A client wants me to write an app, the primary goal of the app is not marketing but I would say the secondary goal is marketing.
So the app allows the user to select names from the address book and then it sends out a rota to everyone. It also sends out a meeting request.
The problem is it has a voucher for a consumer product attached as an image and it has the company's logo etc in the emails and meetings request.
is this allowed?
5.6 - Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind
2.13 - Apps that are primarily marketing materials or advertisements will be rejected
An email isn't a push notification - why not just send emails rather than pushes. No issue then.
If it isn't primarily, only secondarily, marketing, then I guess it is OK with Apple?
Seems like it is bothering you though. Good thing iOS developers can pretty much choose what they do these days eh?
Related
My annotated email promo is only showing the extra markup in some gmail accounts and so I can't test how it's displaying.
Does anyone know what proportion of gmail accounts display annotated promo's and why those that don't display them are affected as such.
My settings for the gmail app include bundles, conversations and images are all on and i've the latest version of gmail and still do not display as expected.
I don't see promos from any other companies either so i can't check against that, But at least their company images are displaying - where ours is not.
I've been given a figure of 25% of gmail accounts are seeing the promotion at the offices of our ESP.
Further- I am now seeing the promo as intended in my gmail app.
I speculate that perhaps my opening the promo several times- in a sense- 'engaging' with the brand, has resulted in now seeing the promotion and the marked up content.
I also note that a new user that we proof to, is receiving the promo in the 'top promo's section -but not with the added graphics - but then he's a new user and perhaps needs to engage with the content further.
Most Gmail accounts, with a few exceptions, should be seeing promotions. For a while, Google was withholding groups of users for testing.
Whether or not users are seeing your promotions is another matter and seems dependent on what other promotional email is currently in the user's inbox and how much a user has interacted with your brand.
As of January 2020, G Suite users do not see promotions, nor do users using the desktop web client. Desktop support has been reportedly "coming soon" for several months already.
Is there a service that currently offers this (that isn't just the 'notification' settings on Facebook - as this is too delayed), OR, what would be the best way to attack this in terms of developing an online service that could provide these updates in almost real time?
I'm writing a school administration software package, but it strikes me that many developers will face this same issue: when communicating with users, should you use email or SMS or try to combine them?
A previous version of this question was closed for being too subjective. The answers will be somewhat subjective but I do think this is a good question, topical and not yet debated widely. I'll try to narrow it down as much as I can:
Is it feasible to give users the choice of email versus SMS, and have the same business logic apply to both, with the help of a long form and short form message template?
Do users get annoyed when receiving the same message over SMS and email?
Is it common to present administrators with a single report listing message delivery failures combining both SMS and email?
Are there significant numbers of users who prefer to be contacted via facebook rather than SMS or email?
Is there a best practice for all this stuff?
Is there a place on the web where this stuff has been debated?
Are there any reputable commentators who have made predictions about the future of all this stuff?
I'm particularly interested in hearing from developers who have already grappled with these questions.
Is it feasible to give users the choice of email versus SMS, and have the same business logic apply to both, with the help of a long form and short form message template?
Yes, you can implement logic for the user to select which methods of communication he would like to use
Do users get annoyed when receiving the same message over SMS and email?
ABSOLUTELY! Unless the user has set up to receive messages in both the formats
Is it common to present administrators with a single report listing message delivery failures combining both SMS and email?
Yes
Are there significant numbers of users who prefer to be contacted via facebook rather than SMS or email?
Cannot comment on this, YMMV depending on the usage of the site, the target user group etc. You site stats & trends over a period of time will help fine-tune this aspect.
Is there a best practice for all this stuff?
Sure, see a lot of sites which give opt-in/opt-out options for getting communications from the sites. The tendency to spam/flood inboxes with a lot of email should be avoided & the user should be able to set how little/much data should be sent to him & in what format. Google is your friend here, there are tons of articles out there on different aspects.
Is there a place on the web where this stuff has been debated?
I am sure you will find all sorts of legal & other details around this aspect, google is your friend on this item
I have an application that we are building to be delivered to our users for free. However, the business wants to be able to sell this application to anyone else who might want it. Is there anyway we can do this?
The suggestions and concerns we've come up with are:
Submit app with price and deliver free download codes to users, but I believe that we only get something like 50 free download codes and we have more than 50 users.
Submit app for free, but make content an in-app purchase and have some mechanisim for allowing our users to validate and get the content free. We think that Apple will hate this since the application isn't functional without the content.
Submit application twice, one free and one paid and just direct our users to the free one. This means that our free version can be found and used by anyone cutting into the revenue stream.
Any suggestions/advice/hints/rants welcome.
Have you considered Software as a Service? The app is an extension of the service. Make the app free to anyone, but to get anything useful out of the app, require username/password or some other validation. You'd be hard pressed to find an app today that doesn't require some sort of signup process.
There are plenty of options you can go with.
In-App Purchase
Free/Lite version of App
Paid version of App
Just a matter of what you and your customers want. Good luck.
Why not have a very basic version of the app available for free (so that Apple is happy) and then have the rest of the app "unlocked" when the user either:
Registers their copy of the app back with your servers (covers giving it to some for free)
Makes an in-app purchase to unlock the rest of the functionality
This keeps Apple happy, gives you the functions you want, and is only minimal effort.
You can pay for and gift paid apps to iTunes account holders. Making the app appear to be "Free" to those recipients. If it's your own app, Apple will keep (only) 30% of the price you pay, so add that on to your cost of doing business.
O.K so I'm writing a iPhone travel guide, you purchase a subscription to a travel guide for 3 months, it downloads a fairly hefty database and for 3 months that database gets updated weekly with new stuff.
Now what I'd like to do is make the user enter their email address as a one off action before they purchase their first guide, for China say. The purpose for doing this is
1) To allow me to contact the user by email when they add a note/tip for a particular place (the app will allow them to send notes & information to me)
2) To Uniquely identify who has purchased the subscription so that if they wipe their device and reinstall the app they can plug the email address in and pickup their subscriptions again. Or so they can use the same subscription on another device they own.
My concerns are
1) Will Apple allow the email method of restoring functionality to a second or restored device?
2) As long as I tell the user what I'm using their email address for (aka I won't sell it to anyone else and use it for X purposes) will it be o.k to ask for said email address?
And as a side note, can I tack the devices unique id onto my server comms to track devices or is apple going to through a hissy fit about that as well?
Our app got rejected because we used email to uniquely identify the user. From apple review guidelines:
17.2 Apps that require users to share personal information, such as email address and date of birth, in order to function will be rejected
For subscriptions UDID can't be used to uniquely identify the user. So we were using email address. Back to drawing board.