Some cool tips from Google

I was at a Learn with Google event yesterday. It was pretty cool. Most of it had to do with AdSense and Analytics, until the AdMob team dropped by and stole all the app developers into a smaller room.
Surprisingly there weren’t that many of us.

Got to chat to other devs, and most importantly Google employees. AdMob folks talked a lot about app design and monetization (primarily through AdMob). Some cool things that were mentioned were about getting featured. If your app is lower than 4 stars, you won’t get featured. Another free awesome tip: there are currently not a lot of apps that are optimized for tablets. The Play team is looking to feature apps that are. By optimization, I mean using all the extra real estate that you get on a tablet, instead of just making it all stretch out properly. Something else that was mentioned (this is mainly to game devs), keeping a sync on user progress. For example if a user beat a bunch of levels on the phone playing your game, when they get on their tablet to play some more, they should start from the same spot they left off, not the first level. You can imagine, that nobody would like to start from scratch.
Tablet sales are going up, and in fact there’s a very high tablet use in the evening (according to some charts they showed us). I was rather surprised to find that out.

A lot of other information was about AdMob, which to be honest didn’t really apply to me (I make wallpapers), so I’m not sure how much of it would be new to you guys. I got in on a closed beta of an AdMob interstitial ad that they plan to add.

Overall, pretty cool experience. They were very forthcoming about all the questions, which (in my opinion) really made amends for the lack of support Google provides to the devs. Although, they said that the Android department is very separated from everything else, it feels good to know that I can now email someone and get a little closer to what’s happening on the other end. I highly recommend to go to one of these events if you happen to get an invited.

Thanks for the summary. Joke: you should’ve asked what the hell is happening to eCPM on adMob this year. :slight_smile:

Thanks for sharing… useful to know stuff!

Thank you VERY much for sharing this info.