Columbian developer Brainz’ debut game Vampire Season is shaping up to be an unlikely success, even after launching, failing, seeing its publisher implode, going back drawing board, and making a counter-intuitive switch from free to paid. The new version of the game has found its footing, and is seeing higher engagement, retention and better monetization than the old one. Much like its cast of zombies, mummies and monsters, Vampire Season seems to be back from the grave.

One of the first mobile developers to sign a publishing deal with 6waves, Brainz’ had high hopes for its first mobile game. Its tower defense title Vampire Season combined quirky humor, solid gameplay and high production values. Unfortunately none of that can guarantee a hit — although the game received overwhelmingly positive reviews upon its release, it didn’t find much of an audience, and the audience it did find didn’t pay.

Then things went from bad to worse. As Brainz was trying to fix the game, its publisher was collapsing. By September, 6waves had laid off everyone Brainz worked with, including the SVP of publishing and the associate director of products. There was a new version of the game, but there wasn’t a publisher. Brainz did the only thing they could; they took the game back, releasing the new version as a paid title on Oct. 16.

Rebuilding for retention

“We were very happy with the critical reception,” explains Jairo Nieto, Brainz’ head of games. “But we still found that across the board there were certain things that could be improved.”

With 150,000 downloads under its belt from the first version of the game, Brainz began doing a deep dive into Vampire Season — seeing where users churned, what levels seemed to be too hard, and how people behaved while going through the game’s story mode. Brainz took what it learned and used it to revamp the tutorial. Pinch zoom gestures were added improve the controls, and the whole experience was made much more epic.

“We were falling short of giving users an experience that felt rewarding when they unlocked new units,” says Nieto. “Stuff like that makes people go from level to level and enjoy the game more.”

Brainz also took a big gamble by rebalancing the gameplay. The toughness of each enemy was reduced by two thirds, but the number was increased substantially in order to make players feel like they were constantly under siege. Player units were overhauled to make them seem more powerful and exciting to use.

“I wanted the player to feel powerful, that he’s constantly killing stuff. We really wanted to have the sense of accomplishment you get in Diablo when you kill a big horde,” says Nieto.

The results were immediate, reports Brainz’ CEO Alejandro Gonzalez. The game has gone from having 30 percent retention on day two to having 50 percent.

Bucking the trend and going from free to paid

Brainz also completely overhauled the way they tried to monetize the game, switching from a pure free-to-play model to making the game a paid app with optional in-app purchases.

Even though it’s now far easier to earn money in the game, generosity seems to have boosted Vampire Season’s average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU), not reduced it. According to Brainz, the game is actually seeing much higher ARPDAU as a paid title than it was when it was free-to-play.

“I think it was a big mistake that we were making the first time around, telling people to monetize all the time,” says Gonzalez frankly. “Finish a level, why not get more coins? You did this, get more coins. More coins! more coins! It’s not about the coins, it’s about the user feeling that they can move faster through the game by using the store.”

“Maybe it’s just me, but maybe there’s a relationship between paid players and high ARPUs,” muses Nieto. “Something in my head makes me want to finish the game because I paid for it.”

On publishers, and hindsight

Brainz doesn’t hold any ill will towards 6waves for the initial performance of Vampire Season. The two companies parted ways amicably, knowing each tried their best.

“The market changed very quickly and I think that was the biggest issue. A lot of what we managed to do was no longer viable because acquisition costs are so high,” Nieto says when asked to comment on what happened with 6waves.

Nieto also feels that Brainz inexperience in the mobile market was a factor. Without knowing what they were good at, they didn’t know what they needed to look for in a publishing partner, he says. Its not enough to just get a cheque and some analytics. In his opinion publishers need to fill expertise gaps as well.

“We were expecting them to teach us everything, and no publisher knows everything,” he says. “You need to find a publisher that will let you know what’s going on with the product. You cannot give away your product to a black box and wait for something to come in.”

Casual gaming startup Breaktime Studios wants to make the experience of playing a casual mobile game a little deeper, a little more complex and a lot more interesting.

Founded by former Playdom employees in 2011, the San Francisco-based company’s first generation of games were titles like Dream Dresses, Pocket Potions and Sweet Shop — slick looking, casual and female-focused affairs.

