This is a hand-curated newsletter bringing you the best reads from last week on everything about the mobile app ecosystem. Please help us spread the word, and forward this email to your friends; share it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

1. App Of The Week: Copy Bubble (Android only) CopyBubble lets you copy text and images as you browse through your phone, and saves them into separate clipboards. You can later choose individual items to paste or share. It is a floating app so you can always directly access it. As multi-tasking on mobile does not come naturally, letting apps float is a powerful UX feature (on Android).

2. Garmin’s navigation app moves towards Freemium. Last week SwiftKey went from paid to freemium. This week Garmin dropped the $30 price tag to a mere $1. They are leveraging in-app paid upgrades and optimizing their user funnels to drive revenue for them. We think this is a smart move from Garmin, as the economics of the freemium model have been proven many times. Talk to us if your app is freemium, or planning to go freemium, and if you want to leverage data to make freemium work for you. Garmin’s new app lowers the price of premium navigation

3. 9 Best Practices for App Monetization. The first one is most important: Start Early. Every app and its audience is different. Some trial and error is needed to find its monetization sweet spot. And it is best to do that before driving significant installs to the app. The next most important one is the last one on the list: “Track, Analyze, Research, and Optimize”. Read the full piece at: Best Practices For App Monetization

4. Choosing an Ad Network for your app? Here are 5 important factors to consider. Fill rates, eCPM and user experience are the top 3 of the 5. Fill rates vary by geography for any ad network, so make sure they are high for the dominant geography of your audience. The complete list: How to choose a good mobile ad network

5. Design for use with one thumb. 49% of users use their mobiles with one thumb (the complete breakdown is in the article). A simple way to design for this is to not let the keyboard come up. This article has UI strategies for how you can do so. It also advocates designing user flows that focus only on one task. NDC Oslo 2014 – Takeaways from keynote “It’s a write/read web”

6. iOS8’s App Extensions will have the biggest, most visible impact to the app ecosystem. Last week, we suggested App Extensions be the first deep dive for any app developer, amongst the myriad of WWDC announcements. This week, Ars Technica agrees with us. It does a deep dive for you into App Extentions: how they work, touch points with your app, security and privacy, and comparison with Android’s Intents. This article is an absolute must-read. Explaining iOS 8’s extensions: Opening the platform while keeping it secure

7. In the News app category, 75% of downloads are on Android but 80% of the revenue is on iOS. If you are in the news business, you might want different strategies for Android and iOS. We covered Reuters digital news report last week. This week follows it up with some more data: AppAnnie Index For General & Business News

8. Apple’s HealthKit looks like yet another way to keep its high-end customers loyal. Jared Sinclair is a Registered Nurse who switched to iOS app development – a very unique combination of skills that are most apt for a fair assessment of HealthKit. Unfortunately, it seems HealthKit cannot have much impact to professional healthcare delivery because it is limited to iPhone owners and can only model a tiny fraction of medical data. With these constraints, EHR vendors will not be willing to undertake large changes to their legacy systems for a few niche use cases. Healthy Skepticism – My Critique of HealthKit as Both iOS Dev and Registered Nurse

9. In contrast to the item above, Health & Fitness iOS apps are taking off. Perhaps this is how the high-end iOS customers stay loyal. Here are some interesting stats from Flurry: Health & Fitness apps have grown at 2x the rate of the overall app ecosystem. The predominant audience of these apps tend to be mothers, in the 25-54 age group, who lead healthy lifestyles. Health and Fitness Apps Finally Take Off, Fueled by Fitness Fanatics

10. The trend of “unbundling” apps continues: LinkedIn this time. Some weeks ago we talked about how unbundling apps into separate focussed apps for every task was found to be a successful strategy. Facebook broke out its chat functionality into Messenger. Foursquare created Swarm solely for check-ins. Google Drive has different apps for Docs and Sheets for creating & editing. LinkedIn has just launched a separate app for job searches. It seems users don’t mind downloading many apps, as long as each app makes it simple and quick to do one specific thing. LinkedIn Unveils New App Dedicated to Job Searches

11. Amazon launched a new phone called Fire Phone. Inbetween WWDC and Google IO, this is probably a minor event this year. We’re pretty sure you’ve already been inundated with stories covering specs and features, so we’ll point you to an interesting write-up by NYT’s Farhad Manjoo on where Amazon missed making a difference: Amazon Fire Phone’s Missed Opportunities

12. Google has a “Mobile Playbook” targeted at “busy executives”. Even if you aren’t a “busy executive”, but are an entrepreneur / intrapreneur / salesperson trying to convince someone of the importance of a mobile strategy, this is a handy piece of content (best practices, case studies, etc) to pass around. And what Google says certainly holds weight. The playbook is not new, we have to admit, but we have found it fairly useful recently, so we’re sharing it with you too. The Mobile Playbook: The Busy Executive’s Guide To Winning With Mobile