App.net

by sahillavingia • 15 years ago

124 59 15 years ago

mtogo2• 15 years ago

Cool, flavors.me for phone apps. Their list of apps that use the service is rather impressive, did those companies add themselves or did app.net create profiles for all of them?

dalton14• 15 years ago

Those were beta testers that I showed the service to before we launched, and explicitly gave us permission to feature them.

mtogo2• 15 years ago

Pretty impressive in that case! Great app idea.

the_unknown• 15 years ago

Having recently built a mini site to host info about an iPhone app I can appreciate where the idea is going... unfortunately their pricing seems fairly out of place with what's being offered.

I built a small supporting site and tossed it up on Google Apps (really just plain HTML) for free hosting... yes, I needed to set the template and Google Analytics code myself but is that really worth the $2.50 - $4.00 a month?

Might I humbly suggest a small change... bump the free level to 5 apps so that I get hooked on the ease of use and simplicity of your model then group together upgrades in wide bands... maybe 5-10 for the second tier and 10-50 for the third tier.

Oh, and get Windows Phone support in there... there likely isn't much demand but it is my preferred platform and I'd like it to succeed. :)

dalton14• 15 years ago

That's good feedback, thanks.

revorad2• 15 years ago

Do you really have trouble spending $4 a month on marketing a product you want to make money from?

teyc• 15 years ago

Nice. and nice domain too.

jrmg2• 15 years ago

Seems a bit weird to me that they're effectively selling URLs of the form app.net/appname rather than selling subdomains like appname.app.net.

keyle2• 15 years ago

Seems a bit weird to me that they link to fake examples to real apps in their "Featured apps". Unless they got permission?

EDIT: They are legitimate testimonials.

dalton14• 15 years ago

Hey this is Dalton. I absolutely got permission from every single app developer on the featured apps page.

dariusmonsef• 15 years ago

We're one of the featured apps (ColorSchemer). We granted permission and appreciate the support.

adrianwaj2• 15 years ago

I'd love to see someone make use of the TLD .app

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/20/icann_dot_everything...

It has been registered by someone, however.

jrmg2• 15 years ago

Who? And, already? Doesn't registration for new TLDs not open until next year?

I've been following this project:

http://dotappapp.com/

It would be sad to learn they've been pipped.

newman3142• 15 years ago

Especially given the recent guidance that subdomains are less prone to penalty by the Google Panda update.

Might want to retool or at least offer the option for appname.app.net

robtoo• 15 years ago

There was no recent guidance that subdomains are less prone to penalty by the Google Panda update.

There was just an SEO blogger with poor reading comprehension and an axe to grind.

dalton14• 15 years ago

Hi this is Dalton, CEO of App.net

hn people might remember me from this: http://startupschool.org/schedule.html

Feel free to ask me any questions you have. You can email me at dalton -at- app dot net

lwat• 15 years ago

That is one sexy domain name you got there!

dalton14• 15 years ago

Thanks, I spent an embarrassing amount of time domaining over the past couple of years. At last it finally paid off :)

joelackner• 15 years ago

this might sound lazy, but why don't you scrape the content (description, icon, screens) when i add my app?

dalton14• 15 years ago

I don't think that's lazy, that's smart ;)

We actually wrote a lot of code to do exactly that, but it wasn't good enough to make it into the launch. Would rather have less features that are rock solid than a flaky importer.

xelfer3• 15 years ago

Great site, well done! I found a few problems with your templates you may want to look at (especailly with a longer app name):

http://i.imgur.com/hGpwU.png

http://i.imgur.com/DgnnK.png (I had to highlight the text to see it)

http://i.imgur.com/WjsKe.png

dalton14• 15 years ago

you are right, that doesn't look great.

Could you try reducing the font size of the Title text size (under the "Styles" tab in the theme editor)?

xelfer3• 15 years ago

Did that! looks much better now, thanks!

When trying to upload a second screenshot I'm getting this (google chrome): http://i.imgur.com/Agk8l.png (after a refresh it seems to be working properly.. odd bug)

simonsarris• 15 years ago

By the name alone I was expecting a Microsoft App store

jjets718• 15 years ago

It looks great. Can you use your own app domain name instead of using app.net/yourappname?

dalton14• 15 years ago

Thanks :)

re:custom domains, not at this point, but that is definitely one of the most common feature requests we have gotten so far.

benatkin• 15 years ago

The site is really well done, and the selection of launch partners is great. I like the App.net app pages much better than the Apple app pages that try to launch iTunes. I don't think it matters much whether it's nameofapp.app.net or app.net/nameofapp.

dalton14• 15 years ago

Thank you very much.