So far Breaktime has been pleased with the performance of its games, but CEO Matthew Davie tells us that going forward, his company intends to differentiate itself in the highly competitive free-to-play mobile gaming market by creating what he calls “mid-casual” titles.

“We will continue to focus on casual players, but our philosophy centers on the notion that these players are wildly underserved in terms of depth and richness of gameplay,” he says. “Our players have showed us that they want more complexity as long as it is introduced appropriately and not forced on them.”

This, he explains, will allow Breaktime to incorporate new features and monetization mechanics into its games that other developers might avoid for fear of making a product that seems “too core” for casual audiences.

The company’s upcoming game Dragon Skies has been designed to follow this “mid-casual” philosophy. Scheduled for release in early November, the title will blend traditional animal care elements like breeding and building habitats, but players will also be able to take the dragons they collect into side-scrolling, arcade style races as part of the gameplay.

“Our goal is to deliver the best mid-casual free-to-play mobile games. Period,” says Davie. “That means games with more complexity but less difficulty, enabling much richer social interactions than you currently see on the market.”

It’s an approach that will help differentiate the company from more established rivals like TinyCo, Zynga and Storm8 as it seeks to carve out a niche in the mobile gaming market and compete for users. Introducing more complexity into casual games has also already worked for another Breaktime rival, Pocket Gems.

Earlier this year the company took a bit of a gamble on its title Tap Paradise Cove, a game that blends traditional citybuilding mechanics with exploration elements inspired by the ultra-popular indie hit Minecraft. Although the game wasn’t a big hit right away — according to our traffic tracking service AppData, it took about a month for Tap Paradise Cove to rank within the top 25 on the top grossing iPhone app charts — the title hasn’t dropped below that position since May either. Tap Paradise Cove is currently the No. 19 top grossing iPhone app, the No. 26 top grossing iPad app and the No. 17 top grossing game on iOS.

So, while its impossible to predict if Dragon Skies will be a hit, if the performance of Tap Paradise Cove is any indication, there is definitely demand in the casual market for more complex elements borrowed from core games.

Breaktime Studios is backed by an undisclosed amount of funding from Azure Capital Partners and Sega Corporation. The company’s games are currently iOS only, but Breaktime is looking to launch Android versions of select titles before the holiday season.

Apple’s decision to increase the cellular data download limit from 20 to 50 megabytes has led to a dramatic and noticeable increase in iOS app size reports ABI Research.

According to the latest study from the company’s Mobile Application Markets service, the global average size of an iOS app was 23 megabytes in September — up 16 percent  since March. iOS games grew by 42 percent during the same period, swelling to an average size of 60 megabytes due to the combination of Retina display upgrades and an increased download limit.

Apple’s decision in March to increase the maximum size of 3G/4G-downloadable apps from 20 to 50 megabytes has clearly had an unleashing effect on developers,” said ABI senior analyst Aapo Markkanen in a statement. “Games can now be more complex and graphically polished, while still being able to benefit from the instant gratification of cellular downloads.”

While the move to larger apps may allow developers to create more detailed products, as ABI points out, it also means developers will have to fight harder to keep their apps installed. As our readers with smaller capacity iOS devices are likely aware, once non-app files like music, photos and system files are accounted for, a consumer may only have two or three free gigabytes to devote to apps — space that can quickly be eaten up by titles that require hundred of megabytes of storage space.

Developers wishing to avoid having apps deleted for no other reason than size issues may wish to consider local storage limits when designing their apps.

Editor’s note: Germany’s HandyGames recently brought its pet-raising sim Clouds & Sheep from Android to iOS, debuting the title in the Chinese iTunes App Store after working to localize the title with its Chinese publisher Yodo1.  In this guest post, Yodo1 CEO Henry Fong shares his advice for making a Western-developed game appeal to a Chinese audience.

There are many challenges involved in bringing a mobile game to the China — it’s difficult to get a new title noticed in such a huge market, and the cultural divide between Western developers and Chinese gamers is also often a problem.

For HandyGames, the question was would Clouds & Sheep and its other titles work in China? After all, the company is based in Germany, and its titles come with very Western elements like castles and cowboys, and Clouds & Sheep might have seemed too weird for Chinese gamers. We recommended that HandyGames change some features and focus on others when they launched their titles in China. Since many of these tweaks will also apply to other Western developers who want to get their games into the Chinese market, I wanted to share them here.

