Google today announced that Google Play now supports four additional countries from which developers can publish paid Android apps. These countries are the Czech Republic, Israel, Mexico and Poland. With these four new countries come four new currencies in which apps can be sold.

Appmonger, Rectangular Software’s app for tracking Android app sales on Google Play, already had support for three of these new currencies but we failed to anticipate Google’s support for Czech crowns so today we’ve published version 2.2.9 that fixes this.

This new version also includes a few other minor enhancements including fixes to the reconciliation functionality to address Google’s recent changes to Google Play sales reports. There are also some changes underneath the covers that may not be particularly visible at the moment but will become more obvious with the upcoming release of Appmonger 2.3.

Pitch Invasion, the UK’s leading organiser of 5-a-side and 6-a-side football leagues, has today released an enhanced version of its free iPhone app for players in the 100+ Pitch Invasion football leagues across England.

This version of the app was built by Rectangular Software based on the foundations of an app that Pitch Invasion had previously commissioned that is currently being used by thousands of footballers across the country.

Taking the existing app as a starting point, and working closely with Pitch Invasion, Rectangular Software has made several refinements and additions to existing functionality.

Improvements in the updated app include a new location-aware league finder for finding your nearest league, a new streamlined native payment facility and the ability to make and view nominations for Player of the Week. This is in addition to other fixes and enhancements including support for the high resolution Retina displays found on the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPod Touch (4th generation).

The updated Pitch Invasion app is available now from the iTunes App Store.

Rectangular Software provides custom development of native iOS and Android mobile apps. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Some interesting figures were published by mobile app analytics firm Flurry recently. They show how Google Play (the new name for Android Market) is trailing a long way behind its major competitors in generating per-user revenue from smartphone apps (an app on the iTunes App Store earns over four times as much per user).

The that fact apps on the iTunes App Store generate more money than equivalent apps on Google Play is not news but what is interesting in these figures is that Amazon has no such problems making money from Android apps.

The comparison between Google and Amazon is not entirely like-for-like since Amazon’s store is US-only at present and has less than 10% of the titles that Google has. The difference in performance is striking nonetheless and perhaps explains the recent Google Play rebranding that positions Google’s app store as a more direct competitor to Amazon’s digital content store. Google also reportedly has the Kindle Fire in its sights with its own 7-inch Android tablet in the works.

On Thursday evening I received a message on Twitter drawing my attention to a new app on Android Market that bore an uncanny resemblance to Rectangular Software’s own Appmonger app for tracking app sales on Android Market. And by “uncanny resemblance” I mean “almost entirely identical”. So much so that both myself and other Appmonger users who looked at it were convinced that the distributor of this app had downloaded the Appmonger .apk, removed the licensing protection, made a few cosmetic changes and republished it under their own name. The feature set and UI structure were identical, the on-screen labels matched word-for-word and the charts were in most cases visually so close as to be almost indistinguishable. The final insult was that the app was made available as a free download whereas Appmonger sells for £2.49 / $3.99.

The motivation for cracking a niche paid app and giving it away for free is not at all clear. It would have required a fair bit of effort since the Appmonger code is obfuscated. The person responsible had not added any adverts so they did not stand to derive any direct financial benefit from their actions. Perhaps they had added some malware to the app?

A visit to the website linked from Android Market revealed that the perpetrator is a woman in Texas. As well as promoting the app, the website included a support page that was remarkably similar to the Appmonger FAQ on the Rectangular Software website (question titles were identical but the answers had been reworded slightly).

On her blog she claimed to have spent $4,152.11 on developing “her” new app (seemingly the first and so far only app that she has released). On the surface this was an odd claim for an apparently pirated app. I could at least confirm that she had spent $3.99 because a search in Google Checkout revealed that the same person had legitimately purchased a copy of Appmonger on October 21^st 2011.

Takedown

At this point, convinced that Rectangular Software was the victim of pretty blatant code theft, I filed DMCA takedown notices with Android Market and the woman’s web host. Within 24 hours Google had pulled the app from Android Market and the web host had removed the offending pages from her website.

The Plot Thickens

When I later had time to analyse the suspect app more closely, I discovered that things weren’t quite as they had originally seemed. Playing around with the app on an old phone (I didn’t trust it on my phone), I noticed that the whole experience had more rough edges than Appmonger. If this was modified Rectangular Software code then the modifications had been done clumsily and introduced issues that weren’t there previously. Digging around in the .apk, the structure of the app was not as familiar as I expected it to be. If this was modified Rectangular Software code then they had gone to some lengths to try to disguise that fact. Furthermore, I discovered that this app uses achartengine to generate at least some of its charts whereas Appmonger uses custom chart classes that I wrote myself. That at least explains why the line charts look different between the two apps.

There are enough differences for me to entertain the possibility that the person distributing this app did actually pay somebody to build it from scratch and what we’re looking at is a very uninspired clone rather than a pirated and modified version of the original Appmonger. Though why on earth anybody would spend thousands of dollars going to such lengths and not at least try to make something a bit different is beyond me.

On the other hand, there are also certain similarities that would be unlikely to occur without reverse engineering of the original app, particularly in regards to the back end services and the database (all table, column and index names are identical between the two apps except for a few extra columns in the clone).

Anybody is free to create an alternative Google Checkout reporting app and give it away for free if they so choose. As a competitor I might not like it but I’d have little cause for complaint. However, regardless of whether or not it includes any Rectangular Software code, this app takes the sincerest form of flattery to ludicrous extremes.

