SlideScreen released!

by Matt Hall on Android /

A couple rewrites and 17 beta versions later, our home screen replacement SlideScreen is finally live in the Android Market! If you haven’t read about the app before check out the product page to see what it’s about, or read our original blog post about the ideas behind the design. The reviews have started coming in and they’re really positive, we’re excited! You can read more at TechCrunch, AndroidGuys and a detailed post at These Are the Droids.

Here’s the first release feature set:

• Realtime notification for phone calls, voicemail, SMS, GMail and Calendar appointments.
• Periodic syncing with Google Reader, Google Finance and Twitter.
• Current weather conditions.
• App chooser with custom shortcuts.
• Automatic sign-in and sync for all Google services, no password required.
• Google Reader features: In app customized viewer with share, and synced mark as read support.
• Twitter features: Twidroid integration, share, retweet and reply.

And here’s what we’re working on next:

• Multiple account support for email and twitter.
• More types of email account support (exchange, pop, etc.)
• More features for news and twitter reading to make it easier to navigate between items.
• Top ideas voted for over at the support site.

If you’re on an Android phone tap here to download the app. Everyone else can check out videos and screenshots at the product page.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in and commented on our original design – it was your enthusiasm that convinced us to finish it.

Update: Gizmodo reviewed SlideScreen calling it “one of the most polished Android apps I’ve ever seen, it’s also in itself an argument for how great Android can be.” Read the full review here.

Update: Lifehacker says it “provides way more information on messages, weather, calendar events, Twitter or RSS streams, stocks, and whatever else you want, in a slick-looking black wrapper.” Full review is here.

Home Screen Beta Signup Now Live

by Matt Hall on Uncategorized /

The beta signup page is now live for our home screen, refresh the product page or go straight to the form.

We’re going to take a relatively small group of testers to start, but hope to expand quickly from there – so don’t get discouraged if you don’t hear from us right away. We’re hoping to send out the first version to testers later this week.

Intelligent Home Screen Demo and Beta

by Matt Hall on Android /

If you want to see our Intelligent Home Screen in action, we’re going to be demoing it at the NY Tech Meetup this Tuesday. It’s a big and exciting meeting (the last time I was there I heard Dan Bricklin speak) so hopefully we’ll find some like minded people there.

The other big news is we’ll also start the private beta signup that day as well, with the first release coming a few days after signup opens. I’m not sure how many people we’re going to take into the beta at first, we’re looking to start with a small group with a good distribution of phones then expand from there. Next step after that will be an open beta via the Android Market, and we’ll know more about the timing of that in a week or two.

If anyone makes it out on Tuesday be sure to say hi!

October Update

by Matt Hall on Android / LarvaLabs /

Sorry about the lack of posts this month, things got busy and the updates suffered. So I’ll try to get everything in this one update.

Android Market Sales

Since our last post on Android sales numbers the new market client in Android 1.6 has rolled out to most users (we think). The new client prominently features the top paid apps, and allows for two screen shots. Our game Battle for Mars has been on the first screen of top paid games, or just off of it for most of the month. We definitely thought this would make a big difference since it’d now be one of the first games people would see when going to the market. In percentage terms it has made a big difference, we’ve seen a roughly 50% increase in sales! The bad news is that’s a 50% increase on not-so-good. So we’re up around ~$90 a day now it looks like. That isn’t super encouraging, but we’re still optimistic in general (as you’ll see in the next section). However, there remain some serious problems with the market that we hope get addressed soon:

• 325 character app description limit
• Applications inexplicably missing for some customers: Example support thread or look at these sad support search results. We get asked questions like this all the time in support emails, we can’t figure out what’s wrong.
• Download failures. There’s several super long support threads about this that I’m too depressed about to go find.
• Refunds (to a lesser extent). Here’s an example user comment on a game made by a friend of ours: “Great game, loved it. Beat it in an hour – refund.” The game is $2.99. As John said, that’s similar to hearing “Loved that movie, it was $12 but only 2 hours so I decided not to pay. Loved it though.”

