[diune]

A new app from Diune

We haven't blogged for a long time but we will come back soon. 

The diune team has been working on a really innovative core application that we hope you will like and enjoy.

[diune]

Appkik está finalmente em espanhol

Olá,

We are not native Spanish speakers but we have so many spanish speaking fans and friends from Argentina, Bolivia, Spain, Mexico and of course the United States :) that we decided to translate Appkik.

It is not a perfect translation. If you both speak English and Spanish and wants to let us know about a mistake, please contact us - twitter is the best for this.

[diune]

Why did we re-launch Appkik?

Appkik was removed in April from the Android Market in April by Google and we never really understood why. We asked the Google support for help and couldn't get a clear answer, they just pointed us to the Android Content Policy which we read many times and never found what was really wrong with Appkik. 

It was very frustrating. Then we found out that on some countries our Ad provider was publishing Ads which we thought were age restricted. We believe this is the reason why it was removed and we understand why Google did it.

The funny thing was that, besides telling the ad network to not display those kind of ads, they were still displayed. That was not their fault apparently, they were probably displaying ads in the wrong category. Very unfortunate for us and Appkik.

So why did we decide to relaunch Appkik?

We received so many emails from Appkik users who wanted to re-download Appkik that we thought we had to relaunch it. This time, we have put Appkik in the 16+ age section just to make sure this issue never happens again.

We are happy about the relaunch. We can see that people still love Appkik and new ones are also very pleased about it.

The new version is more mature, more stable and faster. 

Thanks to all the bloggers from Spain, Chili, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland which wrote nice articles about us.

[diune]

Appkik 1.3.2 - Go Appkik Pro

The big news with the new version of Appkik (1.3.2) is the ability to Go Appkik Pro.

From Appkik, you will be able to buy a Pro Key and this will remove Ads.

Instead of the Ad-filled header that you are now used to, you will see a clean header with a search button. You will then have more room for apps as the search input will not visible by default.

We have also done some performance improvements and some bug fixes. 

Comments are always welcome.

[diune]

Appkik 1.1 to be released - A GMail-like experience for selection

We are releasing a new version of Appkik next week, Appkik version 1.1.

The key changes will be:

Multi-selection

Support of small screens

UI improvement

Deleted tab added to the main Apps section

And of course, some small bug fixes and performance improvement.

Multi-selection

As you can see above, we have added select boxes in front of each of the apps. When you select one or more apps, a set of actions appear at the bottom, similarly to the GMail Android app. You will be able to back-up, uninstall or share multiple apps at once. We hope you will like it.

(By the way, you can see that we use Andlytics, it is an app for developer. It basically shows the Android Market console on your Android phone. It is a must have app for all Android developers, highly recommended)

Support of small screen

  We have created a small screen version of Appkik. HTC Tattoo owner will finally be able to enjoy Appkik.

The experience is not optimal on a screen like that. We really did what we could :)

UI Improvement

There are UI changes in every part of the App. We have changed the tabs, slightly modified the footer, updated the Appkik logo and many other small things that we hope you will like.

  Deleted tab

There is a new tab in the Apps section. You still have the A-z, New, Best and Recent view and there is a new one: the Deleted view which list the deleted apps.

In this new deleted tab, you will find all the apps you have deleted as well as all the apps that have been back-ed up with Appkik (from a previous installation).

Basically, as an example, Linda Manager has been deleted in the example above. We can retrieve it from the Android Market by clicking on it in this Deleted view.

You will never be afraid to delete an app to save space as they can be easily retrieved with a simple click.

We hope you will like this new version which should be out next week.

[diune]

hii recently upgraded my Galaxy S to Froyo and have been having a few glitches since. It's suggested on Whirlpool Forums (god i love this forum - they've helped me pout on a number of occasions) that a Factory Reset after the upgrade should have been done and that doing one now would probably resolve them for me. I use my phone for business as well as for mindless happinesses which means i need to do a backup if my sms's (minimum) and also my call logs etc (preferred). Your 'Event Flow' seems to back up everything i want and tehn some but i'm not sure where it stores them (SD card he askes hopefully?) and more importantly - does it have a restore feature? This is something i've not been able to find on your pages. Another thing not clear from your information ... does 'Event Flow' only start to function from time of installation or does it also backup all events that occurred prior to installation? Which is my priority at the moment.Also, i've installed an awful lot of apps since the 2.2 upgrade and am dreading having to troll through endless websites to locate them and then spend hours downloading and reinstalling them all again. Does your Appkik save to SD card and allow me to restore them from there. Come t think of it ... do your apps allow me to use App 2 SD Pro to move them to my SD card?regardskevinaPS, you're right, doesn't matter how good your apps, if they aren't in front of the public's eyes then you'll never get the downloads you deserve or need. I must have done 4 or 5 searches of app markets for sms backups before i stumbled on a link to your apps. This was after looking at perhaps ten or so other apps and glancing at dozens more. And i still haven't been able to find the one suggested to me - 'My Backup' (laughing)))dunno how you get round this short of having people like Android Police and Ars Technica do a review and then blog it on Face Book for you (between them they have over 30,000 FB followers). good luck with itk

Dear Kevin,

Thanks for your message. Lots of interesting questions here.

About Event Flow: Event flow creates a flow of events of everything happening on your phone and synchronize that on Google Calendar. It starts a month prior to the installation of Event Flow (a current limitation of the app). It is better than at the date of installation but if you have been using your phone for a year, this is still a serious limitation (that we should fix soon). Your SMS and Call logs will be backed up but you won't be able to restore them on your call log view and message view. 

