Backend as a Service Blog

 It’s May 17th, 2013, and welcome to this week’s issue of The App Ecosystem Weekly. Today we’re looking at App Store and Google Play milestones, developer features announced at Google I/O, ported Android apps on BlackBerry, and TestFlight’s availability for Android devs. We took a short hiatus, but we’re back to publishing weekly roundups of interesting and thought provoking stories around the app ecosystem, app development, and the rest of the mobile world.

Welcome to our fourth installment of our “Marketing Your App” blog series. This series is a compilation of tips for marketing your app, both before and after it is launched.

“The revolution will not be televised.” With those simple words, great soul and jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron reminded us that things are changing and changing fast. As he once explained, “That song was about your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move…The thing that’s going to change people will be something that no one will ever be able to capture on film. It will just be something you see and all of a sudden you realize ‘I’m on the wrong page.’”

This week, Google is holding its annual developer conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco, CA.  This event is Google’s biggest of the year, and outlines the direction that Google is pushing developers over the next year. Here are some ways you can benefit and learn from the conference, even if you’re unable to attend.

In order to make designing for your target platforms easier, we made a cheat sheet for both iOS and Android Human Interface Guidelines (HIGs). It gives a high level summary of the User Interface, how to support multiple screen sizes, icon sizes, and touch gestures so that you don’t have to dig through the books to find them every time you need them. It also allows you to see the subtle differences between the platforms.

Everyone in the tech scene knows there’s a fundamental difference between West Coast and East Coast startups. Play-it-loose West Coast startups skew consumer tech, while their buttoned-up East Coast counterparts are generally focused on the media, finance and healthcare industries and selling to the enterprise. As seen on our Boston Startup Map, there are plenty of East Coast startups with West Coast style here in Boston.

Our friends at Tracky, an open social collaboration platform, are hosting the first-ever hackathon for those who work in the communications industry. The hackathon, called #CommHacks, is seeking the best #workhacks created that simplify or improve frequently used tasks by communications professionals. Unlike many hackathons, you do not need to be a developer or engineer to participate. #CommHacks runs […]

You don’t need an Apple-like budget to create an Apple-like launch. You need a great product, a multi-channel mindset, and a bit of moxie. You also need to think as creatively about marketing as you did for the app itself.

The mobile landscape is changing at a pace that can seem breakneck to outsiders. In the early days of mobile development, a few select players could create mobile applications. As the tools of development became democratized, creative agencies and development studios could enter a massive market and reach consumers on personal devices like never before.

Android apps are typically written as Java classes. That source code is then compiled into bytecode that the Dalvik engine (a subset of a Java Virtual Machine) runs under the Android operating system. These steps describe how to acquire and configure the tools you need to write your app’s Java classes and then test and package the app for deployment.