Here’s why the Facebook iOS app is so bad (UIWebViews and no Nitro)

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It’s the week of the Facebook IPO, and a lot of talk in the Facebook roadshow is about it’s mobile strategy. Out of the 900 million monthly active users, 500 million use Facebook on mobile. Mobile is booming and will so the next few years as these numbers are showing, so rightfully so a lot of attention goes to mobile.

On the iPhone in 2008/9, before the iPad was out, the first version of the Facebook app was seen as one of the great examples how to build an iPhone app. It was developed by one person, Joe Hewitt, and parts of the app were open sourced as the Three20 project. When he left Facebook and stopped working on the iOS app, a new team took over which resulted in a complete rewrite for a universal app that also supported the iPad (November 2011). In spite of growing numbers, not a whole lot of users actually like the current iOS app. In the US iTunes store, the rating average is 2 stars, with out the 21,803 ratings, 11,839 1 star ratings (!). One star ratings are often a sign of frustration, and you can see that in the comments. For most of the apps an average of 2 stars is deadly, but we all use Facebook so yes we will all have to use its iOS app if you own an iPhone or iPad.

So what is wrong with the iOS app?

  1. app is slow 
  2. inconsistent information notification icons say there are new messages or responses, actual window does not show anything new.
  3. app is slower than mobile web site while everybody is used to speedy apps, the Facebook mobile web site is faster than iOS app, and offers almost the same functionality.
  4. tons of other bugs scrambled views, photo upload, text boxes disappear, no sharing.

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For success, you need a great app AND money for marketing

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Just in case anybody still thought just a great iOS or Android app would get you tons of downloads and lots of money: no it won’t. If you want success for your app, you need to market it and that will cost money.

As this nice infographic from Apppromo.com shows, top earners spend an average of 14% on marketing and have an average marketing budget of $30,000 dollars. Yes, that means it is really hard to make money if you are a small team with no cash in the bank. But with so many apps out there and the iTunes and Play store not really facilitating discovery, you need to get your customers attention somewhere else.

So how can you do app marketing?

  • Do PR: blog posts, youtube video’s, build an app web site or send out a press release to tech news sites and bloggers
  • Buy ads from companies like Admob or Milennial Media
  • Buy incentivized downloads from companies like Tapjoy, although these users will probably not become active
  • Get promoted through platforms like Appsfire, Chartboost or Hooked

Edit 1: also very interesting thread on Hackernews about a story written on Ars Technical about this infographic.

Rogue app: Syn for iPhone slips through Apple review process

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I got some annoying app requests on Facebook from this one app. They came via friends that I know click on too many apps and games, so I ignored them. Yesterday I saw a post about this very app called Syn on the Dutch iPhoneclub, where it was deemed a spam app. Worse, somehow it had made it to the number one position in the paid top 10 of all apps, in spite of an average rating of 1 star (!). My first reaction was that the company behind the app, Falkor, inc must have hired some shady firm to boost downloads to get that high in the ranking. But so many people complained about spam, I thought let’s dig deeper and do some research.

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Windows 8, Metro and Nokia Lumia 800

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Yesterday I attended the Windows 8 app development event at Microsoft Silicon Valley. Funny for me to walk in with my iPhone and Macbook Pro. While Microsoft might not be considered cool anymore in the startup scene, they still serve a huge market on PC’s and laptops and more importantly, are coming up with new products that deserve developer attention, even in the startup world. And I got my first Windows Phone device, a Nokia Lumia 800 to test out.

So what’s new and cool in Windows 8? Continue reading →

Testflight acquired by Burstly – what about getting those testers

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Burstly just announced that they have acquired TestFlight. Congrats on both, it shows how mature the mobile market is becoming. Besides the acquisition they also announced TestFlight Live, a product to see how your app is performing once it has been published.

I think this is a step away of what they have been doing until now, which was all focused on the phase before launching. Also it is a crowded space: there are already mobile analytics companies like Flurry and app download companies like Distimo and Mobapp.

Meanwhile, we at Mobtest.com keep on focusing on our mission: to build a great marketplace where mobile developers can find testers. Developers need feedback on their apps before they push them out in the app stores. They need to get high ratings to do their marketing in the app stores and get interested users to actually download their app.

We are looking for beta testers of our own service, so sign up at mobtest.com to get an invite. First batch is 50 testers, so sign up quickly!

iTunes App Store sucks, and finally Apple acknowledges it

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I had this blog post drafted already, and originally had it titled “iTunes App Store sucks, and Apple doesn’t give a shit”. Well, after the acquisition of Chomp Apple shows it knows. Finally!

To be more precise, I think that app discovery in the app store sucks, and this hurts both users and developers.

Right now, the only ways users find apps are through New, What’s Hot or the top 25 of a category. With almost  600,000 apps,  that is basically an Office Depot with aisles that are 50 miles long. You look at the top 25, but that’s it.  App search is just really bad. Genius? Anybody ever used Genius more than once? Genius is a joke like Ping is. Apparently, Apple is just not good at social.

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Great slides on iOS interface design by Qubop

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Not our content, but I loved this great presentation by our friends at Qubop.

My take aways:

  1. Apple values great visual design over human interface guideline compliance
  2. Assume nobody reads anything
  3. Make choices for users (no 50 configuration settings please!)
  4. Limit the number of clicks
  5. Don’t force a workflow on mobile
  6. Be consistent across different platforms
  7. New trends #1: 5 tab navigation, where the center tab answers the question “What do I do with this app?”
  8. New trends #2: hidden navigation is replacing tab bars
  9. New trends #3: users expect “Pull to refresh”
  10. New trends #4: iPad and iPhone are converging
Here are the slides from their presentation:

What and how to test when developing a mobile app

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Mobile development is not easy. A lot of platforms that change a lot, many different programming languages and tools. And of course a slew of new devices each year, in particular on the Android platform.

Testing is even harder, arguably also more important. Native apps crash completely on an error, not just one page. You have less screen real estate. Users have less time to use your app. And there are so many tools to choose from. So let me ask a few questions: what to test? And when are tools appropriate, and when do you need users?

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Our mission: connect mobile app developers with testers

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Welcome to the Mobtest blog! Our first post, so let us describe to you what our mission is. Actually, how we would put it now, as this will most definitely change over time:)

Mobtest’s mission is to connect mobile app developers with users that understand apps and can test them

Why? Well for developers, we think that now it is too hard to do app testing, so the quality of the apps out there is not that great. How many times do you have an iPhone app crashing on you? Or received a lot of one star ratings because of a huge bug you or Apple didn’t find before publishing in the App Store? That should be a thing of the past. With over 450,000 apps in the iTunes app store and 250,000 in the Android market it is hard to stand out. Your app needs to be top notch to do so.

Besides that the market is growing and growing, over the next 4 years about 1,000 percent. We as app developers have to deal with that, crunch out more apps while same time improve the quality of our work. Not a simple task.

For testers, we want to give them early acces to the coolest newest apps out there, and give them a chance to help them improve these apps. And become good at testing them and adding value to the developers.

Engineers focus on development, testers will provide them with input what part of their work needs improvement. Find out why your app always crashes. Learn if your users find it easy to use your app. No more crappy apps! No more one star ratings!

What do you think?