I spent quite a bit of time before we launched talking to app developers across the spectrum of size of company, and types of app.

fascinated• 15 years ago

Dalton, why can't I upload and play music or view photos from app.net? I am confused

dalton14• 15 years ago

thanks for troll, anthony :p

jzting• 15 years ago

Looks great. Is there any way for analytics ignore clicks from the creator? Just got an inflated click count while testing out different templates.

dalton14• 15 years ago

Good point. That would probably be a way to filter out specific IP addresses, right?

adityakothadiya• 15 years ago

And cookies too.

mst• 15 years ago

Given the minisites are all under a single domain, wouldn't serving a cookie to the author be sufficient?

Cyph0n2• 15 years ago

Very interesting idea, and an even more interesting domain name.

One thing though: how can a user download the app itself? Must he/she be on an iPhone or are you just advertising the apps themselves and expecting the user to visit the App Store to get them?

dangrossman• 15 years ago

There's a big "Get this app" button on the app's page, which opens up a widget with a link to the app store listing as well as a form to have it sent to your phone directly by SMS.

dalton14• 15 years ago

We are building tools to help app developers gain insight and drive engagement. There are myriad issues around creating alternate app stores, so we are very intentionally trying to build on top of existing atores.

In terms of how a user that hits one of the pages and actually get the app on their phone, we have a couple of novel approaches (in addition to the standard iTunes link): click "get the app" and you will see a place to SMS a link to the phone, email a link, etc.

Cyph0n2• 15 years ago

I see. Well, I wish you and your team the best of luck.

davidedicillo• 15 years ago

As they say, the ones making money during the gold rush, are the one selling picks.

salman89• 15 years ago

So I actually tried out this service today for the company I am working at.

I do not see much value being created from the current offering. Sure, it makes a pretty page and gives you analytics for people being sent to that particular page. This really doesn't solve a problem though. I would say that about half the people discover apps through the app store itself. Developers needs analytics in the app store, not on some redirect page. As it stands, this is just another layer.

I really did like the feature that a user can send an SMS to their phone number for an install link. And that button can be replicated anywhere. This is pretty useful. Everything else, I don't see why appstores can't integrate those features into their appstores.

What value is this creating for me as a developer? A custom app landing page? I could have done that myself. Analytics? I can throw Google Analytics onto a custom landing page. Can I track how many people hit my app.net/domain page and then proceeded to install? Nope, but Google/Apple can certainly create that value (and maybe even charge for it).

revorad2• 15 years ago

Edit: I eat my words below because I didn't know what I was talking about. Thanks for pointing out bruceboughton and mbarr.

<uninformed>The "send to phone" button on app store webpages is a simple feature Google and Apple can copy straight from Amazon's Kindle playbook. If I couldn't send book samples to my Kindle while browsing Amazon on my computer, I'd miss out on checking out and buying a lot of books.</uninformed>

bruceboughton• 15 years ago

This is part of iCloud isn't it? Anything you purchase is synced to your devices, so you can purchase in the store on your desktop/laptop and it is synced to your phone/iPad/iPod.

mbarr• 15 years ago

That's been possible on Android Market since the website was launched in February:

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-android...

stucksimon• 15 years ago

So I just tried out the service and am debating whether to use it or not. I've been looking for something like this, but dealing with the domain issue and providing a bit of automation for icon/image grabbing would go a long way for me. Also wondering if there are plans for multi-platform support? My company has many apps that exist on both iPhone and Android.

dalton14• 15 years ago

The importer isn't quite ready for prime time.

We support iPhone and Android currently.

Feel free to email me at dalton -at- app dot net, would be happy to answer any additional questions you have :)

inmygarage• 15 years ago

Absolutely love the SMS feature.

I think what some people forget is that there are only about 500K iphone apps in the app store (about the same for Android? not sure on that), and the store is barely three years old. Over the next few years I bet that number is going to explode, providing a huge opportunity for a service like app.net.

unwiredben• 15 years ago

Where have I seen that SMS feature before? I think it's been a key feature of the webOS app pages for the last year and a half, as seen at http://developer.palm.com/appredirect/?packageid=com.rovio.a...

masonlee• 15 years ago

This is a good idea for a business! Custom site design of that quality can easily run someone a couple grand.

Feature request: room for iPad screenshots!

minikomi• 15 years ago

Might be a good idea to add some control over the screenshot slideshow.. clicking the screen to go to next image would be fine

canistr• 15 years ago

This is EXACTLY what I've been looking for. I was going to hire a designer to make a simple splash page like this for my app but it probably would have costs a lot more than "free" just to get that done including the hosting.

Thanks!

App.net

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