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.

In today’s weekly App Store refresh, which Apple does every Thursday, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company added a countdown to 50 billion app downloads.

Apple did a similar countdown in February 2012 when the App Store was reaching the 25 billion mark for downloads. To celebrate the 50 billion downloads achievement, Apple will be awarding a $10,000 App Store gift card to the user who downloads the 50 billionth app, and the following 50 users who download an app will receive a $500 App Store gift card.

In early January, Apple announced that its App Store exceeded the 40 billion downloads mark (excluding re-downloads and app updates), with approximately 20 billion downloads occurring in 2012. December 2012, in particular, was a record-breaking month in terms of app downloads, where the company saw more than two billion apps downloaded during the month.

Here are the top 25 free and paid apps of all-time for iPhone and iPad: (more…)

Distimo’s latest report takes a deep dive into the Amazon Appstore, taking a look at the top apps and publishers in terms of estimated daily downloads and one-off revenues in the app store. The report also takes a look at the differences and similarities between the Amazon Appstore, a third-party app store for the Android platform, and Google Play.

App tracking company Distimo kicked off its April report by revealing that the top 200 free apps on the U.S. Amazon Appstore saw a total of 16 million downloads in March. Similarly to the Apple App Store and Google Play, the most downloaded genre of apps were games, with Imangi Studios’ Temple Run 2 leading the way as the most downloaded free app. Also, eight of the top 10 most downloaded apps were games, with Netflix and Facebook as the two non-game apps.

As expected, the amount of device installs for free apps in Google Play is significantly higher compared to the Amazon Appstore. The Dutch firm adds that Google Play is approximately 10 times larger than the Amazon Appstore in the U.S. For example of the disparity between the two app stores, Developer Halfbrick Studios’ Fruit Ninja Free, which is ranked No. 9 in the Amazon Appstore among the top free apps, was downloaded 9.1 times less than in Google Play, which translates to 2.3 million installs from Google Play and 250,000 from the Amazon App Store in March.

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Social game distribution and monetization company PapayaMobile announced the launch of a new SDK to help independent Android developers access the Chinese mobile market.

The first free game with in-app purchases to launch in China using the new SDK will be Scottish developer Cobra Mobile’s WW2 shooter iBomber for Android.

The PapayaMobile SDK helps Android app and game developers monetize by plugging into the company’s cross-promotion and ad network AppFlood, where they can buy, sell or exchange ads and traffic with advertisers and other publishers.

More importantly, the SDK also plugs into China Mobile, China’s biggest mobile operator with more than 700 million subscribers, to allow for in-app purchasing via carrier billing.

Carrier billing is tremendously important if not absolutely necessary in order to monetize in the Chinese market. In November 2012, CocoaChina’s US GM Lei Zhang Zhang told us that carrier billing accounted for 90 percent of Fishing Joy 2’s total revenue of $1.6 million per month. At the 2013 Game Developers Conference Yodo1’s CEO Henry Fong told us that there may be other companies that are able to push games and apps to the many Android app stores in China, but that only those with standing deals with the mobile carriers and access to carrier billing will be able to monetize.

The official release from PapayaMobile claims that the company is taking the lead in opening up the Chinese market to Western developers, but in reality they are already in competition with big and established players such as the aforementioned Yodo1 (which also offers important localization services), InMobi’s App Publish distribution platform which can push an app or game to more than 130 Android app stores in a few clicks, and others.

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.

Google today revealed a new redesigned look for its Google Play app store on Android smartphones and tablets.

The refreshed look is one that’s simple, clean and aimed to help users find apps and media content faster. Notable changes include larger images, grouping of similar content and the appearance of content recommendations as the user scrolls through the app store. Purchasing has also been simplified, so users can go from checkout to enjoying their content as fast as possible.

The previous look of the Google Play store was more text heavy, with black as its primary color. The redesigned store changes the main colors to lighter colors, which is more akin to the look of the web-based Google Chrome Store.

The redesigned Google Play store begins rolling out today for Android smartphones and tablets running the Android Froyo operating system (version 2.2) and above. The refreshed storefront will roll out worldwide in the next few weeks.

Editor’s note: Today’s guest post comes to us from Jan Beckers, co-founder and CEO of HitFox, an incubator focused on investing in and acquiring game distribution and user acquisition startups. This article is the second in a five-part series of articles analyzing game platforms and the patterns that historically repeat itself.

Part 2: From marketing to product focus

In the first party of this article series, we discovered how gaming platforms are very similar to countries in many ways. Both types of entities have specific rules and regulations, growth and decline cycles, competition and taxes. We saw that just like countries and societies, game platforms show patterns in the development of these features. We then took a closer look at the first of these crucial patterns, the acceleration of platform cycles.

