Google’s Launchpad Accelerator successfully takes off. Apply to join the June class.

Posted by Roy Glasberg Global Lead, Launchpad Program & Accelerator

Last month, 24 promising startups from India, Indonesia, and Brazil came to Silicon Valley to participate in Google’s Launchpad Accelerator, a new program that provides late-stage startups (mobile apps) with mentoring and resources to successfully scale in their local economies.

During the intensive two-week Accelerator kickoff in our Mountain View headquarters, Google engineers from 11 product areas, as well as experts from other companies, were on hand to provide startups with mentorship on how to scale and monetize their apps, and ultimately, build successful businesses. Now back in their home countries, the teams will continue developing their products with the support of up to $50,000 in equity-free funding, six more months of ongoing mentorship, and a breadth of developer tools from the Launchpad Accelerator program.

So far, many startup participants have already seen an immediate impact. Two weeks after attending the kickoff event, Brazilian mobile game developer UpBeat Games was featured on Google Play and saw a 1,000% increase in app installations in Asia, as well as a 200% overall increase in active users, by leveraging analytics to better understand their users.

According to UpBeat Games founder Vinicius Heimbeck, “By working one-on-one with the mentors, we learned that we needed to be a data-driven company. We now have the right analytics tools to measure the results of our efforts and to learn from them to optimize the user experience. This all directly impacted our huge success once we were featured on Google Play.”

eFishery, an Indonesian startup that produces smart automated fish feeders, turned its focus on scaling since attending Launchpad Accelerator. “The mentors gave us great insight about how to build a scalable product and how to engage billions of users,” said co-founder and CEO Gibran Chuzaefah Amsi El Farizy. “We received both technical and practical advice on our business, from building back-end technology to embracing failure with the right mindset.”

Apply now for Launchpad Accelerator
We are also excited to announce the second class for Launchpad Accelerator which will begin in June 2016.

If you are a startup from India, Indonesia, Brazil, or Mexico (a new addition!) and are interested in participating in the next wave, we encourage you to apply here by March 31. We expect to continue adding more countries to the program in the future, so be on the lookout!

Project Tango workshops help bring indoor location apps to life

Posted by Eitan Marder-Eppstein, Developer Engineering Lead, Project Tango

GPS helps us find our way outside whether it is turn by turn navigation to the nearest grocery or just getting us oriented in a new city. But once we get indoors, it is not quite as easy - GPS doesn't work, with accuracy dropping and navigation becoming all but impossible. This is one of the reasons why we started Project Tango, which has centimeter-scale accuracy of a device’s location, allowing better navigation and experiences in indoor spaces.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been collecting amazing ideas from around the world for great apps for Lenovo’s Project Tango-powered phone. (Have an idea? If you can dream it, you can submit it!) As part of this program we're hosting workshops, focused on specific Tango features. And we just wrapped up a session that we hosted with Westfield Labs devoted to indoor location. Here are some of the highlights:

As you can see, everyone from retail brands to robot startups joined in on the fun—using Project Tango's motion tracking, depth perception, and area learning capabilities to build some amazing location-based apps. Some of our favorites included:

• Wayfair made it possible to look through your phone and visualize how a piece of furniture would look in your home.


• Lowe’s Innovation Labs improved in-store navigation by overlaying directions to individual items
  


• And Aisle411 created a shop-along experience with some of your favorite celebrities

The next stop in our series is a utilities workshop, where we'll be going deep on getting things done with Project Tango—like taking 3D measurements, or mapping your home or building. In the meantime, keep submitting your ideas to the App Incubator (the deadline is February 15!), and we'll see you soon!

How Fabulous and Yummly grew with App Invites

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Introduced in May 2015, App Invites is an out-of-the-box solution for conducting app referrals and encouraging sharing. So far, we’ve seen very positive results on how the feature improves app discovery. While 52 percent of users discover apps by word of mouth, we have seen 92 percent of users trust recommendations from family and friends with App Invites. In this post, we’ll share some success stories from companies that have already used App Invites to grow their user base.

Fabulous is a research-based app incubated in Duke University's Center for Advanced Hindsight. The app helps users to embark on a journey to resetting poor habits, replacing them with healthy rituals, with the ultimate goal of improving health and well-being.

Users started taking advantage of App Invites within the app to share their experience with their friends and family. App Invites installs now account for 60 percent of all Fabulous installs via referrals. Sharing clicks also increased by 10 percent once App Invites were used. Fabulous also noticed increased user retention, with 2x the Life Time Value of the app for users that came in to it via App Invites. Fabulous simplified their user experience, combining SMS and email into a single interface, allowing users to focus on sharing.

Additionally, users that were acquired via App Invites versus other channels were found to be twice as likely to stay with the app.

CTO of Fabulous, Amine Laddhari, commented, “It took me only a few hours to implement App Invites versus several days of work when we built our own solution. It was straightforward!”

You can view the full case study from Fabulous here.

Yummly, a food discovery platform that views cooking a meal as a personalized, shareable experience wanted to expand its user base and generate awareness on the Android platform. It added App Invites so that users could recommend the app to their family and friends, giving functionality to share specific recipes, dinner ideas or shipping lists.

With App invites, they found that installation rates were about 60 percent higher compared to other sharing channels. Additionally, Yummly was able to take advantage of the seamless integration of Google Analytics. It’s the only share channel that has this integration, allowing data such as the number of invites sent, accepted and resulting installs to be accurately tracked.

