ANE Ads4AIR v1.0.1 + Android Sample app

One week after my first ANE release comes my first update !

While writing a sample AIR app, I noticed some bugs mainly related to the ANE's context.
Following doc and tutorials, I made a wonderful error : using a static context

On Ads4AIR case, using a static context is an error because if you ask for interstitial ad THEN a banned ad,  the banner ad request won't work...because it's stil initialized with interstitial context.

I fixed a lot of others memory leak and was able to code some workaround on Adfonic's limits.
Now it's time to work on the Blackberry !

Be free to
- download the new version (v1.0.1)
- make some tests on your Android device
- check the source of the sample AIR app

My first ANE Ads4AIR : Ads from Admob, Adfonic, Inmobi and some others...

Today I release my first AIR Native Extension.
While only for Android for now, the next release should include BlackBerry support.

What is Ads4AIR ?
This group of ANE offers you alternative to Admob.
Some ANE already exist which give you access to Admob ads on Android and iPhone, my goal was to let you choose.
First, because Admob doesn't support Blackberry.
Second, because choice is the key and Google isn't the only one.
It also allows you to use the ads network you want anytime you want : when your user is from india, when admob returns no ads, when your user is on wifi....It's up to you !

Which are the ads networks supported ?
Adfonic
Adiquity
Admob
Inmobi
Inneractive
Madvertise
Smaato
I tried to support banner and interstitial for the most of them.
Unfortunatly, some SDK are buggy or work only on native Android app.
If you need another one, just ask me !

What's the licence ?
I tried another way to earn money : success sharing.
In fact, it's really simple : if you earn money with Ads4AIR, I'll earn too.
10% of the ads shown are from my own Adfonic account.
Since I understand developers could be afraid to not control every ad shown, it's still possible to register.
And since I'm a nice guy, YOU define the price.
Contact me for my paypal account, transfert the fund and I'll send you a serial id.

Where could I find it ?
On http://www.willna.com/extensions/
More ANE will come if this one is a success so...hurry up, use it and give me your feedback !

Learn Dari on Android thanks to AIR

Some weeks again, I finished an app I personnaly use : Dari AlefBe
This app help you to learn the Dari's alphabet.
What is Dari ? Wrongly called Farsi or persian, tt's one of the 2 main languages in Afghanistan.
Mainly in the north part of Afghanistan, including Kabul.

This app was made using Flex 4.5 and its mobile version.
It's my first app using Flex for mobile since my games use pure AS3.
I must say I'm not totally happy with Flex 4.5 Mobile.
The way they defined the skins according dpi, the default navigator, the buggy BACK key handling are some of the reasons why I not totally like it. I probably blog about these soon.
You could also add the fact they changed the defaut mobile skin from the beta : it is no longer Android-like, so I had to redefine almost every skin of the component I used.
Hopefully, gesture and effects are working very well. It was easy to make the Flash Cards !

How to (not) win money with AIR for mobile

Last week, I analized the ads fill rate for my games on several market.
I was very surprised to find a poor 8% max for my Android games while almost 25% for the WillNa website and Poulpytris Flash Lite.

So I tried to find the difference, using my own ads request log....and found it:
This is the UserAgent I receive from some guys on Poulpytris
 mozilla/5.0 (android; u; en-us) applewebkit/531.9 (khtml, like gecko) adobeair/2.7
When you look first, nothing strange...but then I looked at my log about WillNa.com and found this one
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

Well, it seems there is a lot of differences, no ?
For whatever reason, AIR use its own UserAgent.
It wouldn't be a problem if it didn't use a partial UserAgent!
In AIR default UserAgent, no android version, no device ID.
These 2 points are a MAJOR problem when you monetize your app throught ads : Ads network use these info to give you the ads ! No info, no ads or a basic one times to times.

Hopefully, there is a solution : you can override the defaut UserAgent with URLRequestDefaults.userAgent = newUA;
Now, we need to find a solution to detect the AndroidOS version and device ID.
And again, AIR failed to help us to make money : there is NO way to get these values using AS3 !

After some googleing, I find someone who made a fantastic discovery : these values are available on an .ini file !
Using his NativeDeviceInfo class, I updated my apps everywhere, hoping users will update them quickly.

It's been a week and about half of them update it.
For them, I saw a BIG increase of the ads fill rate which confirm the problem's origin : user agent !

