i am VERY new to the Android platform coding, have no skills at all, but know to edit stuffs and add some basic modifications like everyone else so, however im trying to get my app to inform me about how many ppl each click.
I mean, each time when someone clicks on the ad Banner, it should send an anonymous email (without anything special in the mail, just sending it to me).
At the same time during clicking on the ad, it should both send the email without any special message and show the ad page.
I need this to know when people clicked it, because i can't track people who really says they done or not and im uncapable to trace who clicked or not.
as i said, im VERY new, so please be kind to me im not skilled at all.
Using email to do this work is a very bad idea. The answer to your question is "don't do it this way".
it's technically a poor solution - dealing with that large volume of email will likely cause all sorts of problems, both for you and for the people who are installing your app
sending email surreptitiously on behalf of your clients is considered shady, usually - you're likely to get your app marked as containing malicious code.
going around existing ad tracking interfaces and apis is often against the agreements you're normally required to sign with ad providers
the end result is likely to be not useful for you - email, in large quantities, for this kind of stuff, can be less reliable than alternatives
Instead, look into creating a service/api, and have the app call the service/api each time an ad is clicked. Most ad providing software provide an interface for hooking into the ads so you can track them.
Related
When developing Java apps used internally by users in the company I work for, I would have the app display a message such as "An issue occurred. Please contact the Help Desk and report it", when an issue occurs with the app that is being used.
Now that I am learning to develop mobile apps on my own, I am faced with the question of how best to handle app issues in this environment, since there really isn't a help desk.
My initial thought was to asynchronously call a service to log the error. But, remote communication may not be possible. Then, I thought to display an error alert with a number to contact or e-mail address to mail to report the issue. But, is that really best practice?
So, for mobile apps, what is the best practice for capturing issues or having users report them, so that they can be properly addressed and not have them become very frustrated with your app, especially if the root cause may be related to something that is out of your control, such as an issue with a godaddy server, which hosts a database used by the app?
Thanks in advance
For recording crashes, you could use Crashlytics, so that you can see the device log when that crash occurred and investigate the reasons to improve your app / prevent the crash from happening again in the future, or reaching out directly to the specific user (as you could record user id / email addr in Crashlytics) if you for instance see the app crashes for her/him repeatedly.
For issues/problems the app experienced (but it didn't crash), you can use things like Rollbar to record the incidents. You can put special logic in your app, especially places that are prone to failure, or whenever your app recognizes "an issue".
If you want to have a place in your app that users could search for FAQs, ask questions or provide feedback and concerns, you may want to use things like UserVoice to provide a central hub.
[Things aforementioned may not be free software.]
You can use Crashlytics and if you do not want to go for third party then you can read all of your logs from iOS SDK for your app,so you can go for it as well
or there is always solution with third party softwares
I have been getting some amounts between $0.2 to $0.7 debited from my final payment from AdMob ads under the title "invalid activity" in my payment details.
Yes the amounts are small but i am still worried as i have been extra careful while testing i used the test keys and i have not told any of my friends to click on my ads or have clicked on them myself.
I did have the same issue for my web-site but that was due to some bots which i black-listed in the server access files so i am no longer getting such "invalid activity" on my blog earnings
I have built my apps in Ionic Framework.
So my question is how can i detect where the invalid activity is coming from in my app and how can i prevent it.
How can i detect where the invalid activity is coming from in my app
You can check a country wise view of requests on Google Adsense at this link. You can analyze and check where major traffic is from, where clicks are from, etc.
Fore more detailed reporting use Google Analytics for Android
How can i prevent it.
There is no fixed way of how you deal with that. You will need to take steps and write algorithms in your app based on your analysis. But, I dont think that is really required. If it is an invalid activity from a third party (NOT You) Google will take corrective actions. But, if it is by You, you are in trouble and may get the app suspended or account blocked.
google doesn't provide actual invalid activity because of security reason according to google terms& conditions
I found different approaches to offer android app user the opportunity to share an app link with friends form within an app and also ask them to rate the app on google play. As I am a friend of doing things the standard way yet new to android I was wondering if there is a google recommended standard way to do this, to
ask the user of an app from within the app to rate it on google play
offer the opportunity to share a link to the app on google play from within the app via email, facebook etc with friends
Thanks buddies
UPDATE
As this was obviously not so clear, my question is mainly around the technical aspect of doing it. (other suggestions are of course also welcome)
UPDATE 2
Found
http://www.androidsnippets.com/prompt-engaged-users-to-rate-your-app-in-the-android-market-appirater
which is not exactly what I wanted but maybe useful for people stumbling over this thread. In its core it is what Budius suggested
There's really not an 'standard' way of doing it. It's a very delicate situation, I guess the 1st rule will be don't be rude or over-intrusive to your users.
