. During her time at YUDU she has helped some of the worlds biggest brands and publishing houses with their digital projects.

She loves traveling to new places as often as possible and sampling new cuisines along the way.

 

Justen Calvacca: Account Manager

Justen hails from New England by way of Miami. His passion for writing, marketing, and technology collided and led him to the digital publishing realm. If you catch him outside of the office, expect to find Justen at a dimly lit comedy club or a trendy restaurant. When thinking about how to end this short bio, Justen concluded with a universal “cheers”.

 

Ashley Gurney: Customer Support Executive 

Ashley is YUDU’s newest Customer Support Executive and a Philadelphia native. While earning her B.A. in Marketing at St. John’s University she fell in love with the diversity of Queens, NY and settled in Astoria. She brings her experience in social media and sports/promotional sales to the YUDU team.

 

The team can be contacted via their individual email or at NYC@yudu.com

 

 

 

MPA – IMAG

Posted on by
1

Next week sees the return of the MPA’s IMAG – Independent Magazine Media Conference, this year in New Orleans. The two-day event is the premier conference for independent magazine media companies, designed specifically for the senior teams at independent companies who are faced with the strategic challenges of smaller staffs and limited resources.

YUDU’s Easi-App is designed specifically with smaller publishers in mind, it’s an affordable entry-point app that enables publishers to get their magazines on the Newsstand simply, quickly and most importantly cost-effectively, perfect for IMAG members!

Our VP of Sales Les Csonge will be attending the event, so if you’re going and would like to discuss YUDU’s digital magazine solutions drop him an email on NYC@yudu.com.

What makes digital textbooks a good bet?

Posted on by
Reply

For some time now we’ve known that the digital textbook market, or more broadly speaking the educational market as far as it pertains to digital publishing, is something of a case unto itself, with its own unique variables that make it, for many analysts, a more attractive long term proposition than other sectors.

So why is the digital textbook market different? Unsurprisingly, there are a number of reasons, most obviously the existence of a market that is essentially guaranteed to some degree (university students) but critically, the government support of initiatives behind the digitization of textbooks, which sets out clear timeframes for publishers, both print and digital, to get their content onto e-reading devices. This level of comprehensive support from the very top of government departments is something that no other vertical possesses, and the reasons for it have been aptly summarized by Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education:

”Do we want kids walking around with 50-pound backpacks and every book in those backpacks costing 50, 60, 70 dollars and many of them being out of date? Or, do we want students walking around with a mobile device that has much more content than was even imaginable a couple years ago and can be constantly updated? I think it’s a very simple choice.”

Digital textbooks are therefore naturally one of the areas that stand to benefit most from the migration to tablets /e-reading devices in general, both in terms of form factor and features. Alongside this, textbook publishers have benefited from creating new monetization models that fit the specific requirements of the market (something magazine publishers are still grappling with). In this sense, digital textbooks have a unique advantage over other sectors when it comes to implementing alternative pricing models because of the nature of educational print materials in the first place. Educational publishers can implement models that incorporate micro-transactions (for individual chapters) as well as textbook rental (e.g. owning a book for a single term). The jury is still out on whether the actual price-points associated with these almost entirely DRM driven models are competitive enough to push students away from traditional print editions to the extent digital will become the dominant platform, but the models themselves, of term-based ownership, of purchasing individual chapters and so on will remain (indeed, we’re seeing rental sales drive adoption moreso than outright purchases in some studies) and increasingly we’re seeing free initiatives, particularly amongst community colleges, that are helping to further cement digital textbook adoption rates.

