2018 has been an incredible busy year for AppCoins, full of challenges and opportunities, new developments and exciting features. It has been an unbelievable journey since we launched the AppCoins ICO, published the white paper, built a strong community on Telegram and Bitcointalk, and reached the hard cap 3 weeks before the ending date, just a little over a year ago.

Since the very beginning, our vision for AppCoins has been to provide developers a transparent and efficient way to monetize their apps across app stores; provide users a trusted environment with 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.

In order to achieve our very ambitious goal of improving the app economy, we relied on a strong team of over 90 people across the world to help us grasp and identify the different challenges and opportunities in the implementation of the AppCoins Protocol. One year ago, we had a project, a set of ideas and many doubts. Today, we have a sturdy, secure and transparent billing solution that promotes a circular economy where everyone benefits for being apart of it.

Throughout the year we worked around the clock to release a number of new features and updates to keep our community involved and engaged with the project. We understand the trust it takes to give a blockchain-based protocol project a go and we are grateful that you gave us that chance.

Before we dive head first into the new year, we’d like to take the opportunity to look back at the one we’re leaving behind. Here’s a recap of some of the most important achievements of 2018:

In-app Purchases

In this flow our main focus was to make the payment process as simple as possible for both users and developers. On one hand, after setting up the wallet, users now only have to perform one step to conclude the payment, and can use four different payment methods: credit card, APPC, PayPal and APPC Credits. On the other hand, in order to integrate our billing system, developers only have to build an url to enable users to pay for in-app items with One-Step Payment, the easiest way in the industry to include payments in mobile. It is that simple!

Even though we worked on different features and implemented a bunch of them, there was still a big challenge that we needed to tackle: scalibility. Since we use blockchain as a source of truth, we were limited to 15 transactions per second, which was a huge obstacle for us. To solve this, our team created a second layer infrastructure that is capable of processing thousands of transactions per second while still registering everything in the blockchain.

Step-by-step tutorial of how the AppCoins BDS Wallet works.

User Acquisition

A big challenge we aim to solve with AppCoins is to allow users to earn coins by paying attention to apps for a certain amount of time. We believe this flow is what sets AppCoins apart, as it embodies what circular economy really is.

With the implementation of the protocol in Aptoide and with the creation of the AppCoins BDS Wallet, we saw the very first real use case of getting rewards for using mobile apps. Users can now earn APPC Credits without having to use any Ether, that they can later use to buy their favourite in-app items. Today, it is possible for both users and developers to earn and monetise with real APPC, respectively, making it possible for users to be included in the revenue share, as opposed to what happened in the past.

Gamification

To increase the added value of the AppCoins Protocol for both developers and users, and to incentivize and boost user adoption, we’ve also developed a gamification system that aims to reward the most active users. The team worked on a new feature in the AppCoins BDS Wallet that enables users to get a bonus of up to 30% in APPC Credits for each purchase they make to spend on in-app-purchases. In this case, the more transactions the merrier, as the user gets more bonuses the more he spends. This system is pretty new so expect more development here. You can also follow the progress of the ecosystem on APPC Explorer.

A video showing how the User Incentives Program works.

You can watch a step by step tutorial here and get APPC Credits on the AppCoins BDS Wallet.

Partnerships

The partnership with Unity was crucial for AppCoins as 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. This means that the AppCoins billing integration will be automatic to all Unity developers, similarly to other existing billing solutions provided by Unity. All developers will be able to get a version of the game that will automatically and immediately be available for distribution in the Aptoide App Store, Cherry Mobile and Multilaser.

Developers & OEM Integrations

2018 was the year we put the plan into action and started integrating with three App Stores with a potential of reaching over 200M users with Aptoide App Store, Cherry Mobile and Multilaser.

Throughout 2018, the team also managed to grow the portfolio of developers and apps with the APPC IAP SDK to 60 developers and over 100 apps, respectively.

In an effort to work along with our community and contribute to the success of the project, we knew we had to be as transparent as possible. Transparency didn’t just make good ethical sense; it made good business sense, too. So, during Q3 2018, the team started working on appcexplorer.io, which currently shows what is happening in the APPC ecosystem and opens the doors into all transactions, purchases, and bonus attribution happening within AppCoins.