Play up cute

Unlike a lot of Western games in China, Clouds & Sheep has one very big thing going for it: cute. Chinese gamers love cute much more than their western counterparts do. This is especially true with one of the top audiences for iPhone games in China: young professional women between the ages of 20 and 28.

Unlike most of their peers in the U.S. and Europe, Chinese in that age range are still very much into Hello Kitty style and other cute fashion accessories.  “Kawaii” — Japanese  for “cute” — has now become synonymous for the style of chic-cute fashion that is tremendously popular with the Asian female demographic. All that in mind, we made sure that the game’s cuteness was emphasized in all its marketing material.

Make it easy to share and spend on

If there’s anything Chinese love more than cute, it’s sharing. With Clouds & Sheep, we integrated the game with Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, the Twitter-style social networks in China.

That way, people could share photos they take in-game, show off their sheep wearing decorations, and other things. Within a week after launch, we saw many Sina Weibo updates with Clouds & Sheep photos. This created a nice viral growth mechanism. We weren’t surprised to see that the hundreds of personalized Clouds & Sheep screenshots being shared were mostly from young female players.

For instance, one talented player created and posted a Clouds & Sheep screenshot to her blog, adding characters from a popular Chinese TV series. In the first three days after she posted it, the image went viral – it’s already been reposted by other Sina Weibo users 2754 times (and counting), which means hundreds of thousands of new eyeballs looking at Clouds & Sheep content.

On the monetization side, Chinese players hate waiting, so we provided an option to buy stars (Clouds & Sheep’s currency, usually earned by accomplishing in-game goals) with a diverse pricing structure, so players could buy a pack of stars for the Chinese equivalent of $1, all the way up $60. Even for a casual title like Clouds & Sheep, we’ve see Chinese gamers buying the high priced packages, which reflects another rule I like to follow: Make the monetization options flexible enough so that all kinds of customers can buy them. (And don’t be surprised that some Chinese customers are willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month on your game,  because that happens fairly often.)

Don’t just translate to Chinese language — translate to Chinese culture

While the basic gameplay of Clouds & Sheep and other HandyGames titles are easy to understand in China, a lot of the slang often found in Western games (Awesome Dude, OMG, etc), simply doesn’t translate well in Chinese.

During the localization process, many game publishers just do a literal translation of the game’s text, but we knew that would only make HandyGames seem foreign. The literal translation for “Cute!” in Chinese is “ke ai” but the popular Chinese word is “meng“,which is the equivalent of “chic cute.” As a result, a lot of Chinese gamers tell us they assumed that Clouds & Sheep was actually made by a Chinese studio — a huge compliment.

So far, the results are pretty positive: Clouds & Sheep has been a top game in China’s Apple Store for two weeks since launch. It’s also one of Apple’s featured apps. HandyGames is also incorporating what they’ve learned in China with the launch of Clouds & Sheep to the rest of the world.

Game cross-promotion network Applifier is branching out even farther from banners with a new iOS game recording service called Everyplay.

The idea is to capture that word-of-mouth moment between mobile game players when one person shows another person a game on their phone. At its most basic level, Everyplay records live gameplay clips from within a game that can then be shared among friends — via Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. The service can also be used to generate replays of game moments, which could be used by players to create walkthroughs or by developers to display asynchronous game moments like when a rival attacks the player in-game. Everyplay also offers personalized messages sent with the videos, and can edit the video to remove bits or add voiceover commentary.

Videos are initially stored on the user’s device and later uploaded to Applifier’s servers when and if the user shares the clip. The developer sets when the recording starts and stops and the only hard limit is the device’s free disk space. Uploaded videos are tagged with the game’s name and any hashtags the user wants to add. Everyplay is enabled via an SDK that will support Unity 3D at launch with Cocos 2D to follow.

There’s an additional functionality that records users’ faces from the front camera — to really capture that sharing moment — but users must opt into this feature. After doing so, the user can choose to discard the video from the front camera while keeping the audio, which could make voiceover commentary very easy to add.

Applifier recently launched a Facebook-only video ad service called Impact. Everyplay follows on the same principles of Impact by granting games recognition with high quality trailers and game clips. By showcasing the best of what a game has to offer, Applifier’s services hope to drive both discovery and engagement among users on mobile, Facebook and the web. According to CEO Jussi Laakkonen, Impact has already paid out over six figures in revenue (USD) to one unnamed developer for the month of July.

