Dogtown Media Has Returned to Our Venice Beach Roots
We’re moving! Well, moving back home, to be specific. Dogtown Media has grown by leaps and bounds in the last five years, to a team of over thirty mobile app developers. Our main office has been in Santa Monica for the past few years, but our heart has always been in the neighborhood where we […]
The Best Apps to Accelerate Your Startup
The startup life has never been easy. More than 90% of mobile apps fold within a year of launch. Even fewer move on to become commercially viable. At the same time, startup profits are higher now than they’ve ever been before, with mobile app developer revenues from the Apple App Store and Google Play rising […]
On-demand Service Startups Start Targeting the Suburbs
Food delivery startup Farm Hill announced their intention to expand into San Francisco last week, which doesn’t sound like hot news until you look at the context — specifically, the expansion “into” rather than “out of” a city. Farm Hill is backed by high-profile VCs like SOMA Capital and associated with Standford’s accelerator StartX. Regardless, rather […]
Freemium Pricing: Can it Work for My App?
In just a few years, freemium pricing for mobile apps has gone from an unusual fringe strategy to the dominant pricing scheme in the mobile app industry. How dominant? Well, in 2014 98% of all app revenue in Google Play came from freemium apps in the form of in-app purchases and monthly subscription fees. Apple […]
Apple Says App Store Ad Changes Won’t Hurt Small Developers
iPhone app developers have been voicing concerns about Apple’s new App Store app-install advertising proposal, after an email to developers announcing the beta program went out to the development community. According to Apple, Search Ads will be similar to Google Adwords in that users will place bids on relevant keywords in order to appear at […]
Brexit Vote Sends Shockwaves Through Startup Community
The United Kingdom’s Brexit vote in favor of leaving the European Union (EU) has sent shockwaves through the business world, and tech is no exception. Surging stock prices only 24 hours before the historic vote saw Wall Street place their bets against the UK’s departure, making Friday’s 52:48 near-tie all the more bitter a pill […]
Apple App Store Tops $50 Billion in Developer Revenue
Apple recently announced that developer payouts on their app platform passed the $50 billion mark, with a record-setting 2 million apps live and 130 billion downloads. The announcement comes at an interesting time in the mobile revolution as the advancing popularity of app alternatives like voice, bots, and integrated assistants begins to chip away some […]
Siri Is Finally Bridging the Gap Between Mobile and Desktop
When Apple bought Siri back in 2010, few San Francisco iPhone app developers believed it would become quite so central to the mobile experience. That success on mobile has made Mac devotees eager to use the personal assistant on other apple devices and platforms — yet it’s been years without an apparent move to jump […]
Some of the Biggest Tech Products Started as Side Projects
What do Gmail and Facebook have in common with a Post-It Note? The fact that they all started as side projects. More than any other industry, tech has offered developers and designers the chance to rapidly prototype their ideas — however off-the-wall or unrealistic — and bring them to market with minimal investment. iPhone app […]
Top 10 Reasons Your App Might Be Rejected from the App Store
Making apps is hard. Waiting for apps to be approved by the apple app store? Nerve-wracking. For developers, the biggest frustration with the App Store review process is that apps are often returned as soon as an issue is found, rather than receiving a top-to-bottom check the first time around. For example, an app returned […]