Melissa Guyre, Product Manager at Yummly, commented, “The App Invites Integration process was seamless. A bonus feature is the excellent tracking tie-in with Google Analytics.”

You can view the full case study from Yummly here.

App Invites is available for Android or iOS, and you can learn how you can build it into your own apps at g.co/appinvites.

An updated app guide and new video tips to help you find success on Google Play

Posted by Dom Elliott, The Google Play Apps & Games team

Last year, we introduced our first playbook for developers, “The Secrets to App Success on Google Play”, to help you grow your app or game business, which has been downloaded more than 200,000 times.. Many new features have since been announced on the platform – from Store Listing Experiments and beta testing improvements to App Invites and Smart Lock for Passwords.

Get the second edition of “The Secrets to App Success on Google Play”

Hot off the press, you can now download the second edition to learn about all the new tools and best practices for improving the quality of your app, growing a valuable audience, increasing engagement and retention, and earning more revenue.

Get the book on Google Play in English now or you can sign-up to be notified when the booklet is released in the following languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, español (Latinoamérica), le français, português do Brasil, tiếng Việt, русский язы́к, ไทย, 한국어, 中文 (简体), 中文 (繁體), 日本語. Based on your feedback, the guide was updated to work seamlessly in the Google Play Books app. If you prefer, you can also download a PDF version from the Android Developers website.

New videos with tips to find success on Google Play

To accompany the guide, watch the first two episodes in a new ten-part video series of actionable tips you can start using today to achieve your business objectives. Subscribe to the Android Developers channel on YouTube and follow +Android Developers to watch the new videos as they’re released weekly.

Two new videos will be released each week in the ten-part series


on the Android Developer YouTube channel.

Let us know your feedback

Once you’ve checked out the guide and the videos, we’d again love to hear your feedback so we can continue to improve our developer support, please let us know what you think.

Introducing the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree

Originally posted on Google Developers Blog

Posted by Shanea King-Roberson, Program Manager

As a developer, writing your app is important. But even more important is getting it into the hands of users. Ideally millions of users. To that end, you can now learn what it takes to design, validate, prototype, monetize, and market app ideas from the ground up and grow them into a scalable business with the new Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree.

Designed by Google in partnership with Udacity, the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree, takes 4-7 months to complete. We have teamed up with most successful thought leaders in this space to provide students with a unique and battle-tested perspective. You’ll meet Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm”, Pete Koomen, co-founder of Optimizely; Aaron Harris and Kevin Hale, Partners at Y-Combinator; Nir Eyal, author of the book “Hooked: How to build habit forming products” and co-founder of Product Hunt; Steve Chen, Co-Founder of YouTube, rapid prototyping company InVision and many more.

All of the content that make up this nanodegree is available online for free at udacity.com/google. In addition, Udacity provides paid services, including access to coaches, guidance on your project, help staying on track, career counseling, and a certificate when you complete the nanodegree.

The Tech Entrepreneur offering will consist of the following courses:

• Product Design: Learn Google’s Design Sprint methodology, Ideation & Validation, UI/UX design and gathering the right metrics.


• Prototyping: Experiment with rapid-low and high-fidelity prototyping on mobile and the web using online tools.


• Monetization: Learn how to monetize your app and how to set up an effective payment funnel.


• App Marketing: Understand your market, analyze competition, position your product, prepare for launch, acquire customers and learn growth hacks.


• How to get your startup started: Find out whether you really need venture capital funding, evaluate build vs. buy, and learn simple ways to monitor and maintain your startup business effectively.

Pitch your ideas in front of Venture Capitalists

Upon completion, students will receive a joint certificate from Udacity and Google. The top graduates will also be invited to an exclusive pitch event, where they will have the opportunity to pitch their final product to venture capitalists at Google.

Support for 100MB APKs on Google Play

Posted by Kobi Glick, Google Play team


Smartphones are powerful devices that can support diverse tasks from graphically intensive games to helping people get work done from anywhere. We understand that developers are challenged with delivering a delightful user experience that maximizes the hardware of the device, while also ensuring that their users can download, install, and open the app as quickly as possible. It’s a tough balance to strike, especially when you’re targeting diverse global audiences.


To support the growing number of developers who are building richer apps and games on Google Play, we are increasing the APK file size limit to 100MB from 50MB. This means developers can publish APKs up to 100MB in size, and users will see a warning only when the app exceeds the 100MB quota and makes use of Expansion Files. The default update setting for users will continue to be to auto-updating apps over Wi-Fi only, enabling users to access higher quality apps and games while conserving their data usage.


Even though you can make your app bigger, it doesn’t always mean you should. Remember to keep in mind the following factors:

• Mobile data connectivity: Users around the world have varying mobile data connectivity speeds. Particularly in developing countries, many people are coming online with connections slower than those of users in countries like the U.S. and Japan. Users on a slow connection are less likely to install an app or game that is going to take a long time to download.


• Mobile data caps: Many mobile networks around the world give users a limited number of MB that they can download each month without incurring additional charges. Users are often wary of downloading large files for fear of exceeding their limits.


• App performance: Mobile devices have limited RAM and storage space. The larger your app or game, the slower it may run, particularly on older devices.


• Install time: People want to start using your app or game as quickly as possible after tapping the install button. Longer wait times increase the risk they’ll give up.

We hope that, in certain circumstances, this file size increase is useful and enables you to build higher quality apps and games that users love.