Everyplay’s beta launches today. Interested developers can find out more or sign up here.

Editor’s Note: This guest post comes from game design consultant Adrian Crook, a producer and designer with credits on over two dozen games spread across a variety of platforms, including classic consoles like the Sega Genesis and modern mobile games for iOS. In 2006, he was named Producer of the Year by the Canadian New Media Awards. You can find out more about Crook’s consulting agency here.

In this analysis of Jewels with Buddies (JwB), we’ll focus on breaking down day one engagement, compulsion loop mechanics and friend invites. I’ve chosen to focus on these aspects of the game because together they represent a tight, focused mobile design.

Day One Engagement

Automatic Pairing

Immediately upon completion of a quick tutorial, the player receives a game request from a stranger. As it is the player’s turn first, they are immediately put into gameplay and engaged. With the asynchronous nature of the game, they already have a reason to return later. Being invited to a game (as opposed to the player having to reach out themselves) also helps the player overcome any fears of inviting others to play with them in the future.

As soon as the player has completed their first turn in their first game, the app presents them with another game invite from a random (non-friend) player. This flow gets the player in the habit of playing multiple games at once while they wait for their opponents. It is also an excellent example of “blurring the game loop,” which I’ll discuss later.

Using two random opponents for the initial matches instead of the player’s friends is smart; it ensures the player is matched with an active opponent and not a potentially lapsed friend.

User Created Game Funnel

With the booster rockets of two games now ignited with random opponents, the player is shown how to start a game of their own choosing (note: orange arrow is in-game art, not my own markup).

Taking no chances, the game walks the player right through the suggested new game creation process, proposing they start a game with a random opponent by default. Again, this is most likely to ensure the new player is matched up with an opponent who is not “stale” (i.e. the app finds a player with a recently opened random game and/or a track record of recent activity/fast turnaround on rounds). The wording below this dialog supports as much, as “start a game with an online opponent” implies that random opponents are ready to play now.

In a matter of just a few minutes, the player has already started and played their first turns in three matches with real people – a great start.

The Compulsion Loop

Getting Into Games

With the on-boarding and day one engagement cycle complete, the player is on their own to use the New Game Creation Menu and Main Games List to start up game loops.

The Rematch option found here is worth pointing out. Frequently, good opponents players find via random games are hard to track down again for future games. But this feature allows players to view a list of recent opponents from current and previous games, building rivalries and friendships that will make the player more invested and thereby increase retention.

Starting a new game via an opponent’s username is also vital to allow out of network player discovery and for those who don’t connect via Facebook. Frequently, 40 percent of a game’s online play comes from non-Facebook sources (i.e. a username system).

Lastly, on the Main Games List suggested games to start are always present.

Play More, Get More

By starting another game, the player can unlock the second boost slot, generating at least another few guaranteed rounds from the player – one to unlock the slot, and another to try playing with two slots.

Often extra consumable slots are monetized, but in this case the developer has chosen to trade engagement for monetization. Considering the difficulty of surfacing new apps on iOS, this boost for extra engagement and virality is smart.

The layout of this screen also bears mentioning: the most obvious call to action is the Start a New Game button along the bottom. To avoid pressing this, the user must back out to the Main menu using the top left button. Undoubtedly, this results in a lot of game starts – an excellent example of prioritizing the on-screen elements to tie in to desired user behavior, in order to guide users in the intended direction.

Compulsion Loop Reinforcement

In case the player forgot, the game reminds them why they’re here: play a lot, earn coins, buy power ups. Repeat.

This screen appears as soon as the player crosses the 100-coin plateau (presuming they are not in the middle of gameplay). It also acts as a bit of empowerment, creating a positive milestone out of an otherwise meaningless event.

Blurred Game Loops

In blurring the game loops, the player is kept in the habit of closing open gameplay loops by putting them into another game loop as soon as one ends. The idea is to keep the player as close to the game loop as possible because kicking them back to the Main menu gives them a natural spot to exit the game.

In JwB, often the player doesn’t make it back to the Main menu for several games due to the presence of the Game Selection option at the bottom of the Round Summary screen.