A big thanks to Sidney for his class so !
and another buggy feature for AIR to report, helas ...

My games were stolen !

I today discovered a new kind of piracy...

1 month ago I published my (android) games on GetJar.
I planned to publish them on Android Market later (because of the fees).
It's just now impossible :
someone (Jasminstory or his clone integrixx) published my games (which he downloaded from GetJar) on the market, using the same name, the same screenshots, the same icons and even the same UIDs !

Yes, Jasminstory was able to publish air.com.willna.poulpytris from his own...
So, in the future, publish your game ANYWHERE you want to publish them at the SAME time...else someone could do it for you...

You could say "what's the matter? he paid the fees and publish it for you"...but
1/ he was SELLING my free games
2/ he was discovered and so I can't publish my games now, even if they were removed from the market
3/ the air.com.willna.xxx are now with a low profile on the market, few chances to be on the "Top" or "Try them" list now ....

I hope Google will help to solve this issue but it's now clear I won't earn a cent with these games...
so bad...
Nokia bullshit (more on this soon) and now that...
It's not my year, it seems...

Who want to sponsor a mobile game ?

Like I said, we submitted a game to Flash Game License contest.
We're happy to say it's one of the 150 winners !

I choose Flash Game License because I (still) don't know the sponsor-way to make some money. As far as I know, the main site to start on sponsoring is Flash Game License so...
Sponsoring is common for Web games but not for mobiles games (I never found a company to sponsor flash lite games!). I hope there will be there a new way to make profit.

So, we now have a game ready to be sponsored* !
This game will be available on the coming soon Adobe site dedicated to Flash mobile games so it's here your chance to get maximum exposure !

Penguinoid is a fun cute game, just what a player looks for on mobile.

And, moreover, we hope we'll be able to publish it soon on the Android Market thanks to AIR2 for Android!

*link only available to register sponsor

Poulpytris results after 1 month

Poulpytris was released one month ago so, it's time for some analytics !

The main difference with Poulpy's Game is the ads feature : Poulpytis shows up to 4 ads on a 'sponsored by' screen at startup.

Poulpytris is hosted on Playyoo, GetJar, Voeveo, Mobango, Mobile9 & Phoload

In one month, because (?) hosted in more sites than Poulpy's Game, it definitly beat Poulpy's Game result

Downloads
Playyoo : 324 (web) & 88 (premium)
GetJar : 5796 (swf), 3954 (sis) & 1430 (cab)
Voeveo : ?
Mobango : 14488 (swf, sis & cab)
Mobile 9 : 11386 (sis 3rd), 18033 (sis 5th) & 7948 (cab)
Phoload : 22 (sis)

so, in 1 month, Poulpytris was downloaded 63469 times !!!
For info, GetJar was about to be a failure...until it became one of 'Best Puzzle game'
I assume it's because of the old GetJar rank or I'm again recommanded by GetJar ?
GetJar changed a lot of things these last 4 months, for good and bad...but I'll post about this later.


Phone models
Playyoo : ?
GetJar : 5130 (10% of download!), 3110, E71 & still the 6300...N95 & 5800XM close the top 10
Voeveo : ? (N95 ?)
Mobango : ?
Mobile 9 : mainly 5th ed (5800XM)
Phoload : mainly 5800XM

So classics on Asia and Touch/smartphones on Europe ?


Country
Playyoo : Italy ;)
GetJar : Indonesia & India are 40% of download !
others : Indonesia, India, US, UK ?


WillNa connections
1000 from PC
3600 from mobile
so 7.5% convertion rate, better than the 2% of Poulpy's Game
+ the daily users count is near 30 (0 before!)


Ads
About 12000 ads request and about 40% impressions
Revenue on Admob : 14$
Revenue on InMobi : 9$
Revenue on ZestAds : 1$
Revenue on WebMobLink : N/A => still waiting activation of my website (!)
Revenue on AdFonic : N/A => we'll try next month if their servers won some speed
EDIT: fixed, see this post

Of course, this is the result for Poulpytris, we can't assume it will be the same for any others app/games


Results
12K ads from 60K downloads... it seems only 1/5 of the people go throught the 'Allow internet connection' screen...
and, shame on me, I forgot to activate unique visitors analysis so it's perhaps worst !


