Ever since Apple instituted clause 2.25 in October 2012 to its App Review Guidelines, the Cupertino, Calif.-based corporation has been cracking down on app discovery services violating the clause like AppGratis, which was removed from the Apple App Store in an effort to stop third-party tools that directly compete with the store. Clause 2.25 states that “Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.” Another relevant clause is 5.6, which states that “Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.”

Inside Mobile Apps first heard of AppGratis when we spoke with CEO Simon Dawlat back in January about the company’s raising of $13.5 million in Series A funding and that its service was delivering up to 700,000 installs for app developers. Essentially, AppGratis offered developers burst campaigns by getting their app featured by AppGratis for a certain amount of money. Now that the app is removed from the Apple App Store, for those who still have the app installed on their devices, the app just prompts users that daily deals will be delivered to their email instead of through the app via push notifications. App discovery remains one of the largest hurdles for app developers, so when engines like AppGratis get taken down, developers need to start looking at other avenues for discovery. In a guest post from Side-Kick Games marketing director Noya Polliack, she adds that it’s clear Apple wants to remain “hands on” with picking the “right” apps for its users.

This wasn’t the first time Apple cracked down on limiting outside influencers from its app ecosystem. Apple shook down incentivized install practices back in April 2011, where developers offer their apps in other games and pay for downloads when users install their titles for virtual current.

PocketGamer.biz reported earlier this month that Apple apparently expanded the language in clause 2.25. PocketGamer.biz was sent an email conversation between Apple and an anonymous developer who’s developing an app “primarily focused on sharing recommendations to your friends.” In the email from Apple to the developer, Apple pointed to apps that “include filtering, bookmarking, searching, or sharing recommendations are not considered as significantly different from the App Store.” The additional language to clause 2.25 is not present in Apple’s guidelines. This expansion to the regulation 2.25 has left iOS developers confused about what is and what isn’t acceptable in terms of app promotion. (more…)

Google today announced that all Android developers can now reply to user reviews in Google Play. Developers can reply to app store reviews through the Google Play Developer Console. All replies are displayed publicly below the corresponding user review on Google Play. Users receive an email notification when a developer replies and can either reply to a developer directly by email, or update their review if they feel the need to.

In June 2012, Google first allowed a select group of developers — those with a Top Developer Badge — the ability to respond to specific reviews directly from the Android Developer Console. Google expanded the program to more developers in January. Comparatively, the Apple App Store still doesn’t have the ability for developers to directly respond to user reviews.

Responding to app reviews is helpful to developers because an app’s average review score is a powerful viral mechanism for app discovery as well as provide a more effective communication channel with their audience to handle any customer support requests like complaints, bugs or suggestions for new features.

Google also provided some best practices when replying to user reviews, which it collected from developers who had the ability to reply to reviews already:

• Check reviews frequently, and involve people from all parts of your organization
• Identify and prioritize bugs based on user impact
• Let users know when their problems are resolved
• Reply constructively to both negative and positive reviews
• Refer users to documentation or other support channels
• Get ideas about new improvements or features
• Thank the users who are your biggest advocates

Developers interested in learning more about replying to user reviews can go here to see Google’s posting guidelines.

Fiksu today reported a steady landscape for daily download volumes and mobile app marketing costs in its March 2013 Index. The user acquisition and marketing company also announced that its Fiksu Mobile App Marketing Platform has now registered 100 billion app user actions and driven more than one billion app downloads.

Fiksu reported a cost per loyal user increase of 5 percent, or $0.07, to $1.36, from $1.29 in February’s Index. Marketing costs are up by approximately 5 percent year-over-year when compared to costs of $1.30 per loyal user in March 2012′s Index. The Boston-based company, which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free iPhone apps in the U.S., noted a 4 percent decline in daily mobile app downloads, moving from 5.20 million daily downloads in February to 5.02 million downloads in March. Although daily download volumes remained steady month-over-month, volumes were up 12 percent year-over-year from March 2012′s figure of 4.45 million daily downloads.

“The ‘new normal‘ continued in March, which was good news for mobile app marketers,” says Micah Adler, CEO of Fiksu, in a statement. “Inventory has increased but costs have held steady, reflecting a maturity in the overall quality of apps and their ability to engage users. Despite the last few steady months, marketers must always be prepared for the ebbs and flows that inevitably happen in the complex app ecosystem.”

For the purpose Fiksu’s Indexes, the company denotes a loyal user as a person who open an app three or more times. These reports are meant to help mobile app marketers gauge their performance against industry trends.

