Great blog post on Moco News by Tricia Duryee –

How A Company Recovers After Pissing Off Steve Jobs

We found out today how a company regains its composure after infuriating Apple’s Steve Jobs: Concede as quickly as possible.

That’s what Flurry is doing after its high-profile stunt earlier this year led to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) changing the terms of its iPhone developer agreement and prompted Jobs to blame Flurry during his appearance at the D8 conference on Tuesday.

Ok, so they admit they were wrong and are making some changes.

Flurry said that well before the D8 conference, it was working on complying with the issues raised, and has since been taking steps to address them with the help of its 30,000 customers. Specifically in regards to “device data,” Flurry said it is updating their service to be in compliance and will no longer collect the data. All-in-all, it’s trying to fall in line as quickly as possible. “Regarding sharing some specific aggregated usage statistics, to which Apple is opposed, we will comply with their wishes. Our goal continues to be to add value to the developer ecosystem and be a strong partner to platform providers,” Farago said.

That’s all nice and wonderful, but does it really change much? Steve Jobs made it clear (but is it clear?):

His exact words are: “The use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited.”

Flurry also says it will not share device data. But is this enough? Will Apple change it’s policy “BANNING THIRD PARTY ANALYTICS”? I guess we will have to see when the next developer license agreement is drafted.

So I have 2 questions.

1. How will Flurry make money?? Raising capital is not the same as generating income. I had assumed all along they were selling the aggregate data and generating some income from that.
2. Will apple let developers track device info themselves? I assume so. Developers need to know so they can tailor the apps and their capabilities depending on which device it is running on. I assume this will be even more true as the next gen is released.

So for now we will leave the device reporting in AppClix since we are not considered a third party if we do not host the analytics app or the data. As always, the developer is responsible for complying with their aggreement with Apple. If the agreement changes, we will release an update that complies.

Oh and I love this graphic on Flurry’s home page. It’s part of their “Privacy First” initiative. I’ll leave that one alone.

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Well that was exciting…

We just placed our pre-order for the iPad. According to Apple it should show up on April 3rd. We ordered the lowest version since we will definitely be getting the 3G one when it is ready.

When the SDK was released we began development of an application through Millennium Studios, our mobile app company. Hopefully Apple will delay the release of iPad apps to the iTunes store until we can all test on the real thing. Everything works great in the simulator by who knows.

While developing the app, we added new features to AppClix to track iPad specific metrics such as what orientation the user is using your app in, as well as whether they are using an external keyboard or monitor.

We’ve also expanded the campaign tracking to accommodate traditional web campaigns. We anticipate a lot more advertising to be done on the Internet now that there is a full screen browser.

AppClix provides a custom URL for all apps and tracks referrers automatically when used on a web banner or site link. The custom URLs can also be coded with campaign codes and ad codes to further calculate ROI and conversions. The campaigns are then automatically created in AppClix. No need to set them up first.

We’re excited to get the iPad in our hands. Hopefully it will be on time as promised by Apple.

Stay Tuned!

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When developing AppClix, we decided in advance that the only way to really understand the needs of the users would be to actually create mobile applications and put them up for sale in the app store.

Through another company of mine, we created 4 iPhone apps. During the development, we learned all about iPhone app analytics and how our competitors work. We saw was was missing from existing solutions, and what was frustrating us.

When we put the apps in the iPhone app store on iTunes, we instantly saw what sales and marketing information was needed that was also not available easily in a single reporting solution.

Each of our apps has both AppClix, as well as one competitor installed for direct comparison of data.

We are in the process of doing specific posts outlining our experience with each of the apps and competitors that can be found at the links below. We also evaluated a few others and are waiting on app store approval.

• Asteroid Runner – AppClix and Flurry Comparison
• Doodle Copter – AppClix and Pinch Media Comparison

In this post we will discuss things that are not specific to one provider.

The first issue we found right from the start is that it can be extremely uncomfortable compiling a third party dependency into our applications. As many of us know from the AppLoop experience, companies go out of business. We have also found out through our experience that there can be serious delays in data reporting by some providers.

Well what do we do then? One of our apps that uses Pinch Media has not had data refreshed in over 11 days. Well our solution to this issue for those larger developers that want their own solution with NO DEPENDENCY on anyone else is a turnkey user installed, or cloud hosted system. More on this later.