The VERY important thing to note is how many download you got from 'community' sites.
At first, I said "WOW!, GetJar is nothing compared to them" !
But, looking at ads impressions, I saw GetJar users are more allright with adware than community's users.
Community users are looking for totally free games/apps : an ads and they close the game/app!
and don't even think about selling them the full ads free version !

For this reason, the download rate from mobile9 is impressive but I doubt we won a lot of money with that.
It's very interesting because it means more downloads is not equal to more money.
If you have 100K downloads but 1K ads request, it's no use : you could win more with 20K download and 2K ads request !

So key is ...the target!
but I don't have a clue on this point since, apart for GetJar, others sites don't report by countries :(

The only way I see to make a deeper analysis of this point is to release a version for each host and to look at the results.
I'm pretty sure we'll see something like
Mobile9 => 30K download for 1K ads request
GetJar => 15K download for 4K ads request
For Mobango, I don't know...very interesting host anyway, I'll submit my others (past/future) games on it, for sure!

Poulpytris available on Mobango

Some weeks ago, I found another content aggregator open to everyone :

I'm actually testing it with Poulpytris, and I must say the results after 3 days are VERY interesting (more info in 1 month)

New screensaver : Poulpyween

In 2 days, it's Halloween...so we made this free screensaver/wallpaper :

It's our first screensaver/wallpaper so we fall into some holes !

Apart the fscommand2(fullscreen) not supported on almost half of the phones (replaced by a Stage.scaleMode = "noBorder"), we needed to optimize it a lot because it was so slow on a S40.
Lesson learned : always use simulate performance on Device central!

We made some changes (use graphic not clip on still image and avoid alpha animated stuff) et voilà...

New game : Poulpytris

This year is the 25th anniversary of Tetris...I couldn't miss it !

So here comes Poulpytris, our tribute to this fabulous game!

Hope you'll like it...

Poulpy Game results after 1 month

Poulpy's Game was released one month ago, at the same time we opened WillNa.com
It is our first game so I planned to make some analysis of its results
Poulpy's game is hosted in 4 websites : Playyoo (historic), GetJar, Voeveo and coming-soon-one
This FL2.x+ game is available in SWF, NFL, SIS (using Nokia's Packager) & CAB (using Adobe Mobile Packager) format

Download
+7500 downloads in one month
+300 per day when Poulpy was recommanded by GetJar
-100 per day when not recommanded
20% for the WiMo version

Models (+100 download each)

You'll notice Nokia's 6300 and no FLite enabled phones results.
I also suspect some errors in GetJar mobile detection (7610 or 7610 supernova?)
The first SE phone isn't Capuchin enabled

Countries
GetJar doesn't provide countries stats, so I'm relaying to willna.com results
Indonesia : 54
India : 32
Netherlands : 12
United States : 11
United Kingdom : 10

You'll notice the very important part of Asia.

Unfortunalty, you'll also notice the very low convertion rate : 2%
7500 download vs 150 connections to WillNa.com

WillNa connections (Top10)
6120c : 18
6300 : 15
MSIE 7 : 9
Windows Mobile : 9
E71 : 8
E63 : 8
N95 : 7
E90 : 7
Opera Mini : 6
iPAQ HX4700/Treo700w : 6

Revenue
Poulpy's game was a 'pay-if-you-like-ware' which gives us 0.70$
I also expected some money from the ads shown on willna.com
- PC version : 0$
- Mobile version : 0.6$

Result
I'm very proud our game was downloaded +7500 times in 1 month
To be recommanded really impacts your download rate.
Unfortunatly, I also must face the bad revenue result :
It was fun to make this game but it only generated 1.3$, because people doesn't want to pay for a free game and rarely visits game's website

My next game will try another selling model, I'll see if revenue will increase or not.

ps: I really need a 6300 ! Nobody to send me one ? ;)

3 months of work and here it comes : WillNa

So, after some hours spent, I finally launched on March 1st my own Flash (Lite) site

At this times, I only provide one game :

You already saw this game, it was my first attempt to make a game with FlashLite.
My friend and I work a little more on it, taking in account some remarks (thanks Dale!) and so, here it is!
At this time, I use Voeveo plaform to sell it.


The second game, still for mobile, will come in some days.


I plan to drive traffic making classic Flash games.
I hope to earn enought money to buy a Chumby ...and make games for it !