Spotlight
On Monday, the team behind Basecamp officially launched Hey. This makes them the latest in a long list of companies attempting to ‘reinvent email’. And since it’s 2020, any email platform (especially one that costs $99/year) without native mobile apps is dead on arrival.
Of course, Basecamp would prefer not to pay an ‘App Store tax’ of $33/user to Apple each year, so they allow customers to access an existing subscription on mobile, but not purchase a new one.
This approach has been the status quo for many popular apps (Netflix, Dropbox, even the main Basecamp platform) on iOS for years, and Apple occasionally makes even more substantial exceptions. But something apparently went off the rails this time: after initially approving Hey v1.0, Apple blocked the v1.0.1 bug fix. Then they doubled down by claiming the original approval was a mistake, and threatening to remove the app completely.
Given the amount of press coverage, and in the context of the two EU anti-competition probes that coincidentally launched this week, I’d be quite surprised if something doesn’t ‘magically work out’ in this case. But the underlying conflict is going to keep simmering away for as long as the App Store business model involves taking a commission.
"Wow. I'm literally stunned. Apple just doubled down on their rejection of HEY's ability to provide bug fixes and new features, unless we submit to their outrageous demand of 15-30% of our revenue. Even worse: We're told that unless we comply, they'll REMOVE THE APP."
Things kicked off with a long Twitter thread from David Heinemeier Hansson, Basecamp/Hey cofounder and inventor of Ruby on Rails.
Read this one for the righteous indignation, with a side of outraged hyperbole.
The Flimsiness of ‘Business vs. Consumer’ as a Justification for Apple’s Rejection of Hey From the App Store for Not Using In-App Purchases
Among other tech-y coverage, John Gruber (inventor of Markdown) picked up the story and chimed in with some more nuanced commentary on the situation.
Read this one to explore some of the inherent contractions in Apple’s current stance.
Apple accused of 'hostile' app fee policies
Finally, on Wednesday morning, the ruckus made it all the way to the BBC.
Read this one to understand how non-techies are going to view the situation…it’s not a great look for Apple.
Interesting Reads
Platforms Took Away User IDs. Now Apps Are Taking Out Platforms
Browsers are cracking down on third-party cookies, and Apple will probably do something about the IDFA eventually (it might even happen next week).
Whether or not these changes are well-intentioned, they could lead to an unintended consequence: the ecosystem might simply retreat into other walled gardens instead.
Why? An IDFA isn’t necessary for measurement when all user activity is happening within the same ‘Super App’, and brands will just follow the money.
What is good retention - Lenny's Newsletter
We all understand that retention is important (why pour money into a bucket if you know it has a giant hole in the side?), but it’s not always clear what that actually means in practice. What’s ‘good’ retention?
This article goes in-depth with recommendations from well-known leaders (for consumer social, Andrew Chen says over 50% is good, and over 75% is GREAT) and comparisons from companies we all recognize (Facebook has 60-70% 6-month user retention).
Industry Buzz
The Antitrust Case against Google | Yale Insights
The rumblings about anti-trust action against Google have suddenly been getting very real (link to an actual, recently-filed class action suit).
However, for those of us who aren’t adept at interpreting lengthy legal documents, this interview gives a pretty good breakdown of how a case against Google might work.
PS, if you’re interested in the full — and very in-depth — paper alluded to in several places, it can be found here.
Walled Gardens
How Wikipedia Lost 3 Billion Organic Search Visits To Google in 2019
A frequent complaint from website owners is Google’s trend toward ‘in-housing’ things that used to be organic search results.
If Google is having this degree of impact on Wikipedia, just imagine how much more it hurts companies that aren’t primarily funded by donations…
Facebook tests Wikipedia-powered information panels, similar to Google, in its search results
Facebook has also been dabbling with ‘in-housing’ for years (see: instant articles), albeit with somewhat more cooperation from content owners.
However, coincidentally with the article above, Facebook just rolled out their own project to slurp up Wikipedia pages for search results. But they’re still new at it, which means their knowledge graph is significantly less robust.
One big reason why Google’s search monopoly has proved so durable: technologies like bulletproof typo-correction and feels-like-magic neural matching are seamlessly integrated into the experience, and have literally trained us to search differently. Any potential competitor that doesn’t include these niceties just automatically feels ‘broken’ in comparison.
Privacy & Security
Political Groups Track Protesters' Cellphone Data
“It’s deeply spooky yet extremely helpful. We’re actively looking at where the protests are popping up and then readjusting our targets.”
That this is technically possible really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone in the mobile industry…but you can bet an average protester wouldn’t be pleased about it at all.
Tips & Techniques
Mastering TikTok Mobile Ads: Takeaways from Six Months in the Self-Serve Beta
For performance marketers, TikTok’s value proposition right now is cost-efficient diversification
...but simply rerunning the same playbook from Facebook isn't enough. For anyone experimenting with install ads on TikTok, this is a very tactical article with plenty of real-world tips.
Fun fact: TikTok is the fastest-growing ad network on the Branch platform: in just the last year, they've rocketed to 4th-place worldwide.
UX
Making an international payment – Built for Mars
In the last issue, I linked to the beginning of this series on mobile banking UX. But now the next couple installments have landed. The new ones are perhaps even better, and definitely worth taking a looking if you didn’t last time!
Unless you’ve tried to use these mobile websites recently, you may not realise how bad they are. But seriously, they’re really bad. I would go as far to say many of them are basically unusable.
Data
How COVID-19 transformed the way Americans spend online
Thanks to our friends at Graphite, TechCrunch ran an article on COVID-19 trends based on data from the Branch platform.
A few top takeaways:
- +200% on online groceries!
- Large increase in fintech (money transfer, personal finance)
- Local went down at first, but has seen recent growth over the last 2 weeks
- eCommerce is up, kids & pets + activewear grew the most
Podcast
Allstate: Mike Antognoli
Adding Value During a Pandemic
During a time of crisis, it’s crucial for companies to focus on maintaining and driving growth. It’s, however, equally as important to continue to find ways to strategically add value to your customers.
Mike Antognoli shares with us how he’s led the mobile product team at Allstate during the pandemic, in an industry whose customers typically have more of a hands-off approach. More on that story, how the Allstate app plays into the overall company strategy, Mike’s views on how a company culture built on trust is key to innovation, and what he learned from a failed Allstate experiment with augmented reality, on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and more.
Listen Now
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | SoundCloud | Stitcher
Events
Mobile Growth Online
Panelists: Zillow, Cars.com, & EA.
Where: virtual event.
When: Wed, Jun 24, 10:00 AM (PDT)
For the Branch marketing team, this last week has been about planning for Q3. Things are different this quarter.
I mean, things are different for pretty much every company in the world right now…in both good ways and bad. But for us, there has been one unequivocally good change: over the last few months, we invested in upgrading our attribution stack.
Let’s back up for just a minute.
Branch provides an attribution product, so you’d intuitively expect that our marketing team would have the whole attribution thing down. But, sadly, we’ve never had the option to really leverage our own platform (the marketing playbooks for mobile apps and enterprise B2B SaaS don’t have a whole lot in common).
Instead, we’ve been forced to rely on the B2B equivalent of a ‘traditional MMP’, and the results have always been…okay-ish. We could sense something was missing, but never quite put a finger on what.
Now that we finally have a top-notch system of our own, I can say it from first-hand experience: data like this is awesome. Like gaining a superpower.
I highly recommend it. But if you’re still on the fence, we should chat — just hit
Alex Bauerreply!