We’re working on updating our games to support higher screen resolutions. The Android SDK support for this is pretty impressive, so hopefully we’ll have things working soon. Also, I want a Droid, so I have some incentive to make things work well. If the Verizon or Motorola CEOs are reading this (they definitely are) please send us several free phones. Also, I need to borrow (all of) the corporate jet(s).

Home Screen

Despite the less-than-stellar sales numbers, we’ve decided to finish our home screen as a product for eventual release in the market. After all the great feedback we got we really wanted to see it through. There are a couple compromises required to be able to release it as a market application, mainly relating to the system status bar, but I think we’ve figured out a way to make it work. As far as a release date, that’s definitely still undecided. We’ll post updates here as we get closer. We probably will want a new name for the project as well, if you have any suggestions please post them in the comments.

Update: I made it a little more clear that the home screen isn’t available in the market yet.

Android Home Screen Design (with Video)

by Matt Hall on Android /

(If you want to skip the details below, you can go straight to the video and features list on the product page).

In previous posts we’ve talked about how, despite some growing pains, we thought Android looked very interesting as a phone platform in the medium to long term. That’s definitely starting to take shape with recent handset announcements showing how UI innovation can be done on top of Android.

However, none of the designs so far seem to provide quite what we’re looking for in a phone interface. Hoping that there are other people out there like us, we’ve teamed up with our friends at Ideas on Purpose to show what our ideal home screen would look like. After several iterations we ended up with this:

The main idea is to separate your personal information from things of general interest. So, emails, phone calls and things directed specifically at you go above the status bar, while feeds and public information go below. Then, depending on the situation, you can drag the status bar up or down to indicate what type of information you’re more interested in. The newest entries of each type are prioritized in the layout, so you always see the most recent items possible given the space provided. The video on the product details page shows this in action.

There are a few principles and ideas that led us to this design:

• The home screen of your phone should strive to show you as much relevant information as possible.
• The interface to accomplish this should be information centric, as opposed to application centric. The iPhone is the current best case example of an application centric interface. Almost the entire screen is taken up with beautiful icons that tell you next to nothing. Rather than a number on an icon showing me how many new emails I have, I’d rather see some of those emails.
• The existing Android design with various widgets on a home screen is visually distracting from the purpose of those widgets: quick access to information. We wanted a uniform look to allow an increase in information density without overwhelming the user.
• Apply color coding across the entire interface to allow visual grouping of information by type. This also allows for higher information density by providing underlying structure and consistent cues to the user.

This project exists as a prototype and is currently the home screen for my phone. Being a prototype it has lots of bugs, but it seems to prove (at least to me) that the design works. This project is also an example of some of the strengths of Android as a platform. The access to information made available by system apps is truly outstanding. Not to mention the ability to have a 3rd party app become the home screen without low level changes to the OS is pretty amazing.

You can find further details, including a video of the interface in action, on the product page (the video is also on youtube) . There is also a PDF summary of the features that’s suitable for printing. And thanks again to Ideas on Purpose for taking our terrible drawings and turning them into something beautiful.

New iPhone App: CoverMosaic

by Matt Hall on iPhone /

I’m struggling not to use exclamation points here, because I think our latest app is pretty awesome. It’s called CoverMosaic and it recreates any photo using album art on your iPhone or iPod. I urge you to check out the video, it’s really the best way to see what the app can do. Also, I spent way more time than I should have on the video.  Please help me justify it to myself in some way.

Here’s the full feature list:

• Turn any photo into a collage made from your album art
• Build a color sorted image of all of your albums to show your friends what’s on your iPod
• Choose one of 12 included designs to make cool patterns out of your albums
• Post to twitter, send via email, save to gallery
• Automatically plays the most used album in the photo during processing
• Amazing animated interface – zoom in to see individual albums and scroll around, then zoom back out to see overall progress

Take a look at the screenshots below, or just go check it out in iTunes. Here’s what it looks like when posting to twitter: all my albums, a cool pattern, another cool pattern. Post your best creations to twitter with #covermosaic or @larvalabs and I’ll link them here.