AppShopper returns to the Apple App Store – App discovery service AppShopper, which was pulled from the Apple App Store in December 2012 just like AppGratis recently, returned to the Apple App Store this week. The developers altered the approach of the app so that it doesn’t directly compete with the app store by focusing on social discovery through a core Wish List functionality.

Rebtel announces public launch of its Voice Platform for iOS and Android developers – Mobile VoIP company Rebtel announced the public launch of its free SDK for iOS and Android developers, which allows them to integrate free global calling capability into any app. The company first opened up its service in beta back in December 2012. Interested developers can go here to learn more.

Slant Six Games releases Max’s Pirate Planet – Slant Six Games, the developer behind some titles in the SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals franchise for Sony PlayStation systems, released an interactive pirate board game for kids called Max’s Pirate Planet — A Board Game Adventure. The title is priced at $2.99 and available for iOS, Android and Kindle Fire.

Animoca launches Thor: Lord of Storms – Hong Kong’s Animoca launched action-strategy defense game Thor: Lord of Storms, which is based on Norse Mythology. The title is available now for free on Android.

Plink launches mobile app for iOS – Plink, a loyalty program that rewards users for making offline purchases, launched a mobile app for iOS. Now current Plink users from the web or Facebook can manage their account anywhere, while new users will be able to create an account and connect their credit or debit card to the account, so they can begin earning points by purchasing offline from more than 50,000 of Plink’s partners.

Zattikka launches Legacy of a Thousand Suns – Legacy of a Thousand Suns, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game originally for Facebook from game studio 5th Planet Games, made its way iOS this week. The mobile version of the game was developed by Spellgun Studios, which is part of games entertainment group Zattikka.

Drippler launches iPhone app, Android app reaches 5 million users – Drippler, the app that provides users with device-related content and information about their handset, launched an iPhone version of its app this week. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup also announced that it reached the five million total user mark across its suite of Android apps.

NARR8 to launch editor tool for its motion comics app in late May – NARR8 announced that it’ll be adding a new editor tool to its motion comics app (review), which will allow users to create their own interactive stories with visuals, music and basic animation. The editor is slated to launch in late May.

In an effort to work more closely with its European publishers, mobile game cross-promotion service Chartboost today announced that it has opened its first international office in Amsterdam, with a team of five led by Dutch game development veteran Ilja Goossens.

“Chartboost has been global since day one, and probably the fact that I’m European makes the whole company be more international,” Maria Alegre, CEO of Chartboost, told Inside Mobile Apps. “Right now probably one-third of our developers are European, so it made sense for us to have a team there and be closer to them.”

Alegre says the company chose Amsterdam because of the convenient airport connection between the city and San Francisco, where Chartboost is currently headquartered. Amsterdam is also the city that has easy access to locations where many of its top European game development customers reside including Supercell, King, Wooga, NaturalMotion and Rovio.

“Europe is a leader in mobile gaming,” she says. “I don’t know why it took us so long to get there.” (more…)

Editor’s Note: Earlier this week, Apple booted out app discovery service AppGratis, which promotes paid apps by offering one for free everyday, from the Apple App Store for violating clause 2.25 of Apple’s App Review Guidelines, which states that “Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.” The app also violated clause 5.6, which states that “Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.” VentureBeat reported that Apple reached out to AppGratis last Friday, informing the company that it was welcome to change its app and resubmit it. AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat said in a company blog post that there were no discussions between Apple and AppGratis in advance of the Cupertino, Calif.-headquartered corporation removing the app. Dawlat (who also explained the full story of how AppGratis got pulled) said he did eventually speak with an Apple employee over the phone and does want to speak further with Apple.

With all that said, in today’s guest post from Noya Polliack, marketing director at Side-Kick Games, a developer of family and mid-core games, says that despite discoverability being a huge issue for app developers in the crowded mobile app market, AppGratis is the latest example of Apple being keen on clamping down on any apps that violate its policies.

Six months after adding clause 2.25 to Apple’s App Review Guidelines, AppGratis finds itself outside of the best store in town – Apple’s App Store.

AppGratis is the second app banned from the App Store due to the new guidelines which restrict apps from providing pure app promotion services. These Apps usually function as app recommendation services and/or alert users when discounts are available. Among this type of apps are FreeAppADay, Appoday, Daily App Dream, Appsfire and more. Earlier in December, the popular AppShopper app was removed from the Apple App Store.

Both AppGratis and AppShopper offered developers burst campaigns — massive traffic in a short period of time. The result of these campaigns is usually high ranking in the Apple App Store for a few days. This method of app promotion is used by many developers in order to overcome the number one problem in the crowded app market today — discoverability.