A question that is equally elemental as it is crucial, regardless of platform is: “How do I distribute my budgets?” This question is dynamic as the crucial success factors change with the platform cycle. And there is one pattern here in that stands out strong.

Pattern 2: Marketing wins on early platforms, product wins on mature platforms

In the early days of a platform, specific knowledge was rare.  Consumers and users are largely uninformed and don’t truly understand or relate to the platform. With a new technology entering the market there is an instantaneous shortage of information. The customer has to get used to a platform. At the beginning there won’t be many media resources. Word of mouth recommendations by friends also need time to build up. In consequence, discovery mechanisms and filtering functions are weak at the outset of a platform.

The shortage of information extends to the products offered for a platform and in our context the games. A user that wanted to pick a game on Facebook in the early days of the social network was like a tourist that just arrived in a new country, trying to decide on which restaurant to pick — without a travel guide.

The potential customer has to rely on marketing in order to make his decisions. Zynga was masterful in using this situation for their advantage. The company successfully focused on marketing with numerous “Ville” titles, which are only marginally different. Their early emphasis on marketing helped to establish them as a crucial player in the social games market.

Marketing wins on a new platform. It’s a land grab.

This foundation for decision making changes significantly over time though. With the development of a new ecosystem, the number of available information sources increases. And over time, the consumers have repeated interactions with businesses. Not only can the customer access information at his or her will, accumulated lessons and experiences are now part of the decision making process.

Mature platforms have educated users.

Mature platforms have experienced users that have played many games. They know the owners reputation and they can more easily differentiate between good and bad games. Brands and franchises become more important. Even if the user lacks experience, the media, e.g. game magazines, websites, blogs and forums deliver plenty of information, providing tools for both filtering and discovery. And friends discuss the games on Facebook or over drinks at the bar. The user can now make educated decisions based on product quality. The first consequences can be seen in the mobile market now with players like Supercell and King.com. Both are hugely successful with a focus on top-quality. “Now it’s a lot more about the product quality and the product itself,” as Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen stated in a recent interview.

The best product wins on mature platforms.

To sum up: In order to be as successful as possible, developers and publishers have to go with the natural platform flow. They need to concentrate on marketing when a platform is young and then use the early success and the user base to build the best product over time.

App store analytics company App Annie today released its Index for February 2013, analyzing the social networking category in the app stores, and apps dominating the space including WeChat, Line, Kakao, Zoosk, Badoo, Find My Friends, Facebook and more.

From January 2012 to January 2013, the social networking category moved from the No. 12 largest category in terms of monthly iOS revenue, to the No. 3 spot, behind the games and productivity categories. That translates to an 87 percent increase year-over-year, when the social networking category represented only 3 percent of total Apple App Store revenue in January 2102.

App Annie saw revenue growth in the category across all major countries. Japan showed the most growth, with a tenfold increase in monthly revenue year-over-year from social networking apps, led by messaging app Line. South Korean NHN Corp.’s Line was already at the top of the download charts at the beginning of 2012, and later moved up the top grossing charts in April 2012.

App Annie vice president of marketing Oliver Lo, formerly of Zynga’s China office, tells Inside Mobile Apps that App Annie is seeing the same regional trend social networks went through on the web, where social networks like Orkut, Mixi and Friendster dominated certain regions until Facebook took over and became the dominant social network globally.

“Social networking in mobile is in an early stage, and we’re seeing that it’s more akin to the early stages in web, where it is regional and the top social networking app in each region isn’t the same app,” he says. “It will be interesting to see if that continues or if one player dominates globally.”

Although the social networking category jumped nine spot on App Annie’s top categories by monthly revenue for iOS, the category dropped down 1 spot from No. 5 to No. 6 year-over-year on the top categories by monthly downloads for iOS. Despite the drop in ranking, downloads for apps in the social networking category were up 30 percent year-over-year, and social networking apps account for 5 percent of total downloads on the Apple App Store. China was the notable country that showed the fastest growth by downloads for social networking apps, seeing monthly downloads double from January 2012 to January 2013. Currently, half of the downloads in the social networking category worldwide come from the U.S. and China — although revenue from social networking apps in China remains low. Apps that contributed to China’s download growth in the social networking category were Micro Love — For Lovers from Discovery Bay and Love Chat — Free Call, published by Ailiao.

App Annie listed the top social networking apps worldwide by monthly downloads for iOS in January 2013, showing Facebook Messenger at the No. 1 spot. At the same time last year, the Facebook app was the No. 1 app, only to be dethroned by one of other apps in its portfolio like Instagram and Poke. Lo believes this is a sign that Facebook’s multi-app portfolio strategy is working.