Friend Invites

Inviting Friends for Coins

The lower portion of these round summary screens is always given over to promotional messaging (i.e. start another game, invite friends, play a turn in another match, etc). Often games only award coins upon an invitee’s installation of the game. However in JwB, merely inviting 10 friends nets the player 100 coins, right away. Their friends do not need to install the app.

The Invite Friends screen as a whole is fantastically simple. A meter at the top indicates the player’s progress toward the 100 coin goal, a strong visual reminder and motivator for inviting 10 friends.

Interestingly, invites being sent are email invites, not Facebook invites. This choice may be for two reasons:

• Avoid popping a Facebook API invite dialog that many players will shy away from.
• Accomplish the invite process silently – no confirmation dialog, just highlight player name and touch send.

Either way, email provides a universal invite system that Facebook users and email-only users can both utilize.

Inviting Friends to JwB

When a player selects a Facebook friend to invite to the app, a Wall-to-Wall method is used (posting on the invitee’s wall) to invite the player to play. Unfortunately, this method of initiating a game converts at a far lower rate than do user-to-user requests. Ideally, a user-to-user invite request should be sent here, redirecting to a landing page with App Store links to each SKU.

Conclusion

JwB has a polished, well thought out day one engagement strategy, and the same can be said of the match surfacing and game loop blurring to make getting into games as easy as possible. The willingness to trade early currency acquisition and consumable slots for engagement and virality is an interesting and innovative decision.

On the negative side, inviting Facebook friends to the game is done via Wall Post, not the higher-converting Request.

For AC+A’s full analysis of Jewels with Buddies, see the original presentation.

Adding strategy to social games can help developers struggling with high user acquisition costs because strategic games attract players that will stay longer and pay more, says Dan Chao, director of product at GREE/Funzio. Chao gave a talk on adding strategy to social games at the Casual Connect conference, happening now in Seattle.

According to Chao, adding strategy to a social game is essentially adding tradeoffs and competition to a game, while balancing social game elements like asynchronous play, offline activity and short sessions. While different audiences will tolerate different levels of strategy and complexity, Chao gave several universally applicable tips to help other developers understand how to incorporate strategy during his talk.

Interesting Choices and Hard Choices 

The key to strategy is interesting choices, said Chao, but developers should keep in mind the “more is better” approach isn’t strategic. Chao referenced early Facebook strategy games like Mafia Wars as an example. If the most efficient way to win a game is to just get more of everything, it doesn’t require players to actually think. Chao argued it is better to create hard choices. A player should have to weigh the relative merits of equipment or items, make interesting decisions, kick off interesting processes and balance multiple statistics.

More than Routine Tasks

While all social games have routine tasks such as collecting money, there should also be more detail and personalization involved, Chao argues. Players who can optimize their army compositions and their towns are playing more strategically.

Every feature should move a metric

In traditional console games, the key driver is to make the game fun, said Chao. To this end, every game system in a console game is just designed to be fun since the game only needs to be sold once. On the other hand, in social games, every feature needs to contribute to fun, monetization or virality (at least), since the game is a living, continuous entity.

Let players lose, let them spend

Real strategy requires one player to lose, said Chao, since people need to lose to create competition, and players wanting to be better and to win will drive monetization. Players should also be able to spend a lot at once — not to a game breaking level, but to a point where they feel happy with what purchases can do for them. According to Chao, strategy games are often whale driven, and whales want to be instantly competitive. If that competitive power is too firmly locked to level progression, those ultra competitive whales don’t get to pay for the things they would be willing to pay for.

As Google’s annual developer conference I/O winds down today, it’s clear Google is trying to evolve Android — not only as a platform, but as an experience for both users and developers.

The company unveiled beautifully designed devices like the Nexus 7 and the Nexus Q to show us Android can provide an elegant media consumption experience for consumers. Meanwhile developers saw the first preview of the Jelly Bean 4.1 operating system, demonstrating how far the platform’s capabilities and design could be taken.

Yesterday we had a chance to have an in-depth discussion with two of the key people behind Android — Google Play engineering director Chris Yerga and Android developer relations lead Billy Rutledge — asking them to weigh in on everything from how developers can make money on the platform to what Google’s plans for Android in China.

Inside Mobile Apps: Android has long been burdened with reputation as a platform that doesn’t monetize very well. I’ve seen more and more examples to the contrary recently, so why do you think this idea persists?