Feature-wise, textbooks also stand as amongst the best examples of how tablet and e-reading technology can facilitate a better experience for all parties involved. Publishers can use multimedia content for a clear purpose (something many digital magazine publishers, in spite of the immense popularity of video content, have struggled with), particularly elucidating upon particular academic topics in such a way as to engage the student and visually clarify particularly complex processes in say, an electrical engineering textbook. Digital textbooks combine practical uses of multimedia integration with powerful methods of cloud synchronization, which allow for not only the ability to access a single textbook with notes and annotations the student has created on one device across multiple devices, but also as a tool for teachers and lecturers to gather data on how students are performing on various interactive parts of the textbook, how much of a particular chapter they’ve read and other useful metrics. This is highly important to educators across the board because it allows them to more clearly identify problem areas for particular students. In short, it’s a highly utilitarian and practical use of new technology, going beyond simple gimmicks.

But there are still issues that require work. Although good monetization methods are in place, publishers still need to address the concerns of students as they pertain to price-points for rented textbooks and individual chapters, which is currently an obstacle to adoption rates according to many surveys. Moreover, on the vendor side, the high cost both monetarily and in terms of time that rich text conversions entail can be problematic.

This ties into our own plans here at YUDU. What we aim to do with our cross-platform educational apps is essentially to bridge the gap between publisher, educator and student. The ability to bring all of these features (cloud synchronization, rich media and interactivity) under a single umbrella, whilst ensuring across-the-board platform agnosticity has been something that has generated some very positive feedback, interestingly, we’ve also found that allowing the publisher to use our self-publishing system alongside this is also very popular as it gives them full and direct control over pricing, publishing and enhancement of the books themselves. Moving forward, we feel this approach of combining feature-richness with a straightforward, user-friendly and well-supported platform for educational publishers to deliver these textbooks to the marketplace will continue to generate interest and appeal.

YUDU App now available on Android

Posted on by
Reply

As promised the YUDU app is now available on Android.

The app, now available on both Android and iOS devices has a selection of guides, videos, case studies and client examples to help give you a better understanding of the YUDU platform, its potential and how it’s being used.

We try and update the information in the app as often as possible so if there’s anything that you think would be of benefit let your account manager know and we’ll be sure to try and make it happen.

Download the Android App here.

Download the iPad App here.

Some notes on the state of the digital magazine industry

Posted on by
1

The topic of digital versus print in regards to magazines has been re-trodden in countless scores of blogs and opinion editorials to the point of exhaustion, but beyond the platitudes and clichés some very interesting axioms around which publishers are starting to orientate their digital strategies are emerging that make for some interesting reading, so I’ll briefly discuss a few of these, particularly in relation to the growth of the e-book industry, below.

Firstly, some background: The rise of the internet as the dominant entertainment platform and news source has been by far and away the main cause of the abysmal circulation figures of print magazines in recent time. This has been met with a variety of responses from publishers, most well noted of which has been the widespread implementation of paywalls, but this has been met with mixed success. While certain large newspapers have reported widespread growth as a result of this monetization model, its effects on the magazine and newspaper industries as a whole is still a matter of some discussion, and there are doubts as to the degree of its effectiveness in the long term. Regardless of this, expect websites which produce large amounts of online-specific content to move towards this model to some degree.

Alongside these web-based developments, the meteoric success of tablet devices has held obvious implications for publishers that, as most of us in publishing are acutely aware, haven’t gone unnoticed. There is now a booming market in digital publications provided through tablet Applications, utilizing a pre-built “walled garden” infrastructure that allows for easy distribution of content. There is some debate however as to the level of real and expected growth for the digital magazine sector.

Another paradigm that is emerging is the fact that certain publications simply cannot survive in print any longer. Advertising revenues and ever declining subscription figures on that side mean maintaining a print publication is, in some exceptional cases, a liability. This happened most prominently at the end of last year with Newsweek, which had been haemorrhaging losses from its print edition for some years. Newsweek has now joined a growing list of “digital only” magazine publishers who claimed they simply could not sustain the losses they had been taking on their print publications.


This ties into the wider issue of the future of print in general, with e-books acting as a good illustration of some of the trends. For some time now, e-reading devices have been touted as the death-knell for printed books. Various statistics are trotted out to back up this affirmation, and there’s certainly good data to suggest that e-reading could very well eclipse printed books in the developed world by the end of the decade. However, as the initial excitement over e-readers has now subsided, more measured voices are now re-evaluating those more hyperbolic, earlier claims; saying not only that is the printed book here to stay, but predicting they can continue to sell well, both independently and as a complementary product.

