AppCoins News Update, or ANU for short, is a regular bi-weekly update by the AppCoins team. As usual, we are going to cover dev updates, market reports, team members and upcoming events. This week we take the opportunity to look back at the major achievements and milestones of AppCoins throughout 2018.

Quicklinks

Dev Update

APPC Markets Report

Featured Team Member

A Message from Paulo Trezentos

Welcome to the first ANU of 2019! This year promises great things for the AppCoins project, and we can’t wait to share them with you, but until then how about a quick recap of all the incredible milestones that the AppCoins team achieved during the past year? Continue reading below.

Since the very beginning, our vision for AppCoins has been to provide developers with a transparent and efficient way to monetize their apps across app stores; provide users with a trusted environment by offering new purchasing possibilities and incentives to discover apps; and to create an app economy with a new universal language that ensures trust, transparency, and openness. That said, one of our greatest achievements of 2018 was to be able to increase the added value of the project for both developers and users, and here is how we did it.

Unity Partnership

Our primary focus has always been to develop a simple way for developers to integrate the unity plugin, giving them more time to focus on building amazing apps. The partnership with Unity was crucial for that to happen since it eases the integration of the AppCoins Protocol for developers globally and makes it an official billing solution for in-app purchases (IAP) available to all Unity developers. We believe that this will make a huge difference to facilitate billing solutions for developers. In the last two weeks, we have been working on improving the feedback that our plugin gives to the developers when there are issues with the integration. Our goal is to keep on working to make the integration occur in the smoothest way possible.

Developers Incentive Program (DIP)

As you may already know, we created a Developers Incentives Program that aims to incentivize new developers to come aboard. The incentives program offers initial and weekly rewards of up to 125,000 APPC for developers that integrate our SDK, and overall it has been working quite well. However, in the last few weeks, we detected that some of the developers were making purchases to themselves to increase their earnings from our program. As a result, we are pausing the program for a few weeks, as we are developing a system that allows us to detect “fake” transactions and mark them as such. We will resume shortly though.

Those transactions still exist, and you can check them on APPC Explorer, but when it comes to DIP, they will no longer be considered since they could lead us to the wrong conclusions. We will continue to work to make sure that DIP is back on track as soon as possible!

In-App Purchases

From the users perspective, performing payments should be as easy and comfortable as possible. This means the payment process should be clean and straightforward, with payment methods familiar to users. That said we worked on integrating credit card and Paypal support. We also developed a way for users to be able to choose the payment method they would like to use before performing the payment.

Besides that, we have recently come across some significant feedback from our community which will help us improve the IAP experiences even more. So, if you have any feeback or suggestions you’d like to share with us, please join our Telegram channel and feel free to do so. We’re always happy to discuss.

The truth is that the vast majority of apps that integrate the AppCoins IAP are games, and those games usually run in landscape. After gathering some feedback, we concluded that our landscape flow doesn’t offer the best experience possible and so we have started to work on a solution that will make the IAP flow as easy, flawless and smooth, as possible.

Proof-of-Attention (PoA)

Since the beginning, we proposed a way for users to earn APPC for the time they spend using apps. We’ve proposed that users would provide a proof of the time spent in an app — the Proof-of-Attention (PoA) — which would be validated and, if the validation held, users would receive the corresponding rewards. Moreover, users would only be able to spend these rewards for in-app purchases, thus creating a circular economy. Since the Ada Release, we have continuously improved our system making the flow simpler, safer and much more cost efficient.

When it comes to POA, we are proud to say that so far we have achieved good numbers, but we want more, and the only way to do so is to continue to work on this feature. We noticed we were having some issues with the foreground detection, so in the last few weeks, we’ve been improving the algorithm that detects if an app is in foreground or not.

Appcoins.io

The Appcoins.io site has suffered a few changes since we launched last year. The reason for this is because we are continuously trying to offer our users the best experience possible. At the moment, we have managed to translate the AppCoins official site to eight languages. Up to this point, you had to choose the language yourself, but from now on, your current language will be automatically detected by the site hence selecting the best language for you.

Following last month’s protocol KPIs performance, on this ANU we have collected the values from December, regarding both flows using AppCoins, IAP and User Acquisition, the number of apps downloaded with the integration of AppCoins as well as indicators from the SDK, as the table shows below.

KPIs performance from December 2018

2018 was a big year for the AppCoins project, between developing exciting new features and delivering several releases, we are proud to say that, in the end, we managed to overcome all of the obstacles that came our way and ended the year on a high note by ticking everything in our boxes.

We are excited to take on our plans for 2019! Stay tuned to know what’s coming!