Chris Yerga, engineering director for Google Play (pictured right): That’s a tough one. It’s hard to get into the minds of people and what they’re thinking. What we know is we’ve been doing a lot of things to expand monetization options for developers. We’ve launched in 130 companies for paid apps in the last year, in-app billing, carrier billing. After my talk yesterday a lot of people had questions for me. The first person that came up said “I just want to say thank you. I make my living selling Android apps and all the stuff you’ve done over the last year is making my life so much easier.” I’ve had a number of conversations like that over the last day or so. I definitely think that people are making a go of it. We had some stats yesterday about Android users having the highest average revenue across all app stores. The data that we have and what we hear from developers is inconsistent with this notion out there.

Billy Rutledge, Android developer relations (pictured right): I would kind of echo that as well. My responsibility is to work with developers and help them understand the right way to build applications. It includes a lot of best practices ranging from design to looking at device efficiency and application performance. We work with a lot of developers around the world and quite often we hear great success stories from them on monetization. But I think that some of the features that have rolled out into Play recently around in-app billing, subscriptions, and more direct carrier billing are making it even easier. We hear quite a lot of good stuff from developers on a regular basis and it’s inconsistent with what I hear in the press a lot.

IMA: I think a lot of the reason this idea persists is because Apple shares numbers like “$5 billion paid out to developers.” Do you have any more specific numbers to share around Android monetization? Has monetization increased in the last six months?

Yerga: We don’t have those statistics to share but the thing we can say is it certainly has been growing in terms of the number of devices, the number of apps we have in the store and the number of apps we’re selling, so clearly everything is growing.

IMA: The other thing people say about Android is that it’s really fragmented. Things like the new Android PDK are addressing it, but how much of a problem does Google see this as? Do you see it as the tradeoff for having an open platform?

Rutledge: As more and more developers engage with the platform for the first time, they’re discovering it provides really nice mechanisms to build applications that run across the different shapes and sizes of Android devices. But it’s new to them, they don’t understand it and they don’t understand how the framework allows them to do that.

One of the things we’re doing right now is trying to promote some of the training material that shows developers how to build applications that cover the diversity of the devices. We launched a new developers site just this week with a collection of training classes that will walk you through how to build applications that will cover everything from small screen devices all the way up to TV class devices. It’s also important to take the right approach to testing your apps, to make sure they’re responding the way you want to and your experience is being delivered the way your product team designed it. I think there’s a bit of awareness that is just now starting to take place with developers.

IMA: Some developers like Animoca test with 400 devices to ensure compatibility for their userbase, many of whom are using non-standard Chinese Android devices. What would you say the standard Android developer experience is?

Rutledge: We typically see our big media partners test on around 10 or 15 devices. If you look at some of the material we put out there, one is a class on how to test your app. You can really create a small set of devices that will represent 80 or 90 percent of what’s out there, test on those and have pretty good confidence your app will run well. In addition to that there’s third party services. There’s a company called Bitbar with an application called Testdroid. What they do is broker that app in parallel to hundreds of devices, run your user interaction script and send you back failure reports and screenshots. It lets your team see how your app runs across hundreds of devices, without having to buy and maintain your own inventory of test material.

IMA: An April interview you did with Forbes indicated that Google is leaning towards standardization with all these education materials and resources. Why do you want to move to a more standardized Android environment? Is this to attract more developers? 

Rutledge: It depends what you mean by standardized. In general our underlying goal is to build a cohesive user experience. The best practices and design patterns we’ve put out there are really to let developers understand what users expect to see on a device. It’s really about helping developers build products that consumers want and will use.

IMA: Moving back to Chris for the moment, you shared some stats about Android international performance. 67 percent of all revenue comes from outside the U.S., and the keynote’s activation heatmap did show a lot of international growth. What’s your international strategy for Google Play?

Yerga: It kind of comes down to a couple of different things. First off for Google Play we want to bring as much content to as many different regions as possible. We’re aggressively working on that. We’ve made some very significant strides even in recent months. On the app side, that’s where we need a similar approach — giving developers the tools they need to reach all those different places and make sure we’re enabling developers in various geographies to be successful, like auto translate stuff we showed off.