This ties back into my earlier comments about the magazine industry because it’s quite easy to draw inferences from the above re-evaluation and suggest that the same pattern of a projected plateauing of digital growth and print stabilization can occur within the magazine publishing sector as well. However, once again things aren’t as clear cut as this.

For one thing, magazines do not generally possess the same degree of “tactile pleasure” and durability that physical books convey to their owners. There’s a sense of permanence in building a physical book library that doesn’t transfer over, at least not to the same extent. Also, as Nicholas Carr points out, the initial meteoric growth associated with e-books happened because it was associated with a single-use device (e-readers) that early-adopters quickly picked up (once price points dropped significantly for sales to hit critical mass) and understood how to use, so much so that growth is now. Marketing and disseminating the benefits of App-based magazine editions has been more of a gradual process, since tablets are devices still in their infancy that are used for multiple purposes, and many prospective customers, both with tablet and without, aren’t well aware enough of the advantages digital magazines can offer them. It’s also extremely important to keep in mind just how young this particular industry is, and how in a broader and more macrohistorical sense, digital magazines will only continue to be a hugely disruptive force upon their print equivalents.

As a result it’s far more likely that the norm for the next few years will be that digital magazines will continue their current trend of steady growth and the trend of print-readers migrating over to digital highlighted by the AMA will continue. It remains to be seen however what the equilibrium point for print will be in the magazine space, when it manages to secure itself alongside existing digital editions as another “complementary product”. But expect broad growth across the board for digital magazines, driven in part by the move away from print, ever more tactile and lighter devices, alongside increasing in-app advertising revenue.

YUDU Helps Shopping Center Industry’s Top Trade Association Go Mobile

Posted on by
Reply

Case Study: ICSC 

Background

ICSC, the shopping center industry’s top trade association, delivers crucial information that the organization’s nearly 60,000 members – located in more than 120 countries worldwide – depend on to stay informed. Providing news, industry trends, legislative developments and research, ICSC reaches key players in the industry, including shopping center owners, developers, managers, marketing professionals, investors, retailers and brokers. Academics and public officials also rely on ICSC to provide accurate news and data.

ICSC provides a vital link between more than 25 national and regional shopping center councils around the world through its flagship publication, Retail Property Insights. The organization’s Research Department has also created several other publications for its online audience, including U.S. Mall Performance, Canadian Mall Performance, ICSC Chain Store Sales Trends, the Pan-European Shopping Centre Executive Survey, Property & Policy Research, Research Plus, Retail Real Estate Business Conditions, U.S. Retail Real Estate Supply Conditions, Weekly Chain Store Sales Snapshot and a variety of Special Studies.

The Challenge

ICSC’s forward-thinking Research Department routinely evaluates how to deliver its information to members in the most effective way possible. As the general public – and members –increasingly turned to mobile apps to access online publications, delivering content efficiently on smartphones and tablets became a major priority.

The desired solution would allow content to be quickly and easily published to a mobile app. The solution had to be easy for the busy ICSC Research team to use, but more importantly, it had to deliver content across multiple platforms and devices to accommodate members’ different device types, which include iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones and tablets.

The Solution

ICSC Research ultimately selected YUDU as its mobile app publishing option. By working with YUDU, the department can now deliver publications that members can access anytime, anywhere via iPad, iPhone and Android devices. This broader access has significantly improved the association’s visibility.

Furthermore, ICSC members are now able to keep tabs on the latest industry research on their favorite mobile device – anywhere they need it.

Partnering with YUDU allows ICSC Research to be more responsive to evolving technology trends without the upfront time and capital investment required to build a mobile app publishing capability in-house. By working with YUDU, the department was able to instantly and affordably access a 21st century communications platform – and keep its 60,000 members in the know.