At the moment there are still plenty of other discovery apps, which offer third-party promotions. While Apple’s next move is unknown, it’s definitely an issue that app developers should address.

Is Apple acting in the users’ best interest?

One of the reasons the new clause was added is that by attracting millions of users, third-party aggregators like AppGratis allow a way for developers to spend their way to the top 25, violating the Apple App Store’s purity. However, big game development studios that can afford to create a marketing buzz before they launch their app can be accused of doing just the same. While these well known studios get the media’s attention and use their apps portfolio to cross promote their new app, indie developers with a low marketing budget and a single app stay behind. Sadly, the outcome is that many new great apps are not visible to iOS users.

It’s also important to remember that burst campaigns can be executed using different user acquisition tactics such as web-based affiliate networks, ad networks and user acquisition networks. Since all of these sources use in-app ads to promote other apps, we can expect to see the mobile ads market growing faster than expected.

As Apple’s ranking algorithm remains a mystery, it’s known that the number of downloads plays a key factor in Apple’s app store ranking. Since app installs can be acquired one way or another, it only seems fair that users’ experience and rating will have a much stronger influence on apps’ ranking.

Looking at Apple’s latest moves — adding clause 2.25, clamping down on incentivized apps downloads, changing the Apple App Store’s look and the unknown magic formula of how to get featured — it’s clear that Apple is keen to stay “hands on” picking the “right” apps for its users.

Twitter yesterday announced a couple of new functionalities for its Twitter Cards platform that are of particular interest to mobile app developers. The two new functionalities allows mobile app developers to add links at the bottom of their Tweets featuring Twitter Cards that either prompt users to download their app from a mobile app store or deep-link into their own app (for users who already have a particular developer’s app installed).

Both of these new Twitter Card functionalities — app installs and deep-linking — work across iPhone, iPad and Android. Developers can implement Twitter Cards with these functionalities by adding a new set of markup tags, which Twitter details here.

Twitter Cards, which more than 10,000 developers already use, allow developers to embed rich media — videos, images, story summaries and more — in Tweets that are generated from the link within a Tweet’s text.

First, mobile app developers can add these new footer tags to their markup, so they can specify to users who haven’t downloaded their app to do so. The Twitter Card will have a link that reads “Get the app.” For developer’s that have an iPhone app that’s not iPad optimized, they should include the iPhone app ID, name, and URL, for both iPhone and iPad related tags. When no value is provided for iPad, the Cards will render a “View on web” link directing to the value in twitter:url.

Second, If a user has a particular developer’s app installed, a developer can specify a deep-link into the relevant resource within their own app. The text prompt in the embedded Twitter Card in a Tweet reads “Open in app.” If a user taps the link, Twitter will send the user out of Twitter and into a developer’s app. For example, instead of viewing a photo from Flickr within the Twitter app, a user can click the “Open in Flickr app” link to hop out of the Twitter app an into the Flickr app to view the photo.

“With mobile app deep-linking, users will be able to tap a link to either view content directly in your app, or download your app, depending on whether or not they have your app installed,” explains Twitter’s Jason Costa in a blog post.

These new functionalities tear down the barrier between app-to-app communication. Instead of pulling up an in-app browser like Twitter used to do, which the Facebook app still does, a user can hop out of Twitter and to another app. These new Twitter Card functionalities also provide a huge potential for app developers to drive downloads and app discovery. Since many developers promote their apps on social networks or implement social sharing features within their apps, they can now use these new Twitter functionalities to encourage users to download their app or re-open their app to increase retention and decrease churn.

Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson said in a blog post that the deep-linking functionality is helpful for ecommerce apps. Instead of directing a user to a mobile web page where they may not be logged into a particular ecommerce company’s website, they can now be sent to an ecommerce company’s mobile app where a user is generally logged in with their payment credentials. Essentially, ecommerce businesses can use this new Twitter Card functionality to help with driving transactions rather than just page views.

For developers interested in learning more about how to enable app install prompts and deep-linking, head here.

Mobile game developer Rovio today announced that Angry Birds Toons, an upcoming cartoon series based on the company’s popular game franchise, will be accessible within all Angry Birds mobile games.

After installing an update, any of the Angry Birds apps will be able to get access to a new channel button in each game’s home screen, which is where users can watch episodes of the show.