One of the messages I was trying to get across to people was it’s not just being mindful of the world outside the U.S. if you’re a U.S. developer. Whatever country you’re in, most of the market is outside of your territory. A feature like that is sort a first step to get some early data, so you can say “this thing is really starting to heat up in this area, maybe that’s where I want to make an investment in localization and translation.” I  talked to some developers yesterday after the session who are using the new stats available in the Google Play developers console to get an idea of where their userbase is. Some of them are saying things like “my app was huge in Japan, and I’ve done no promotion.” That early data shows them something is there and is worth investing in translation, promotion and marketing.

IMA: What’s Google’s stance on China right now? You don’t agree with its government policies due to ethical reasons. Google Play is there but limited because you won’t censor apps, and therefore you’ve had an explosion of third party Android app stores. Do you think that’s healthy for the ecosystem?

Rutledge: China’s always an interesting topic.

Yerga: The one comment I make on that is that our principles of openness and giving developers the ability to publish their apps freely as long as they’re respecting our policy and content guidelines is one we’re unlikely to be compromising on.

Rutledge: From a developer’s point of view, if you look at some of the top apps in Google Play, a lot of them are coming from developers in China. The expert market is very strong for them. Distribution of content to consumers in China is not yet decided.

IMA: Moving back to developers, what do you tell them to attract them to the Android platform? What makes an Android app financially successful? 

Rutledge: I think probably now its in-app billing. We’ve seen a lot of success in that camp.

Yerga: You’ve got a wide variety of developers that are building a wide variety of different types of apps. We have a flexible platform, we have a huge, diverse population of users, and in-app billing is flexible in that same way. Developers can use in-app billing to do everything from a try-before you buy thing to virtual currency. There’s so much flexibility that people have there. It gives control to the developers to experiment with different business models. With paid apps you can play with the price-point, but we’ve seen in-app billing really unlock success for a lot of developers. We’ve very excited to see how people use subscriptions going further.

IMA: Speaking of subscriptions, how much of an uptake have you seen for them so far?

Yerga: It’s still pretty early. They’ve only been out for a little bit, but we’ve been very encouraged by the enthusiasm of the people we’ve worked with. Back when we launched in-app billing there was a handful of developers that implemented it initially, and one day, everyone was using it. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a similar sort of uptake. Part of the issue is developers getting their heads around what subscriptions really mean for them and how they can best make use of them.

IMA: What about Android security and malware? 

Yerga: Bouncer is a great example of how we’re taking a Google style approach to this. Not compromising on openness, still allowing open access to developers to get their applications into the store, and using technology that we have like Bouncer — which is constantly evolving — to catch these things. There’s been a 40 percent reduction in potentially malicious applications that were caught by Bouncer in the first half of 2011 to the second half. These tools that we’re applying are actually making a difference. That’s one part of our approach. In malware it’s a little tricky because we don’t actually talk about all the things we do.

IMA: What about security issues in third party app stores? These problems ultimately reflect back on Android as a platform. How much of a challenge is that?

Yerga: It’s another thing for user education. If you elect to get your software from other app stores, you need to know what the exposure is. Right there in the platform we warn you — if you want to accept APKs from untrusted sources, you’re free to do so, but at your own risk.

IMA: How important is that freedom of choice to the Android philosophy?

Yerga: It’s at our core. Fundamental principle.

Rutledge: For everything. It’s why we release so quickly after the announcements. Developer tools, SDK… as soon as it’s ready for release, it’s out there. We really do believe in the platform.

IMA: Android lead designer Matias Duarte compared Android to an ocean liner — he sees the the changes he makes fan out like ripples. What are your goals for Google Play and Android apps? Where do you see the platform going?

Rutledge: That sounds like Matias. [Laughter]

Yerga: There’s the platform and there’s the content within it. For Google Play we want to keep expanding it and adding new types of content. With this vast amount of content that’s available to you, focusing on discovery and how people find content they’re interested in. With apps and games, it’s a little bit different. There it’s like the entire wealth of the developer community is this system that’s comprised of thousands and thousands of people, all acting somewhat independently but motivated by what they see. One of our goals with the Nexus 7 tablet is having it be a goal-post, having it out there for everyone else building applications and tablets. This is what a device built from the ground up cognizant of Google Play really looks like.

Rutledge: If you look at the range of devices that were talked about at the keynote yesterday, you can see Android is about a lot of things. For us exposing developers to the right tools and APIs to explore their creativity, foster innovation and see what they can do is what we’re really after. Beyond what the platform may do in terms of hardware or hardware capabilities, making sure that developers have the tools to come up with new stuff we haven’t even thought about is part of the driving force behind that, and one of the reasons we support the openness of it all.

