Technical presentation about the lifecycle of open source mobile apps which will be presented on 6 April 2013 during Openmobility conference 2013.
The talk is dedicated to the lifecycle of an open source mobile application from an idea to the market. The aim of the talk is to share experience about establishing contributor’s community, localization, version control, bug tracking, testing, and managing new releases on different platforms such as MeeGo Harmattan, Android, Symbian, Sailfish OS and BlackBerry. Common QA failures during publishing to app stores as well as tips for app monetization and strategies how to increase downloads will be also discussed.
1. Challenges in Open Source
Mobile Apps
Leon Anavi
@leonanavi
leon@anavi.org
2. Agenda
Idea
Framework & Open Source License
Community
Bug Tracker
Version Control
Localization
Testing
App Stores
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3. Mobile App Lifecycle
Idea
App Store Plan & Design
Test Develop
Build & Debug
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4. Idea
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5. Idea
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must
run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning
a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or
it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion
or a gazelle: when the sun comes up, you’d better be
running.”
Dan Montano
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6. Mobile OS 2013
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7. New Mobile Platforms in 2013
Now is the best time to develop apps for:
Sailfish OS
Tizen
Firefox OS
BlackBerry 10
Ubuntu
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8. Frameworks
Native Qt HTML5 Android Other
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9. Open Source Licenses
MIT
GNU General Public License (GPL)
GNU “Lesser” General Public License (LGPL)
Apache License 2.0
Eclipse Public License (EPL)
Other
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10. Community
Small open source project’s contributors:
Developers
Translators
Testers
Users
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11. Bug Tracker
Publish all bugs and feature requests
Describe in details each task in a separate issue
Create a roadmap and follow it
Encourage contributors to use the bug tracker
Popular free for open source bug tracking systems :
JIRA, Bugzilla, Redmine, SourceForge, GitHub,
BitBucket, Google Code
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12. Version Control
Commit often
Write accurate commit messages
Tag releases
Popular open source SCM systems:
Git, Mercurial, SVN
Popular free project hosting services:
GitHub, Gitorious, SourceForge, BitBucket, Google Code
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13. Localization
Teach your app to speak foreign languages!
Advantages:
Reach larger audience
Increase app popularity
Disadvantages:
Difficult maintenance
Open source web-based system for L10n management:
Zanata
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14. Testing
Meet the Users!
Think like a user
Get user feedback
Listen to customer complaints
Ask the community to test prototypes
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15. App Stores
Go to Market!
Monetization:
Paid App
In-app Advertizing
In-app Purchasing
Donations
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16. Reviews
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17. Market
… and one more thing about app downloads:
“Business is like sex. When it's good, it's very, very good;
when it's not so good, it's still good.”
George Katona
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18. Thank you!
“Above all, don’t lose hope!”
Life of Pi
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