Apprack Blog

News about iOS, App Development and the App Store

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Getting Started

Getting started with a landing page:

1. Sign up on apprack.io 2. Create your AppKit by entering your app Id or app's name 3. Go to Website builder in the dashboard to see your first draft and adapt it to your needs 4. Press Publish and your landing page is online 5. See below how to add your privacy policy, terms, imprint, ...

Getting started with the SDK

1. Sign up on apprack.io 2. Create your AppKit by entering your app Id or app's name 3. Include the SDK into your app by adding `pod 'Apprack'` to your Podfile and running pod install (for more details see github.com/apprack/apprack-ios-sdk) 4. Go to SDK in the apprack.io Dashboard and copy your AppKitId and API Key 5. Add the SDK initialization code to your AppDelegate's `-application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:`: [APRAppManager.sharedManager initializeWithAppKit:appKitId andApiKey:apiKey]; Don't forget to add `#import <APRFramework/APRFramework.h>` 6. Adapt the SDK to your needs on the SDK dashboard. To show the settings screen present `APRAppManager.sharedManager.settingsViewController` in a `UINavigationController` (for more details see github.com/apprack/apprack-ios-sdk) 5. See below how to add your privacy policy, terms, imprint, ...

Add content for documents

1. Go to your apprack.io dashbaord 2. Select the type of content you want to add from the sidebar 3. Enter your text and save 4. For the SDK ensure, that the content type is enabled in the SDK section of the dashbaord 5. The content is now linked on your landing page and will show up in the SDK's settings controller

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App Landing Pages

You've heard it probably on severalt occasions already: "You'll need a landing page for your app to be found" "Increase downloads by providing a website for your app" "With this simple landing page I quadrupled my revenue"

But we're mobile developers, we want to develop our app and don't want to be bothered with HTML to advertise it, right?

Apprack is here to help you. We fully automatically create a website for your app based on the meta data from the App Store. This means you don't have to maintain any content, just enter your app name on apprack.io and your landing page is ready.

We'll take your app description, screenshots, release notes, icon and other data dricetly from the App Store and generate a beautiful website for your app. The landing page will be fully localized into all languages you support.

Of course we'll link also to all the legal documents, support form, FAQ and other content you've created on Apprack. So there's only one place to maintain and update your content.

In the same way we create a page with release notes for each new release of your app, which you can integrate into the app without any effort.

The landing pages generated by Apprack look like the one for Weiqht or stonewall – and yes, these are websites, automatically generated without one single line of code or one line of text written. All content comes straight from the App Store.

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App Settings

With the Apprack iOS SDK we solved the problem of the settings screen for you.

There is no more need to develop your own settings screen, install the Apprack SDK once and you're one line of code away from a settings screen, which includes all the basics every app should have:

contact form

information about the current version

access to release notes

access to required legal documents

...

In addition the screen is easily extandable and customizable. Adding custom cells, switches or even fully custom views is possible as well as adapting the color scheme to your app, so that the screen fits perfectly into your app.

Our many years of development experience have also shown that it is just as important to have content quickly and easily available in multiple languages, so you can change all content hosted on Apprack in real time and don't have to wait for review processes until the changes show up in your app.

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Legal Documents

Apprack wants to help you with the constantly increasing legal requirements regarding data protection and data privacy. Since the GDPR is in effect it is required for apps to have a privacy policy – and also Apple just recently started to enforce this requirement.

With the Apprack SDK it's easy to include a privacy policy and other required legal documents into your app and also add it them as a link to your App Store page.

Our framework offers you a variety of placeholders for required legal content such as privacy policies, imprints, terms of use, and so on. Simply add the text you've received from your legal department or laywer in your Apprack dashboard and the screens are in the app without chaninging one line of code.

The legal content is locally cached and can be viewed offline, which for example is a requirement for imprints in Germany or privacy policies in the EU.

And if there are changes to the documents necessary, edit the text in the dashboard and the changes are live in your apps, without requiring an App Store review.

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Introducing Apprack

As iOS developers – who work on several apps – we more than once had the feeling that what we're currently working on things, we've already done manytimes  before. This lead to the idea of a framework which just takes over all the parts you don't want to build again, and again, and again ...

Therefore we designed Apprack as a platfrom to help you be more efficient at mobile development.

During the work on our own mobile projects we detected several pain points, which regularly came up, and we're we always felt like our time could be spent better.

We're talking about annoying things like adding privacy policies and other required legalese to the app, as well as the always necessary but mostly boring settings screen, or the need to create a landing page for the app.

Apprack wants to take over this burden from you, so we focused to ease these pain points:

Legal Documents

App Settings

App Landing Pages

Support

We’ll explain each of these pain points and how Apprack helps you there in the coming days.

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Apple adds support for more languages

You can now localize your App Store product page into Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Hindi, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, and Ukrainian when you submit a new version.

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Apple adds new metrics to App Analytics overview

Apple added two new metrics to its App Analytics on App Store Connect: 

Conversion Rate

app units / unique device impressions

Sales per Paying User 

total sales (incl. in-app purchases) / paying users

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App Store Connect Holiday Shut Down

Apple just announced that App Store Connect will be shut down from December 23 to December 27 2018.

Remember that uploading new apps or app updates as well as pricing changes are not possible during the yearly holiday shutdown.