The full case study is available here.

Download the Android app here.

Download the iOS app here.

New Feature: Social Multiplier for Catalogs

Posted on by
Reply

More people than ever before are shopping online – via desktop, laptop or mobile devices, which is why it’s so important to us here at YUDU to constantly develop and improve our catalog solution.

Our latest feature release is a social multiplier. With advanced YUDU social sharing technology, consumers can now instantly share point of sale links for individual catalog items via email, Facebook and Twitter.

1. Select item to share

2. Select where to share

3. And share away

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exposure to a single user on a tablet now becomes a portal to social networks where thousands of potential buyers can reached and able to buy. Tracking codes provide data and clicks on the shared image go to the item on the ecommerce site for immediate purchase. The new feature can drive higher ROI and significantly increase customer engagement.

The new Social Multiplier has the potential to drive ROI even higher. With more than a billion people on Facebook (and approximately 680 million mobile users) and 500 million with Twitter accounts, social media platforms are the communication channel of choice for millions of consumers, who use Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch with family and friends, share news and discuss products they’re interested in and purchases they’ve recently made.

The new feature allows catalog publishers to capitalize on this trend by linking each item shared on social networks directly to the appropriate portion of the eCommerce site, taking away additional steps the potential customer used to have to perform to reach the point of purchase and removing obstacles to making a sale. The streamlined process benefits retailers by improving conversions as recommendations from friends is always the most effective influence, but it’s also an advantage for consumers, who can now more easily share shopping news within their social circle via email, Facebook or Twitter.

Our catalog solution is currently used by top retailers worldwide, including Shop Direct Group, Littlewoods, Lakeland, Very, Crocs, Jockey and many others and our retailers have increased shopping cart value by as much as 50%, all while saving significant amounts on print and distribution.

For more on our catalog solution click here.

Publishing 360: The Future for Magazines

Posted on by
1

Publishing 360: A conference created by, and for the Irish magazine publishers.

This Wednesday the 24th our CEO Richard will join a panel of publishing big dogs to discus the latest trends in the magazine industry at the Publishing 360 The Future for Magazines digital forum. The conference will examine the integration of print and online strategies; revenue growth through product development; the re-definition and re-skilling of publishing roles; the balance between consumer and B2B strategies; the changing relationship with the audience and finding the best way or combination of ways to deliver content among the many options (a lot to cover between the hours of 8am – 1pm, impressive stuff).

Our CEO Richard Stephenson will take to the stage at 10.50 to examine the route to app success, discussing how publishing brands must extend themselves rather than merely produce an iteration of what they do in print as readers now expect the app to do something else that broadens their experience of the brand.

The event takes place this Wednesday 24th of April 8am – 1pm at the Clyde Court Hotel, Dublin. To find out more and to book a place click here.

 

A few notes on App Store Optimization

Posted on by
2

We’re asked a lot about the concept of App Store Optimization (ASO) here at YUDU, so I thought I’d give a brief overview of what ASO is, how it currently works and relates to existing search optimization methods, what the best methods are and what to avoid.

In an environment of hundreds of thousands and in the case of the App Store, soon to be millions of apps, enhancing the discoverability of your content can potentially make a significant difference to the bottom line, so it’s unsurprising that ASO registers so much interest from existing and new customers.

But what exactly is it?

ASO is the name given to methods that aim to improve the visibility and discoverability of apps within the context of an App Store. It’s closely tied to the concept of Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) to the degree that it’s frequently referred to as “the new SEO”, but despite the fact the aims and principles behind both marketing methods are more or less the same (for example: improving your search ranking relative to the competition), the actual methods by which these are achieved are somewhat different and this distinction requires some elaboration.

SEO is a well-established marketing tool and as one would expect, the methods which underpin it are similarly well fleshed out. There’s a lot of documentation, literature and statistics on how to use these methods, which aspects of them are the most effective, how to produce concrete results and so on.