Having previously added tablet support to the Android version of the educational flag recognition game Flagpole, we’ve now brought the iOS version up to speed with proper iPad support (including support for landscape orientations).  This new version (version 1.3) is available on the App Store now.

The release of the Kindle Fire just over a week ago has breathed new life into Amazon’s Appstore. One of the consequences of this is that Rectangular Software’s flag recognition app, Flagpole, has sold several copies to Kindle Fire purchasers in the last few days having previously barely registered on the Amazon store.

Until now Flagpole has only been optimised for phone-sized screens. Today we’ve released an update that improves the experience on the Kindle Fire and other larger devices such as the 10.1″ Samsung Galaxy Tab. As part of this update the app now also works in landscape orientation as well as portrait mode.

In addition, version 3.4 includes the updated flag for Malawi that didn’t make it into the previous version.  The new version is available from the Android Market right now and has been submitted to the Amazon Appstore where it should appear some time in the next week.

When considering building a smartphone app for your business, it is important to understand the nature of your target audience. The landscape changes rapidly and differs from country to country. There are multiple mostly incompatible smartphone platforms battling for supremacy, constantly gaining or losing market share. Yesterday’s top dog might be tomorrow’s has been.

A glut of surveys are published throughout the year that attempt to provide an overview of the current state of the smartphone world but often they just end up adding to the confusion. I lost count of how many separate occasions Android was reported to have overtaken the iPhone in the last year. The problem is that the surveys often measure different things in different ways. Some count only new activations while others monitor total device ownership. Sometimes they can’t even agree on the definition of a smartphone and, even if they can, the data presented in one survey is often from a different territory to the data in another survey.

Any surveys that you consult have to be interpreted carefully if you are going to use them as the basis for important decisions such as which platform(s) to prioritise. The first question to consider is where are your target audience? If your business is constrained by geography then you’re only really interested in local statistics, for instance those for the UK. Alternatively, if you aim to reach the entire English-speaking world then the data for the much bigger US market is more significant. And if you intend to engage in multiple languages across the world then you should be looking at global data.

Secondly, while surveys based on the number of new activations provide a good indication of where the market is heading, they don’t tell you how many users each platform has right now. Many users are tied into 18-month or 24-month contracts with mobile operators. They are still potential users of your app but they don’t show up in the new activations surveys because they are not buying new devices.

With all this in mind, I wanted to highlight a couple of surveys that have been published in the past week that provide a useful snapshot of where things stand right now (as of the end of the third quarter of 2011). The first is from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech and covers Great Britain. It shows that 43.8% of the population now owns a smartphone (and this is increasing significantly with 69.1% of new phones sold being smartphones). Half (49.9%) of British smartphones run Android, a phenomenal increase over the last 18 months. RIM’s Blackberries (22.5%) are in second place ahead of Apple’s iPhones (18.5%), suggesting that the oft-predicted demise of the Canadian manufacturer is yet to materialise in the UK. Microsoft’s Windows phones have been almost completely ignored by British buyers so far.

The second survey, from Nielsen, provides an equivalent view of the US market. The ratio of smartphones to non-smartphones (43% vs. 57%) is almost identical. Android is number one in America too but not quite as dominant with a stronger showing from Apple pushing RIM into third place. Microsoft has at least registered on the other side of the Atlantic but is still a distant fourth.

The broad similarity of the UK and US figures might lead you to assume that the picture is the same across the world. That’s not the case and if you plan to target other countries you should strive to determine the local situation. As an example, in parts of Asia the popularity of Android is even higher, driven in part by loyalty to home-grown brands. For instance, figures from the previous quarter show 85% Android penetration in South Korea, home to Samsung and LG, and 71% in Taiwan where HTC is based.

Several Beep Test for Android users have suggested an enhancement to the app to make it easier to keep track of what level you are on while running, without having to look at the screen. Specifically, Android’s speech capabilities mean that we can do better than the three short beeps that indicate the start of a new level. Starting with version 2.2 (available today from Android Market and Amazon Appstore), the Beep Test app now announces the level number in addition to playing the beeps, which means you no longer have to keep count for yourself.

This version also improves the experience on Honeycomb tablets. There is more that we can do in this respect (a landscape layout for instance), but these updates are a step in the right direction.

Rectangular Video Poker was originally designed for Android phones and, as such, while it was usable on tablets, it didn’t really integrate with the Honeycomb experience. That has changed with version 2.4 released today and available now on the Android Market. This version improves the layout for large screen devices and takes advantage of the Honeycomb action bar to provide a tablet-optimised experience.

Following on from adding Google accounts authentication in Appmonger 2.1, version 2.2 moves on to the next most requested feature – the ability to alias and/or group apps for reporting purposes.

There are two use cases that this new feature addresses. Firstly, when you translate your app into different languages the translated names show up in Appmonger as separate apps. This is because the data from Google Checkout does not include the app’s package name so there is no way for Appmonger to reliably infer which different app names refer to the same app. You can now assign the same alias to each of these translated names and they will be grouped together as one app.

Similarly, you can now organise your apps into groups. By assigning the same alias to different apps you can treat them as a single entity for reporting purposes. For example, some developers release several different variations of the same basic app and might want their reports to show the combined figures rather than figures for each individual variant. This is now possible.

To assign aliases to apps, simply select the “Groups/Aliases” option from the main Appmonger menu and then tap on each app that you want to enter an alias for.

Appmonger 2.2 is available now on Android Market.