So if you want to keep your information somewhere, it will work for you. If you want to restore the information, this will not work for you. 

If you are looking for My Backup, you should just type MyBackup (without space) on Android Market, it should work. 

We are working on a backup and restore app but it will take some time. 

About Appkik: it allows you to do 2 things: move application to SD card if they can be (not all applications can be moved) and back-up your apps to your SD card. Currently, you need to do that one by one but we are working on a back-up all to SD cards. Once it is done, you can then restore all your apps from the SD card after a factory reset. You will need to use Appkik both for the back-up and restore. 

I don't know exactly about App 2 SD Pro, I think it only moves app to the SD card (which Appkik does) but not really back-up and restore all apps. Appkik should do the work and it is free.

Thanks for encouraging. If you want to contact us directly, you can join us at contact - at - diune.com

Best,

The diune team

[diune]

Our first month experience with the Android Market

It has been roughly 4 weeks that we launched our first application, Event Flow and about 2 weeks that we launched our second application, Appkik.

Has the situation improved with Event Flow? 

The answer is YES. The situation has improved. We have finally reached the 50+ download bar and we have very good comments. We have increased the price of the app and this had no consequence to the number of downloads. This is actually quite logical, Event Flow is quite unique and the people downloading it have a real need for it and do not mind spending $3 on it. In our last post, we calculated that it would take us about 60 years to get our virtual investment of £60000 back.

We are glad to say that, with the current trend, it will take us about 30 years :)

How does the free app model compares with the paid app model?

Appkik is a free app manager and task killer. It has been more successful than Event Flow regarding the number of downloads. In 2 weeks, we have reached more than 12000 downloads. This is not too bad. However, if we are talking about revenue, this is far from being fantastic. We are using Admob and we get from it roughly $2 per day from 7000 active users or 60$ per month from 7000 active users.

If we assume that we get 7000 new active users per month, we can (roughly) assume that we will get

$60 the first month

$120 the second month

$180 the third month

$240 the fourth month

A total of $4680 for the first year.

We believe that the lifetime of an Android app rarely goes beyond 2 years (a new app takes over, the look and feel becomes outdated or people get simply bored...). If everything goes perfect (like shown above), over 2 years we can hope for a total revenue of $15000. Way below the overall virtual cost of Appkik (around £40000, i.e. $62000).

We can only hope for an explosive growth if we just want to be paid for our work.

To conclude, for the first month, the free app model doesn't look more interesting than the paid app model. But the trend seems encouraging.

[diune]

First week of experience on the Android Market

It has been a week since Event Flow was published on the Android Market and we wanted to share our experience so far. In 2 words: Not Glorious.

When we developed Event Flow for the Android Developer Challenge about a year ago, we had the chance to be tested and judged by thousands of people. Most of them like our app. We were not the overall winners but we ended up finalists.

It took us a long time to finalize Event Flow and the environment has significantly changed. There are more than 100.000 apps on the Android Market and they are about 270.000 developers creating apps for Android according to an Andy Rubin's interview in the NY Times. The competitive environment has become incredibly competitive; for a app developer shop, it is increasingly difficult to break even. 

The development cost of Event Flow is roughly £ 60.000 - this calculation is based both on the number of hours we put into this project and the average developer hourly rate. We are currently earning £3 a day (Event Flow is a paid app). If we keep this pace, the yearly revenue will be £1000. This will not be enough to cover the maintenance cost - likely to occur when Google decides to release the new Gingerbread version or when handset manufacturers release new phone with non standard behaviors. It also means that it could take us 60 years to get back the (virtually) invested money. In 2070, we will probably no longer have Android phones :)

This simple exercise shows that:

Releasing an app is nothing - promotion is key. You can have a beautiful, innovative app. If not discovered, it will simply never be downloaded.

The Paid app is probably not a good model on the Android Market. It is quite telling to see that Angry Birds was released on Android for free, with Ads. Fortunately, we will be able to compare the 2 models - we are launching a free app with Ads, called Appkik: It is an application manager and task killer.

Developing very rich app (like Event Flow which has many features, a high number of screens) may not be a viable model. Simple, mono-screen app, could be more interesting financially.

We will try many things and we won't give up on Event Flow. As we go along, we will share our experience. That can be useful for other passionate Android developers. 

[diune]

The story behind Event Flow

The story begins in December 2008. We were digging the Google Android API and we realized that an app could be notified in real-time of almost everything happening on the device including a picture shot, a text message received or a call being missed. We thought this would allow us to design an app which could store and search all the events occurring on the phone.

This led to the birth of Event Flow and we soon realized that the concept was nothing new. As a matter of fact, many R&D departments of companies such as Nokia or Microsoft had been working on the Lifelog concept for quite some time.

There were also movies that had been inspired by this idea. In the rather violent Strange Days (1995) directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron, the hero, Lenny Nero, is a dealer of data-discs containing recorded memories and emotions. When the disc is played, the user experiences the memory as though he was actually living it.

As far as we know, the idea was actually first introduced by Vannevar Bush in his famous As We May Think essay, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. In this essay, Bush described a device called Memex that an individual could use to read a large self-contained research library, adding or following associative trails of links and notes created by themselves or recorded by other individuals. As you may imagine, the Memex technology was not available back then. Now, we have Internet and Search engines which serve some Memex function.

As you can see, Event Flow is just a new step towards this vision and is part of the family of tools that help us remember what we have lived and reignite the emotions locked up in in old pictures and text messages.

[diune]

Event Flow, one of the ADC 200, will be released in April.