

App.io Ads – Your game becomes the mobile ad, with try-before-install - davidbarker
https://app.io

======
SavvyGuard
I work in an ad tech company on the mobile product, and all of my coworkers
are amazed by this. Congrats on actually innovating the mobile advertising
space instead of another native ad/geolocation startup.

~~~
daveytea
Thanks! We've worked hard on this so it's great to hear other ad players like
what we're doing. Maybe there's a way we can work together.

Feel free to reach out to me (david@app.io) if you want to chat :)

------
supercoder
Certainly seems cool and I admire the way these guys have been pushing their
company from when it was appfolio.

But a couple things worry me about these ads.

\- If the user isn't in a mindset to look at another app, then could it be a
bigger barrier to have something 'interactive' if they need to spend time
waiting for menus , loading etc. At least a standard popup can show a
screenshot and get straight to the point.

\- Not being able to control the experience. If all networks were equal would
be great, but how many users might come away thinking your app is slow ,
unresponsive etc because it can't stream the app in time ?

Seems like it could be great for expensive pay to install apps, but if the app
is free anyway maybe it's just better to put the effort into getting them to
download that, rather than play the ad.

~~~
emdowling
Thanks so much for your thoughts. Co-founder here.

\- We give the user the opportunity to download the app at any time. It isn't
in the video, but along the bottom, a download button is available at all
times so the user can get to the App Store as quickly as possible. On loading:
We actively encourage all apps using the platform to bypass menus and get
straight to the content. That converts much better.

\- We do a few things to ensure every user has a great experience and apps are
not presented in a negative light. As quickly as we can (generally 200ms), we
run a speed test to ensure latency and bandwidth are sufficient for a good
experience. We also allow advertisers to specify a fallback video or static
image, so if we can't deliver a great interactive experience, we are able to
offer an ad which is at least as good as the existing types.

I'll also mention that the video on the homepage is actually a live filmed
demo of a trial campaign.

------
khangtoh
Just a quick question about the tech.

Apps are ran in a simulator, and screen caps is being streamed real-time to
the client, then drawn on the canvas. Is that correct?

~~~
chrisnolet
Hi Khangtoh,

That's essentially correct. We do a bit of magic to stream the smallest amount
of image data possible (sending mostly-transparent frames if pixel data hasn't
changed, etc.). Put simply though: yes, you can think of it as a simulator
being streamed to an HTML canvas. But it's taken a long while to get right!

------
coldcode
This is pretty freaking amazing. I wonder how they intend to monetize
sufficiently to support enough servers if this became popular. I think they
need a little more information up front on the landing page, it took some
digging to understand that this is essentially running a simulator build on
their server and porting the bits to the browser and interactions back to the
their servers and the app.

Apple should buy these folks pronto.

~~~
daveytea
Our economics work out pretty well ;)

Good point on having more info. What we've found is that developers will want
to get into the nitty gritty details, whereas ads people will want easy to
digest info about how it will benefit them.

If you're keen to find out more, we have some pretty good documentation:
[http://docs.app.io/](http://docs.app.io/)

~~~
delackner
Sorry, I'm a developer and tapped that API link and the first docs page said
not one word that stood out about the main questions I wanted answered: what
exactly are you doing and what is the latency.

~~~
chrisnolet
Hi delackner,

The API documentation is pretty dense! Sorry about that. To see the latency,
check out: [http://app.io/showcase](http://app.io/showcase). That's our
technology in action.

We are running iOS in the cloud and streaming back graphics to the client. To
get started, users upload a compiled simulator build of their app
([http://docs.app.io/uploading/](http://docs.app.io/uploading/)). It takes a
few minutes. We automatically generate everything else from there.

------
Rodeoclash
Congratulations guys, good to see it out there, and I'm glad to see you're
better at building a business then Chris is at Foosball ;)

~~~
chrisnolet
Naww, thanks. I'll take that as a compliment? ;)

------
munimkazia
That is really cool. Something this cool rarely comes in a field like
advertising. I only wish I was a game developer to try this!

------
jmduke
Wow. This seems like an incredible iteration on mobile ad tech. How responsive
(as in from a UX standpoint) are the trials?

~~~
daveytea
Super responsive. :)

It's a streaming tech, but we can target on the ad network level
(wifi/4g/3g/etc). We only run ads on devices where we know they'll have a
great user experience, since we hate crappy ads as well!

------
philo23
I'm curious how you get around normally being able to only run one instance of
the iOS simulator at a time? Having a load of OS X machines for each
individual stream or even virtualised hosts cannot be the case surely?

Either way it's done, it's a very impressive way to show off your apps and
works suprisingly well.

~~~
daveytea
Well, that's where some of our magic comes in :) I'll see if one of our
techies can shed some more light on it for you.

------
MaxGabriel
You advertised a 3x conversion rate, so I presume you guys are live in the
wild—are there any publishers where I can see these ads in action?

~~~
daveytea
Correct! We'll be releasing data in the coming weeks so stay tuned!

------
superasn
Do you have any plans to proxy the sound as well? (because i couldn't hear
anything on the Klingelring demo)

~~~
daveytea
We don't have plans immediately.

------
MaxGabriel
This is really cool. Do you guys support apps that use multitouch?

~~~
daveytea
Not quite yet, but it's in the roadmap!

------
onmydesk
Relies on the app running in a browser? what about native apps?

~~~
emdowling
Might be a miscommunication on our site! We run native iOS apps in the
simulator environment - if you have a simulator build of your native app, we
can use it as an ad.

Our previous/existing product enables apps to run inside any browser, and we
have a lot of people using this platform for QA, customer support, etc.

~~~
onmydesk
My bad, skimmed it a lot. Thats interesting, why am I making android versions?

------
bananaoomarang
hey, this is actually a good idea. this actually seems like a genuinely good
idea! Congrats :P