IMA: Speaking of the Nexus 7, it’s a really slick device, and it was really positioned as an alternative to the Kindle during the keynote. What’s your strategy there?

Yerga: Our motivation is to build a great device that consumers love. The other thing that is really apparent after a while with Jelly Bean is the zero tolerance for latency — the Project Butter stuff and having that smooth, buttery experience everywhere. All that stuff put together: the platform, the device and all the Google Play content was our motivation.

Rutledge: Developers seem really excited about it too. The seven inch form factor gives you more screen to play with. It gives you choice of building a multi-pane user experience based on how you’re using it or interacting with it. It is all about media consumption.

IMA: Why was it important for Google to move into the tablet business? There were already some well-reviewed Android tablets. 

Yerga: It’s another manifestation of our hero device strategy. We like putting a device out there under the Nexus monitor that says “here’s really what we think the best expression of a seven inch tablet can be.” That’s what the Nexus 7 is.

IMA: When you set it up, we notice you can only get the $25 credit by setting up a Google Wallet account. It’s not a gift card in the box. That’s a very clever strategy to get people used to buying through Google Play. You’ve also done similar things with discounted app sales. How successful has that been for converting consumers?

Yerga: It’s too new to say with the Nexus 7 thing, but intuitively, you know that thing is going to be a success. Sometimes it’s not that consumers don’t want to have a credit card set up with Wallet, but sometimes it’s an inconvenience. By giving people a strong incentive — $25 at that magic moment when you’ve just got your tablet, you’re thinking “this is the book I want on it, this is the game I want on it…” it gets people at that moment and establishes patterns of behavior. You familiarize yourself with the store and all the free content it comes with. You become a Google Play customer literally from the first hour of using the device.

IMA: What about Windows Phone 8 and Surface? Some analysts are predicting it’s going to challenge Android, cut into your market share and become the third smartphone platform. Do you see them as competition?

Rutledge: Most of us on the Android team would say competition is healthy. It only drives us to do bigger and better things. I haven’t taken a close look at it myself — I’ve only seen some of the announcements in the press. I’m excited to check it out.

Tiny Tower developer Nimblebit is soliciting feedback from Twitter to help it refine some of the user interface elements in its upcoming game Pocket Planes.

Earlier today Nimblebit co-founder Ian Marsh tweeted two in-progress pictures of the game’s menu, asking users if they found smaller buttons easier on the eyes.

It’s not the first time Nimblebit has solicited player feedback for the game. Earlier in the month Marsh asked his Twitter followers to submit their ideas for Pocket Planes BitBook posts — the private and often silly thoughts the game’s characters “post” to a fictional social network.  According to Nimblebit’s other co-founder David Marsh, the tweet resulted in a flood of suggestions, approximately 20 or 30 of which have been added to Pocket Planes so far.

“It’s important for us to share things from the development process because the feedback we get is constructive, and getting good reactions from people helps motivate us to push towards the finish line,” Marsh tells us.

While having users weigh in and contribute to a game as its in-progress isn’t common, it appears to be paying off for Nimblebit. So far the company’s free-to-play hits Pocket Frogs and Tiny Tower have earned enough to recoup their development costs more than 100 times over. Tiny Tower also boasts an impressive conversion rate — in a previous interview the company revealed about five percent of Tiny Tower users pay, and the game sees an average revenue per paying user of $10.

According to Marsh, Pocket Planes has been in beta testing for just over a month and the game is tentatively scheduled for a June release.

Google has updated of its official Google+ app to more closely mirror the look and feel of the newly redesigned Google+ web site.

According to a post on the official Google blog, many of the new Google+ design elements are now reflected in the design of the mobile app. Cosmetic changes include new fonts, larger profile pictures and a full-bleed display for photos. Google has also updated the way the app displays conversation flows in a user’s stream, added optical cues to draw attention to more recent posts and moved the +1 button to a set position at the top of the user interface.

Ironically, the new version of the Google+ mobile app is available now on iOS, but the Android version is described as “coming in a few weeks.”

The company redesigned its Google+ social networking service in April to add drag and drop navigation, full bleed photos and videos and update the way conversations and discussions were grouped into user’s activity streams.