To this end certain de facto SEO standards have emerged, such as the robot exclusion protocol to give instructions to crawlers and robots, making use of coherent XML sitemaps to assist in indexing, strategically placing hierarchical HTML header tags to prioritize certain content above other types of content etc. As SEO methods are naturally all built around web-browser based content, these existing standards and methods cannot be transferred over to ASO strategies. In web-browser environments it is the page that is being crawled, in App Stores, it is the app itself, or more specifically, the App’s metadata (App Store crawlers do not index app description pages).

ASO is therefore something of a nascent field and as Marketers we’re dealing with variables, algorithms and so on that we don’t quite yet understand to the degree we understand the standards Google, Ask, Bing et al employ. Alongside that, the requisite analytical data to make firm conclusions about the effectiveness of very different types of ASO methods and strategies isn’t as well established.

This isn’t to say we have nothing; there is more than enough information currently out there to give prospective or existing digital publishers a broad idea of what you should be doing with your app to improve its discoverability and visibility. I’ll introduce a few of these methods below.

Given that App Store searches are the biggest driver of app discovery, you’ll want to make sure your app as high as possible when users search for keywords that are related to it, so choose an app name that’s explicit in its meaning. You’re also given about 100 characters (on the App Store) to use as metadata keywords by Apple and Google, so make use of all of them and make sure you research your competitors’ keywords too – As metadata it’s invisible to the end user, so this will require some trial and error searching on your part. Moreover, be inventive with what you pick, even start browsing a Thesaurus for synonyms if necessary.

With your metadata now optimized, it’s time to think about the end-user facing material such as the app description. Here the rules of common sense apply – Make it simple and coherent, list in bullet points what the reader themselves will be getting in terms of benefits. If necessary, reference any awards the publication has won, or if it holds status as an existing print publication and so on. Moreover, remember to keep the “What’s New” section regularly updated as nothing looks worse than apparent disinterest in the app and its content on the part of the publisher themselves.

Design aspects of ASO come to the fore in the case of the app icon. It’s incredibly important to keep its design consistent with that of the publication itself and test out how it looks against various backgrounds and with various types of borders, especially against the actual iTunes and App Store backgrounds it will be featured on. With regards to in-app screenshots, you’ll ideally want to be showing off the best aspects of your publication, so particularly aesthetic, vector rich images in say, a travel magazine, or pages that show off inventive in-house HTML content within a textbook. This is essentially a case of emphasizing of the particular selling points of your publication in bold, whichever those may be.

Always keep reviews in mind. Here at YUDU we’ve found the best way for publishers to discourage low review scores and encourage high ones is to always provide recourse for your readers to report bugs that we can then deal with on our end. Always keeping them in the loop about this process and ensuring them that work is being done to rectify any fault goes a long way. These processes have produced real and tangible results in improving ratings amongst many of our clients.

Finally, be aware of any marketers who promise easy results through black-hat marketing methods such as false review scores. Just as with SEO, there is no silver-bullet in this space and attempts to boost your discoverability through these sorts of methods is liable to end up getting your app removed from the App Store itself.

So in conclusion it’s worth repeating that the scope of what you can actually do with ASO is more limited than SEO, given that App Stores are very much a “walled garden”, so it should ideally constitute a smaller part of the overall marketing strategy for your app. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of what constitutes ASO is more or less simple common sense. So keep things like keywords, concise app descriptions and good design work on the icon in mind, but these shouldn’t require a particularly large investment of time or resources to get right.

More general app marketing methods are fairly straightforward: Try to employ existing social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to generate buzz and “likes” for your app and try to use your website itself as an App marketing tool, redirecting existing readers to download the app (these people will be the most likely to positively receive it). Here we come full circle as you can employ the aforementioned, established SEO methods in attempting to market your app through your website.

But the bottom line is always the content itself. Ensure good quality content alongside solid marketing emphasizing its strengths and you stand a very good chance of expanding your readership and any associated revenue alongside it.