iPhone marketing

Today I got an email from Facebook saying that (without warning) they have shut down the LogYourRun Facebook app.  The reason for this is that a Facebook algorithm had determined that the application was “spammy”.  This is a huge surprise to me and the thousands of users that use this app on a daily basis to brag about their exercise activities.  The application makes use of very basic Facebook stream post functionality provided by their iPhone SDK.  The post dialog, per Facebook’s terms, is not pre-filled with any information in the message field and requires the user to 1) actively enter their message and 2) press the post button.  There is nothing automated about the posting and it does not happen in the background – the user is fully aware that they are posting the activity.  The screenshot below shows an example of one of these spammy post:

The removal of this app is a huge let down since the the LogYourRun iPhone application relies on the application ID of the Facebook app in order to let people post their activity information on Facebook.  In addition to taking down the app they also took down the app’s Facebook page – so I have now lost all mode of communication with the application users and my inbox is currently getting flooded by emails from users letting me know that the app is no-longer working.

I am used to developing apps on a closed system – the iPhone – so I am used to following directions on how the user experience should be and what I can and cannot do.  For Facebook applications the terms of service is described in their Platform Policies (http://developers.facebook.com/policy).  The terms in this policy are very nebulous and include things such as “Create a great user experience” and “Be trustworthy” but does not actually define what “spammy” is – though from my albeit infrequent use of Facebook, I would think that Farmville would fit that description better than the LogYourRun application.  In addition I do not see a single term in the document that the LogYourRun app violates.  The app clearly pops up a stream.publish dialog (created using the Facebook JS library on the web or their SDK on the iPhone!) which the user can clearly decide to click post or skip.

I tried appealing the removal of the app and I must say that I appreciate that they got back to me within a couple of hours – though the reply could have easily come from the same algorithm that deleted the app (see below).  It crushed all hopes of ever reviving the app and restoring communication to the over 30K users of the app.

So now I am left with having to update the iPhone app so it does not link to the broken Facebook app.  It was surprisingly easy to setup a new application – which is probably why they need to have algorithms for taking them down also.  This will allow me to go back to being an enabler of my evil spamming users so they can once again brag about their exercise activities.

One of the little known features of the iPhone is that it actually does a great job of talking to you. The reason why it is little known is that you have to turn on the accessibility options in order to experience it – or you have to use the Voice Control – which does not work great and therefore is not used extensively. The built-in text to speech engine of the phone is not open to developers so there are no third party apps that make use of the text to speech (TTS).

In the mean time developers have to rely on shipping their apps with large bundles of mp3 or aiff files in order to get their applications to talk to the users. Or they can implement some of the online TTS engines or TTS engines made for the iPhone. The results are terrible in all cases that I have observed – if an app needs to only speak predefined words the developer will load all of these as sound files that will be downloaded with the app. This leads to bloated app bundles and wastes bandwidth and phone storage media. The iPhone TTS engines also take considerable amounts of space and if anyone has been able to understand what the app Social Radio is saying to them they deserve a medal. Then there are apps that use online TTS engines and essentially downloads the sound file on demand. This is probably more efficient and has a better result – but you need an internet connection and you will always be at the mercy of the TTS engine provider.

So Apple – please open up the great TTS engine of the iPhone to developers so we can make apps that will be able to talk to the users.

Apple iPhone 3G 16Gb (Launched July 2008) – $160
Apple iPhone 3GS 16Gb (Launched June 2009) – $335
Motorola Droid (Launched October 2009) – $79
Apple iPhone 4 16Gb (Launched June 2010) – $400 – with cracked glass

Every developer must have had at least one email that goes something like this:  “I opened the app and it did not work”.  For emails like that there is not much you can do but be patient and try to figure out exactly what the problem was.  For other emails though it may sometimes be good to know a little about the device that the person was having the problem with.  For example “The GPS says it is not working so therefore your app is junk” could be put into context by seeing that the email was sent from an iPod Touch (which does not have a GPS chip).  Also, information about the version of iOS helps with locating what the issue may be.  Finally it can be very useful to know which version of your app the person is using since they may be having a problem with an old version of the app where the problem may have been fixed in the latest version.

	MFMailComposeViewController *mail = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];
	mail.mailComposeDelegate = self;

	if ([MFMailComposeViewController canSendMail]) {

		//Setting up the Subject, recipients, and message body.
		[mail setToRecipients:[NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"YOUREMAIL.com",nil]];
		[mail setSubject: [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ iPhone Application Feedback", kTWApplicationName]];
		[mail setMessageBody:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"\n\n\nIn order for us to better help you, please provide the following information:\nCountry: \n\nDebug info:\n%@ v %@\niOS version %@\nModel: %@",
							  kTWApplicationName,
							  [[[NSBundle mainBundle] infoDictionary] objectForKey:@"CFBundleVersion"],
							  [[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion],
							  [[UIDevice currentDevice] model]

							  ] isHTML:NO];

		//Present the mail view controller
		[self presentModalViewController:mail animated:YES];
	}

	//release the mail
	[mail release];

The  TWApplicationName is a constant that is set to the string value of the application name – this allows you to also see which application your user is asking about in case you have more than one app.