Interestingly, Apple’s Find My Friends app catapulted up App Annie’s chart from the No. 15 spot to the No. 2 spot year-over-year. The release of iOS 6 in September 2012 contributed to the surge in downloads for Find My Friends, as users were promoted with the option to download the app among other Apple apps when upgrading from iOS 5 to 6 or activating a new iOS device. Other notable apps in the top 10 were Pinterest at the No. 8 spot and Tencent’s WeChat, the dominant messaging app in China, at the No. 6 position.

The top iOS social networking app by revenue for January 2013 was NHN Japan’s Line, thanks to its in-app purchases of a special emoji, known as “stickers,” which were mostly purchased by the Japanese audience. WhatsApp Messenger, the popular messaging app in the states, came in at the No. 2 spot. What’s interesting about WhatsApp is how it monetizes. On iOS, its a premium download for $0.99, while on Android a $0.99 per year subscription kicks in after the first free year ends. Dating apps rounded out the top 10, with the likes of Badoo, eHarmony and Match.com, as well as gay dating apps such as Grindr Xtra and Scruff.

“The [dating apps] are embracing the in-app purchase model,” Lo says. “They are essentially selling various dating features like extra messages, getting your profile to the top so more people see your dating profile and a bunch of other social features and mechanisms that can monetize people through microtransactions.”

Lo explains that the apps at the top of the download list predominately monetize through an ad model, while apps on the revenue list monetize through an up-front cost or predominantly from in-app purchases.

“Clearly monetizing through mobile advertising is a challenge. No one has figured that out yet. No one is able to monetize at the same rates as web advertising. Whereas those [apps] monetizing through the [app] store are monetizing at same, if not, a higher rate on mobile. (more…)

Selfpubd launches indie game promotion site Thumb Arcade — The Portland, OR-based company focused on helping independent developers promote and monetize their games launched a new website, Thumb Arcade. Users can use the site to discover and download new games. The site is optimized for mobile phones and supports iOS and Android games with support for Windows coming soon.

Chilingo and Samsung partner to launch “100% Indie” — Mobile game publisher and division of Electronic Arts Chilingo has partnered with Samsung to launch “100% Indie.” Developers can submit their games to www.100PercentIndie.com to be considered for Samsung’s mobile app marketplace. Developers who are accepted into the program in the first six months will receive 100 percent revenue for their titles and are guaranteed higher revenue share through March 2015.

Gameloft, GREE release Dragon Summoner — Mobile game developers GREE and Gameloft announced the launch of a new card battle game they created together. The game can be downloaded for free on the iTunes App Store here and on Google Play here.

Glu launches Small City — Mobile game developer Glu launched Small City for iOS, a city management sim and the sequel to Small Street. In the game players will be able to customize their street, play with friends, help their citizens and collect trophies. You can find the game here.

Rovio, DreamWorks partner for The Croods — Based on the upcoming animated feature by the same name, The Croods will release on iOS and Android on March 14 and will include an exclusive short animated clip. Rovio has dabbled in movie tie-ins before with projects like Angry Birds Star Wars and Angry Birds Rio, but this will mark the developer’s first game to be based on a movie with no connection to its hugely popular Angry Birds brand.

Red Hot Labs raises $1.5 million in seed funding — Mobile developer Red Hot Labs which was founded by former FarmVille creators Amitt Mahajan and Joel Poloney announced it has secures $1.5 million in seed funding for the development of mobile games and platform technology. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, General Catalyst, Japan’s IT-Farm and private individuals.

Bing Fund invests in Sonar – Location-based social mobile app Sonar announced Microsoft’s Bing Fund has made a strategic investment in the company. The amount of the investment was not disclosed at this time. you can find our review of Sonar for Android here.

Gaming giant Electronic Arts, which has seen years of success on console, PC and handheld, is seeing more and more success in the burgeoning mobile games market. The company released the highly-anticipated driving game Real Racing 3 yesterday and will launch Command and Conquer: Tiberium Alliances soon for mobile.

Nick Earl, senior vice president and general manager of EA’s All Play label, recently spoke with Inside Mobile Apps about EA’s transition to free-to-play, its relationships with the mobile platforms (Apple and Google) and the core gamer market on tablet.

Inside Mobile Apps: What has EA learned so far from some of its freemium titles like The Simpson: Tapped Out and The Sims FreePlay?

Nick Earl, senior vice president and general manager of EA’s All Play label (pictured right): We’ve learned a lot. Top of the list is how open this model is in terms of the number of players and how big the audience can be when a game is free-to-play, even though there are a lot of opportunities if you’re willing to spend money inside these freemium games. Having [games] as this model means it’s completely open and free for millions to play on a daily basis. We’ve learned that we have to be able to support a large audience and that’s the infrastructure of the game. The operations has to be able to support large audiences and we’ve learned that on games like The Simpsons, for example, which now has now more than five million daily active users, and when we started it, we struggled. We rebuilt the infrastructure to support and maintain large audiences.