Right away while evaluating all the solutions, we noticed that the dashboard presentation of all of the providers is extremely lacking. Flurry, Pinch Media and Medialets have these “Web 2.0” interfaces that are all graphical and pretty but do not provide a simple concise display of information. Here is a comparison of the dashboards of a few. Click for full size.

As a developer and marketer, we want to see relevant information easily. This is not possible with these other solutions. Being the first, and leader does not mean you can provide an inferior product. Then again, you get what you pay for . Also the drill down pages are just as lacking in content and valuable information.

Here is a comparison of the “By Date” detail pages. Notice how Pinch Media has these HUGH numbers on the page. What’s that about? Also note how both Flurry and Pinch Media only show one metric at a time. You have to drop down menus and change pages to view the other metrics (also one at a time). Who can use this?

I was very disappointed when I saw how these products present the data. We found the same issues with Mobile Web Analytics when developing Mobilytics.

Please visit our more specific posts comparing these solutions and what we found.

• Asteroid Runner – AppClix and Flurry Comparison
• Doodle Copter – AppClix and Pinch Media Comparison

If anyone is interested in beta testing AppClix, please contact us.

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For the last 6 months we have been changing the direction of Mobilytics. We have recently entered AppClix into beta, which we consider to be the ULTIMATE mobile application analytics and reporting solution available. With that change we are expanding our blog to include posts and news on all mobile analytics, not just mobile web related. Over the next few days we will be putting up a number of posts we have written recently that have been waiting in the queue.

While developing AppClix, we have done extensive research and testing of our competitors applications. In order to really understand these products, we also developed a number of iPhone applications through another company of mine called Millennium Studios. We are currently developing Blackberry App World and Android Market apps and are looking for beta testers in those areas as well.

Four of these apps are now in the iTunes store and are producing invaluable data for our development and testing. Stay tuned for more posts about AppClix and some detailed analysis of the mobile app analytics Landscape.

AppClix is not just an application analytics solution like Flurry, Pinch Media, Localytics, MobClix and others. (Yes, as usual we are not afraid to link to the competition.)

AppClix is a complete analytics solution that includes detailed sales reporting, and campaign tracking. Some of the features we have that others don’t are:

• Automatic download of iTunes reports from iTunes Connect for complete sales analysis and reporting
• Click through tracking with conversion for in app and mobile web ads. We also support traditional web ads which we believe will be huge for iPad application marketing.
• Reporting on Reviews and Rankings of apps across mutiple app stores in every country available.
• reporting on how price affects conversions and downloads
• reporting on how changes to descriptions affect sales
• reporting on how ranking and review affect sales
• reporting on referrers when purchases are made from web sites.

These features do NOT require the installation of our library in the mobile application. Signup is instant and reporting is available immediately.

As for our Analytics, we also offer quite a few metrics and features again not available in others.

• Additional metrics such as
• conversion rate
• trial to paid upgrade rates
• update rates that show what percentage of users update to new versions and from what version they updated.
• days from last use to new version update
• Simple OpenFeint integration – We have created a simple OpenFeint service that simply drops into the OpenFeint library for instant analytics integration using same syntax and formats as existing OpenFeint code. For those of you who don’t know about OpenFeint, it is a great community, leaderboard, achievement and application cross promotion solution for iPhone games and apps. We have tried a few solutions, but the OpenFeint community is the largest and has the most robust solution.
• Real Time Analytics! – Yes, this is possible. We are currently using the Amazon EC2 infrastructure for 95% of our solution and can easily scale to accomodate real time stats. While some of the summary data is updated hourly, event and user data is immediately available. Through our testing, we have been amazed at the lag time some vendors are providing. Data in our Pinch Media integration into the DoodleCopter app has not been updated since February 27^th! Yes, 11 days!

(click to enlarge)
They finally put up a note about this, and we will be commenting in additional post shortly.

• Lastly, AppClix is also available in a dedicated and customer installed solution. Yes, you can purchase AppClix and install on your own servers. No need to compile a third party dependency int your precious apps. (Google AppLoop for reasons why). AppClix is avilable as a complete Amaon EC2 paid AMI so you don’t even need your own hardware. More on this to come.

We’re excited about the new blog and AppClix. We look forward to our reader’s feedback, and the continued growth of this market.

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