I'm using the new Android Market for some weeks now...
Google successfully made a market...worst than the previous one!
I won't talk about the (un)usability (category on left, search....) but only of a point which affects publisher :
I'm still looking for the old 'new free app' and 'new paid app', I only found top and best value
I don't see how your new released game/app could be a success if people don't even know it was released !
Does it mean you have to made some advertising ? Does it mean you have to rely on (very badly working) keywords, users will so 'discover' you app by chance/mistake ?
So yes, I dislike the new market. The only option I see is to use AppBrain to browse apps and Market to buy and update them....
It's a solution for myself as an user, not a solution as a publisher
16 October 2011
Adobe did again...sadly
Some days ago, Adobe released Flash Player 11 for Android.
Great, no ? Enhanced player, 3D support etc....
Well, yes and no, Adobe made (again) the mistake to release an heavy app without App2SD support....
On my HTC Desire, it needs 17M of internal memory, almost as much as AIR (which at last support App2SD now)....
It's not a problem on my Nexus S but I had to remove 2 or 3 apps on my Desire to install FP11...
At this rate, for the next version, I'll finish with a Desire with bundled apps + AIR and FP only...
(yes, Google Earth, Map and Market are just too heavy also)
Does it mean my Desire is now a obsolete smartphone ? Does it mean Adobe optimized their player for speed nor for size ?
I don't know but if you read the comments (at least here in France) on the market, it's only complaints about the size, not the new capacities... Not very good....
Great, no ? Enhanced player, 3D support etc....
Well, yes and no, Adobe made (again) the mistake to release an heavy app without App2SD support....
On my HTC Desire, it needs 17M of internal memory, almost as much as AIR (which at last support App2SD now)....
It's not a problem on my Nexus S but I had to remove 2 or 3 apps on my Desire to install FP11...
At this rate, for the next version, I'll finish with a Desire with bundled apps + AIR and FP only...
(yes, Google Earth, Map and Market are just too heavy also)
Does it mean my Desire is now a obsolete smartphone ? Does it mean Adobe optimized their player for speed nor for size ?
I don't know but if you read the comments (at least here in France) on the market, it's only complaints about the size, not the new capacities... Not very good....
10 September 2011
Poor fill rate for Asia, sadly
While working on AIR's UserAgent bug, I noticed a LOT of Korean are actually playing my games...
It's a good news and I'm happy I recently was able to sign an agreement with a korean market to distribute Penguinoid.
The bad news is I'm currrently not winning a penny from Korea : the several ads network I use don't support Korea or very poorly ( 1 or 2% fill rate, even with a working user agent )
He! Advertisers! What are you doing ?! I could tell you korean are using Android a lot RIGHT NOW!
And it seems Taiwan is coming too....
It's a good news and I'm happy I recently was able to sign an agreement with a korean market to distribute Penguinoid.
The bad news is I'm currrently not winning a penny from Korea : the several ads network I use don't support Korea or very poorly ( 1 or 2% fill rate, even with a working user agent )
He! Advertisers! What are you doing ?! I could tell you korean are using Android a lot RIGHT NOW!
And it seems Taiwan is coming too....
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 !
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 ...
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 ...
16 June 2011
AIR for Android (almost) on SD
From Alessandro, AIR 2.7 for Android was released 2 days ago...
The main changement I quickly jumped to was the ability to AT LAST move the runtime to the SD Card.
I was about to post about the real problem of this runtime : its size.
I made a quick stats on the french Android Market and about half of the comment are something like "too heavy and don't know what it is needed for so... deleted!"
On the other half, half (so 1/4 of the total comment) claimed they use a custom ROM (the infamous Cyanogen) to move the runtime on the SD.
You see the point : about 3/4 of the comments are talking about the size of the runtime. It also means 1/2 of users deleted the runtime...and so won't install it anymore even if you publish an awesome (air) app/game.
Note I don't know if it's the same in US or UK, I only talk about France.
So, I was more than happy when reading the news 2 days ago!
Hélàs, my happiness was equal to my sadness when I finally updated AIR on my Desire : of the 16Mo of the runtime, ONLY 5Mo are moveable to the SD card....
Come on! It's better but far to solve the "too heavy" criticism!
I think you could argue Google Maps is almost the same size...but I think you can't compare this because Google Maps is Google Maps (people want it) where AIR is ... what? (1/3 of people don't even know what the need for!)
16Mo for the runtime plus x Mo for any basic app generated with Flex 4.5
The more I use this solution, the more I think it's not the good way....
AIR shouldn't be needed and the apk generated should be (translated) native code.
I finally found a middleware which do so... I'll give it a try next month I think.
Note Adobe is able to do this, look at Wallaby (Flash to HTML5) for example....
The main changement I quickly jumped to was the ability to AT LAST move the runtime to the SD Card.
I was about to post about the real problem of this runtime : its size.
I made a quick stats on the french Android Market and about half of the comment are something like "too heavy and don't know what it is needed for so... deleted!"
On the other half, half (so 1/4 of the total comment) claimed they use a custom ROM (the infamous Cyanogen) to move the runtime on the SD.
You see the point : about 3/4 of the comments are talking about the size of the runtime. It also means 1/2 of users deleted the runtime...and so won't install it anymore even if you publish an awesome (air) app/game.
Note I don't know if it's the same in US or UK, I only talk about France.
So, I was more than happy when reading the news 2 days ago!
Hélàs, my happiness was equal to my sadness when I finally updated AIR on my Desire : of the 16Mo of the runtime, ONLY 5Mo are moveable to the SD card....
Come on! It's better but far to solve the "too heavy" criticism!
I think you could argue Google Maps is almost the same size...but I think you can't compare this because Google Maps is Google Maps (people want it) where AIR is ... what? (1/3 of people don't even know what the need for!)
16Mo for the runtime plus x Mo for any basic app generated with Flex 4.5
The more I use this solution, the more I think it's not the good way....
AIR shouldn't be needed and the apk generated should be (translated) native code.
I finally found a middleware which do so... I'll give it a try next month I think.
Note Adobe is able to do this, look at Wallaby (Flash to HTML5) for example....
05 April 2011
All you need to know about icons
If you plan to use AIR to generate Iphone or Android apps, you should bookmark this page ! It will help you to find which size of icons is needed for which version.
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