Interview on the NewsHour

by Matt Hall on Android / LarvaLabs / Sidekick / iPhone /

Our company was interviewed as part of a larger piece on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. We didn’t get a ton of airtime, but it was definitely cool to be on the show. The only problem with the piece is they said I wrote all our apps, sorry about that John! For the record John wrote at least half the apps and should have gotten way more credit.

You can watch the piece below, we’re about halfway through. The transcript is available here.

Android Market Sales Follow-Up

by John Watkinson on Android / iPhone /

We have received a lot of interesting feedback from our post regarding the poor overall sales in the Android market to date. Here is a follow-up on some of the comments:

Market Overhaul

It is encouraging to see some early screenshots of what appears to be a significant Android Market Overhaul. Most notably, there is a “Top Paid” category selectable on the main page (and presumably the default). It is possible to get to the paid-only apps in the Market now, but it requires some tricky navigation through a submenu. We suspect that very few users have found it. The default view is of all apps, but of course the unpaid apps dominate the list almost entirely. If users are unable to find the paid apps, they may arrive at the conclusion that all the apps in the Market are of relatively low quality.

However, it is demoralizing to see in this update that the currency is still tied to the developer’s location rather than the customer’s. There have been arguments that this is somehow a legal requirement, but Apple has gotten around this for iTunes, so it must be possible. Something has to be done– users should not have to do their own currency conversion when buying inexpensive “impulse-buy” apps!

Finally, it remains to be seen if screenshots are supported in this update. We sure hope so!

Credit Card Billing

There was some argument over the differences between billing in iTunes vs. the Market. Both accounts require a credit card, but iTunes is more flexible. There are gift cards and other ways to cap and control the spending of, say, a child’s account. The Android Market is less flexible– each purchase is a separate credit card charge– just like buying a sofa, as Matt mentioned. The credit card charge can even be denied without informing the user properly. It can also be disputed by the purchaser, resulting in expensive chargeback costs to the developer that are often even larger than the original purchase price of the app! While it is true that Apple started the App Store with a significant advantage over Google and others (with its enormous base of iTunes music subscribers), it still seems reasonable for Google to improve the Market purchasing experience.

Refunds and Piracy

The Android Market has an extraordinarily lax refund policy. Apps can be returned for a full refund within 24-48 hours. The official limit is 24 hours, but it seems possible to refund an app within up to two days in some cases. This would make sense for expensive, involved productivity apps; if the user is unsatisfied with the product, paid good money for it but won’t be using it, then a refund is warranted. However, for many fun apps and simple games, the user isn’t expected to get more than a day or so of use out of it. Note that these simple/fun apps are still a completely valid thing for which to charge money! They still require effort to develop and fill an important niche for users. For example, if my plane is delayed and I get a solid two hours of enjoyment from a $3 jumpy game, I shouldn’t be able to refund it 24 hours later. Compare to a movie; it costs $10 at least for a measly 2 hours of entertainment, no refunds! The result of this policy is that an entire category of apps and games (many that do very well in the iTunes App Store) are not valid on Android from a business perspective. Many developers report a >50% return rate, while still maintaining high ratings in the Market, suggesting that users are just getting their fun out of the apps without paying for them. Our return rate is fairly modest at ~16%, but we have purposely avoided apps that may be susceptible to higher return rates.

Piracy is another problem. The iPhone has its own piracy scene with jail-broken phones, but extraordinary effort and maintenance is required, relegating jail-broken users to a minority. On Android, the user must simply flip a switch in the settings to enable the installation of apps from other sources, then download apps from torrents, etc. It is unclear how many sales are lost due to piracy, but this could be a contributing factor to the low Market sales.

Thanks again for all the comments and feedback!