Leave the share option always available on some menu and don't force your users to use it.
About rating, you could count the amount of times your app is used (or for how long) and based on that estimation pop a thing to give the user the option to rate it, but unless the user clicks "Remind me Later" do never show that message again.
edit:
based on the author comment:
nothing special code wise, to rate the app you just start an Action_VIEW to your app link (e.g. for my app)
startActivity(new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.budius.WiFiShoot")));
and for the share is the same standard share code ( http://developer.android.com/training/sharing/send.html ) just passing your app link and maybe some extra message like : "check out my awesome app!"
I ask this question expecting the answer to be 'not possible', as I have attempted to research this already and found no fruit! I thought that I would give the community a chance to weigh in however.
I have a working in-app billing system, but what I want is to be able to provide a little extra bit of infomation with the billing request. Something that would show up in my market place stats.
My users have the option of buying several different levels of product (sort of a Base, Premium and Gold-Star sort of thing). When they purchase the product they provide me with a string that represents the specific thing they want the product about (such as the house number and postcode if the product was about a house).
What I want is to be able to see that extra bit of information in my market place reports, so when I see someone who has requested a refund I can see on what exact item they purchased the product. I have looked at the DEVELOPER_PAYLOAD but I don't think that it will do what I want.
If I can't find a solution this way then I will end up performing a service call and storing the data myself, but I thought I would ask you guys first!
Sorry for being vague about my app and the products it returns but I don't want to expose my app yet (plus it holds no bearing on the question!).
EDIT
Now that I have added a bounty I would like to limit the answers. As I mentioned in my original question my backup plan will me a service call to my system registering the google reference and "data packet" for the purchase.
What I am most interested in is a way to do this where my information would end up in the my market place reports. For instance, if you were to offer a physical item with your in app purchase, how would a user record shipping instructions/etc. There is a place for this in the market reports, so surely there is a way to add the data?
You can certainly use DEVELOPER_PAYLOAD for this. However, Google doesn't process it in anyway and it won't show up in reports (not sure if they store it at all). So what you need to do is send transaction info (the JSON string you receive) to your own sever, parse it and store/process/whatever the developerPayload. You can combine this with signature verification and transaction reporting if you want to. One thing to beware of is that the size is limited to 512 bytes. If you send a request with a longer string, the whole transaction will fail, and the error message is not friendly at all ('IAB-DPTL' or some such).
Of course if you need more that this, you can simply build your own webservice and send whatever data you want. If it includes personal info, etc. make sure you let people know about it and/or they can turn it off.
In order to see this in the report, assuming you have a limited set of "dynamic" data, you would probably have to create a different set of in-app items per each "item" in your game.
Then, of course, you let the game handle which list the user sees according to the "dynamic" data.
That's the only way you would see it in the reports without your own web service handling it.
For those that may find this question via Google!
It seems that the easy answer to my question is NO. You can not add extra information to your market stats with regards to in app purchases.
As I mentioned in my question (and some answers said) the work around would be to upload the transaction string to your server and then compare it to market stats yourself (using the export function from the market perhaps).
I now intend to write a system to extract market stats (likely from the csv download feature) and match it up to the strings from the IAPs. If I ever get around to writing it I will share it with the community.
I'm thinking about putting an half-developed app idea up on Indie GoGo (worldwide variant of Kickstarter) but am considering how to handle delivery.
I need to make sure that just the right people can get the app they pledge for, do you know if there's a way to bind certain users to an app so only they can download it? I was thinking of using the e-mail of their Google account since they need one anyway.
I would then upload the same app publicly for a higher price for everybody else once it's done. If this way isn't supported, do you know how other people have solved this?
I guess it will be hard to do. But I have some ideas that you can use:
First of all if you have emails of your subscribers then you can directly send them your app.
If you want to place your application on Google Play then it's more difficult. I hope the following approach can be used. You can create a stub for your application. This stub during the run will check if a user possesses with some purchased item. If he possess then you simply start your application (inside your application you can also put this type of checks to be more difficult to crack your application). If the user does not have this item you propose him to buy it. During this you check if the user is in your list. If he is then you select one price if not then another.
These are just my thoughts. I've never implemented something similar.