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1. App Of The Week: Shifu (Android only) They say you never know what a huge difference having a good exec assistant can make to your productivity until you get one. Getting Shifu is like that. Suddenly you will find you are getting more done, living a little bit more.

2. Here are some common mistakes app developers make with the Freemium model. These mistakes are about making the wrong assumptions about LTV, CPI and ad networks. What created success for another freemium app may not work for yours, and this is a really good explanation of why blindly copying freemium growth strategies often leads to failure. Five common freemium app marketing mistakes

3. Freemium is about large scale distribution, and data-driven monetization. This is a great article on what makes freemium businesses succeed. We are strong proponents of freemium in the app business ourselves, and we call ourselves “data science for freemium”. Freemium works if 4 conditions are met

4. The most important trick in Freemium is getting the balance between the Free and the Paid stuff right. Here is an old, prescient post from Seth Godin about the inevitability of freemium, and how to think about what to give for free, and what to charge for. Flipping abundance and scarcity

5. Design: Make your primary actions obvious and visible, especially in mobile forms. Here is some data and tips on what works well and what doesn’t, when designing input forms for the mobile. Hint: what looks good doesn’t necessarily work as good. (4 min video) How to Communicate Primary Actions

6. How we discover Apps and Games is broken. Here is one way to fix it. The pain is something that both users and app developers feel, strongly. This interesting article talks about a few ways to make discovery easier, and social seems to be the best answer so far. Also buried in there are some interesting games that the author discovered. Friending the App Store

7. Avoid Cost-per-Install ads to get users for your app. Here is an interesting report that shows how expensive mobile ads have become, and how developers are getting squeezed in user acquisition. NativeX, Fiksu, Chartboost, Flurry and AdColony are cited as the most preferred. Study: 9K apps and 397M users show cost-per-install is the worst mobile user acquisition method

8. App Store Optimization depends on using the right keywords, and you need to keep evaluating and tweaking your App Store page. This article from AppAnnie contains a quick 3 min video of how to use AppAnnie to do some basic keyword optimization (you can safely ignore the rest of the text in the article). How To: Optimize Your Keyword Strategy for Your News App

9. Gamification is just a fancy term for basic applied psychology, and it works outside of games too. Not unsurprisingly. Here are some examples of some retail apps successfully doing what games have known forever. Check out what tactics they used, and how it performed: Think Outside the Box: Gamification Gives a Boost to Retail Apps

10. For the first time, another device has beat the iPhone on App Usage. This is a big deal, proving that Android phones can be a meaningful competitor to the iPhone. Fascinating report from Flurry on how Xiaomi’s phone is doing on engagement, and its demographic. Xiaomi Brings Apple’s Magic to China‘s Young Business Professionals (…and to Android)

11. In-App Purchases are getting noticed by various government bodies. This time, it’s South Korea. They want to make app refunds, even for IAPs, more consumer friendly. Expect other countries to follow suit soon. Here’s what they require apps to do. South Korea makes it easier to get refunds for Android and iOS apps

12. Do you know what permissions the SDK you are integrating in your app is asking for? Do you know whether it is fine to let the SDK do that? The first interaction a new user has with your app is giving it permissions for various functions on their device. Here’s a chart of what permissions the popular SDKs need. Permissions in Mobile Ad SDKs

13. Many of the top apps in China are foreign apps. Here is a report of those apps, and the app ecosystem there. A useful read, especially if you’d like to know about one of the biggest markets in the developing world. China App Index