Android Market Sales, Are Those Tears or is it Raining in Here?

by Matt Hall on Android / iPhone /

There’s been a lot of speculation lately about the size of the Apple App Store, most recently based on some numbers from AdMob which are summarized over at GigaOM. They came to the conclusion that the app store is worth $200M monthly, whereas the Android market is worth a paltry $5M. As sad as that comparison may be, from our experience the total is probably much lower.

To back that up a bit, we’re going to release our latest Android sales data. Before we do, let’s list some of the shortcomings currently plaguing the Android Market:

• No screenshots (Totally insane. No idea why.)
• 325 character application description maximum (Why do I get 4.208 × 10^-8 of my free GMail storage to convince people to buy the app I just spent months developing? That number is correct because I used Google to calculate it, they have hundreds of computers and usually store huge amounts of data.)
• Google checkout only way to buy (Lots of users don’t have credit cards, or don’t want to use their credit card to make an impulse buy. Google checkout really isn’t set up for selling apps on the market, it basically treats everything sold like a sofa. They notify you of every cancelled order, you provide first line purchase support, etc.)
• Hard to find paid apps (We suspect Google would rather just have everything be free since they default most views in the catalog to free apps, or top downloaded apps which means free apps. The option to show paid apps is buried in a submenu.)
• Various intermittent problems like failed or stalled downloads, credit card verification delays that look like stalled downloads, and other problems. These problems have been improving since the launch of the catalog, but they still make up a good percentage of our support email.

Our two best selling games have been ranked and are currently ranked pretty highly on that hard to find list of paid apps. RetroDefense was #1 for a while and is currently around #12 with a perfect 5 star rating. Battle for Mars is currently #5 overall with a 4.5 star rating. Both of these games are selling for $4.99, which is on the upper end of the price range. Finally, both of these games have been featured by Google in the market app and on the Android website. So with all this in mind, here’s our daily Android sales for this August (these numbers include sales from our other two apps, but they barely register):

That’s a $62.39 daily average. Very difficult to buy the summer home at this rate.

It appears this isn’t just our problem. To see examples from other companies just look in the market, a sales range is listed right in the summary of the app. A good example is the well known game Trism, which sold over $250,000 in it’s first two months on the iPhone. On Android it has sold, to date, less than 500 copies. That’s $1,046 total earnings, max. How psyched are those guys that they ported a huge hit to Android and can’t even cover a party sub for the release dinner? By comparison, if you were an iPhone developer with a game in the #5 spot, you’d likely be earning around $3,500 a day (based on recent numbers from tap tap tap). Here’s what that comparison looks like in a gratuitous graph:

So let’s imagine for a moment that we’re a typical Android developer in terms of earnings, even though I think it’s more likely we’re on the high end of the curve. Assuming we are the average though, there would need to be over 2,500 other Android developers to get to $5M total sales. The last estimates I heard put the number of applications at around 12,000, so there’s probably around 4,000 developers total. That means over half of the developers need to be earning what we do to reach $5M a month. However, we know from experience that below position 25 on the top selling games the earnings drop off to almost zero so it’s very unlikely that anyone below that position is earning much money at all.

I should add that even though these numbers are pretty disappointing and currently don’t represent a viable business, we’re still excited about Android in the medium to long term. There’s been some talk from Google of improvements to the market, including more payment options, so that will definitely help. We’re also going to see some big phone releases from Motorola among others, but the main issue just seems to be the market itself and it’s low purchase rate (19% vs. 50% on iPhone). I’m sure Android will be on a lot of phones at some point in the future, whether it’ll be possible to target it profitably as a small developer I’m not sure.

Follow us on Twitter

by Matt Hall on LarvaLabs /

Just a quick note to suggest you follow us on our new Twitter account: @larvalabs

It’s where we’ll post things like:

• News about app updates (like the recent Battle for Mars and RetroDefense map additions)
• Upcoming apps (like CoverMosaic submitted to Apple)
• iTunes promo codes (upcoming)

Now we’ve got a blog and a twitter account, truly we are masters of the internet.