We’ve learned that the design of a free-to-play game is different from a premium game or console game where you pay upfront and get all you can eat. It requires a different style of design, that’s a core compulsion loop, that the user experience as well as the sinks where the game tends to monetize. You need to construct a game that’s going to work for the majority of people that are not going to pay at all but is still going to make sense for people who have the disposable income and desire to speed up and experience or get access to a premium item, and that doesn’t really upset the balance that exists for the entire community that are playing the game. There’s a real art to creating and designing these games.

IMA: With Real Racing 3 recently releasing, which is a free-to-play game, could you talk about the decision or the process of making the change from Real Racing 2′s premium model to the freemium model?

Earl: From the beginning, we made the decision, both EA and Firemonkeys to go freemium from the beginning for a couple of reasons. One, is that the market was moving and voting for going freemium, even though this it’s not supported by everyone because some people don’t like change. We acknowledge that and understand it. The vast majority like that there is no barrier to download a game and to start enjoying it and be a part of that community and experience. It’s clear to us that the way we we’re going to make this the most accessible and get the audience to appreciate what we believe to be a high-quality experience — free-to-play was the way to go. Secondly, we came up during the course of development with this unique, innovative multiplayer mode called Time-Shifted Multiplayer, which allows you to compete with your friends but do it in an asynchronous manner. Once we came up with that, we realized that this game is going to be more fun if there was a large audience. If there wasn’t a limit of people willing to spend $5 or $7 or $10 dollars on a game. We wanted to open it up and make it free. As we were developing, it was validating the decision to go freemium and that’s why we went all in at that point.

IMA: On the flip side, you still have premium titles in your portfolio on iOS and Android and you’ve seen some success with games that are premuium with a price upfront and in-app purchases as well, like Need for Speed: Most Wanted and FIFA Soccer 13. Is EA still seeing success with premium mobile games?

Earl: We have not made the decision to focus exclusively on premium. There’s a place for premium with in-app purchases — we call that “paymium” to make it more confusing. There’s a place for those games and we’ll continue to evaluate each game by a franchise by franchise or game by game basis to figure out what’s the optimal way to construct a game and construct a business model for that game. The majority of games are going to be freemium going forward unless something radical shifts inside the industry. I don’t see it departing from this model any time soon.

IMA: In EA’s last earnings call, the company mentioned again how much revenue The Simpsons: Tapped Out generated. Distimo recently put out a report, which showed EA at the top spot among all top grossing cross-app store publishers. With mobile development having better margins than console development, will EA be focusing more of its business on the mobile platform?

Earl: We can’t talk about our gross profits and gross margins from system to system, but what I would say is this — we are enormous believers in the mobile platform and we’re excited about the future. If you take a look at the numbers and the trajectory, there’s no argument against how fast these devices are being adopted. We’re seeing unbelievable activation rates on a daily basis. We saw enormous numbers over Christmas. We’re seeing a whole market spring up in front of us. We’re excited about mobile. There are potentially millions of people that will upgrade from feature phones to smartphones and tablets in the years ahead. So there’s just no denying that mobile is enormously exciting to this company. And, our goal is to make the greatest highest quality games we can in front as many people as possible.

With all of that said, the company is invested in the future of consoles, and now that there’s some announcements about the next gen, we’re excited about the possibilities there and we’re also big players in the PC business and have some big franchises like The Sims that make sense for the PC — both online and offline. We’re a large publisher that has the ability and the resources to go after multiple markets and find a way to tie these franchises, so that you can play and interact with them across any device at any time, anywhere. That’s the Holy Grail here — to have the ability to access a given franchise from multiple devices, and your data moves seamlessly across sessions. That’s something EA believes in.

IMA: We recently spoke with the developer working on Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances, which will launch on mobile soon, featuring cross-platform play between mobile and PC. Will more EA games feature cross-platform play?

Earl: That’s something we’ll push toward. There’s a lot of intricacies around design. I don’t think you can necessarily stop playing on web and then pick up where you were on mobile, but I do think you can interact with it. I like to use FIFA as a good example of that. On your phone, you can act more like the manager and switch positions — who your players are on the starting eleven and later you can take that new roster and play a new game in all its 3D glory with your 5.1 surround sound on a beautiful HD screen. And then the next time you can open your iPad and look at all the stats that you generated from that game. We love the notion of having your data in the cloud and being able to interact with it no matter where you are and when. (more…)