The cartoon series is scheduled to begin airing this upcoming weekend (March 16 for broadcast TV and March 17 for on-demand services) on a dedicated channel within Rovio’s game portfolio, and on Comcast’s U.S. video platforms like Xfinity on Demand, Xfinity.com.tv and in the Xfinity TV Player app on Samsung Smart TVs. Rovio plans to add support for Roku and other platforms in the future. In other parts of the world, the Angry Birds Toons will air on FOX8 in Australia, JEI TV in South Korea, ANTV in Indonesia, Cartoon Networking in India, MTV3 Juniori and MTV3 in Finland, the Children’s Channel in Israel, 1+1 networks in Ukraine, Gulli and Canal J in France, SUPER RTL in Germany, TV2 in Norway, Canal 13 in Chile and Gloob in Brazil. Rovio has also partnered with Activision, Paramount Pictures, BlackBerry and Sony Pictures for the launch of the Angry Birds Toons channel.

So far, Rovio has planned 52 episodes for the cartoon series, with a new episode scheduled to air every Sunday. Rovio hopes the cartoon show will help with increasing installs as well as its engagement and retention rates for its Angry Birds games.

User acquisition and marketing company Fisku today reported a cost per loyal user decrease of 7 percent from $1.67 in its December 2012 Index to $1.56 in its January 2013 Index. The Boston-based company defines a loyal user as a person who will open an app at least three times. Compared to January 2012′s average cost of $1.14 per user, January 2013′s user acquisition cost is up 37 percent year-over-year, but the drop from December 2012 to January 2013 by 7 percent was not as dramatic as the drop from December 2011 to January 2012 by 59 percent, which fell from $1.81 to $1.14 per loyal user.

The company, which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps, saw mobile app downloads increase by 13 percent from 5.32 million daily downloads in December 2012 to 6.01 million downloads in January. With monetization company Flurry which saw 50 million iOS and Android device activations and 1.76 billion apps downloaded during Christmas week last year, Fiksu says the high trend of user activity and app discovery continued into January.

CEO Micah Adler says Fiksu’s January Indexes are early indicators of the “mainstreaming of mobile advertising,” meaning marketers emphasizing value over volume by spreading their budgets out for maximum profit, especially to mobile advertising campaigns.

“We expect brands to allocate more dedicated spending to mobile advertising campaigns in 2013 and to only get savvier about aligning seasonal spending to the ebbs and flows of user acquisition costs,” he says, in a statement.

Game cross-promotion network Applifier today revealed data from its recently launched game recording service Everyplay as well as a new its new FaceCam featu.

Everyplay is a service that allows users to record gameplay from iOS games, with the aim to drive social discovery for a developer’s mobile game. Developers can integrate the service into its games  with the free Everyplay SDK. Applifier founder and CEO Jussi Laakkonen says Everplay is meant to capture that word-of-mouth sharing moment of a mobile game between friends in-person, but in digital form through gameplay replays. Users can share their replays through social services including Facebook, YouTube or Twitter.

“We are trying to approach the discovery problem by not approaching the discovery problem,” he says. “We are trying to enable you, the player, to share meaningful moments from the games you like. That in turn, solves the discovery problem because it’s authentic, social, word-of-mouth, in action, in video form — you can actually see what it is.”

The Helsinki and San Francisco-based company revealed Everyplay replay sharing data from the mobile game Stair Dismount. The objective in Stair Dismount is to earn points by breaking the most bones in the dummy after launching the dummy down stairs and other environments. The game saw 10,000 video replays recorded by players in 30 days. The most popular sharing vehicle by far was Facebook, with 50 percent of the shares followed by YouTube with 35 percent and Twitter with 15 percent. Drilling deeper into its Facebook sharing data, Applifier found that an average of 15 friends watched every replay and 12 percent clicked through to download the game from the Apple App Store. So far, Laakkonen says about 10 games have integrated Everyplay along with dozens of games with Everyplay integration that have yet to be released.

“The best way to discover good games is through friends, somebody showing me,” he says. “This is what we want to recreate digitally, so its shareable and you can go authentically viral.”

Moving on to the new feature, FaceCam utilizes a device’s front-facing camera and speaker for users to add themselves into a replay through video and audio commentary, which Laakkonen believes, changes a replay from just a gameplay clip to a meaningful moment from a user. Click here for an example of the new FaceCam feature.

Currently, Everyplay doesn’t monetize, but Laakonen believes the service could follow YouTube’s model for content monetization where a promoted video would be shown right before a video.

Applifier funding to date totals $6 million from backers including Lifeline Ventures, MHS Capital, PROfounders Capital, Tekes, Webb Investment Network and angel investors.

For developers interested in Everyplay, click here for additional information about the service and registration for FaceCam’s private beta, which is expected to roll out in March. (more…)