Advice on free app and user security

[Brahmanathaswami]

We also plan to give away apps moving forward. We have/had the same 
"hope" :  to know who, how many and how "deep" the users are getting 
into the app.

For now we are going with Quad/Yudu to build the first Hinduism Today 
mobile app. Their prices and features are very good. In the Application 
brief we got for the discovery phase (set up the design and basic 
feature set)  one of the check boxes says

__ check if you want users to be able to register. Please note that 
Apple's rules state that registration cannot be mandatory


So I suspect somewhere in the fine print... Apple requires that 
registration not be mandatory for full functionality.  It makes sense if 
you think about it... someone downloads and then can't actually use it 
without signing in? That would irritate me...

You might set up a community for your audience in Disqus or a dedicated 
twitter account or some other social thingy (I'm way behind there...) 
and if your app gets traction, perhaps you will see this in the 
community growth?

Years ago we had an HT Digital App on the desktop that required 
registration. Andre built this... it was pretty cool. It worked pretty 
well as a UI to simpy fetch issues as PDF's to the desktop, keep a list 
of back issues etc. we downloaded coverslll The registration requirement 
met with a lot of resistance. Especially if because we had users confirm 
by email etc. lots of issues there failures to confirm because of spam 
etc... But we had other ways to determine "depth"

We tracked downloads of the current issue from the app itself (very easy 
to do, by setting up a unique agent type for the GET requests, then all 
you have to do is parse your ACCESS logs on the server on a cron and 
push those numbers to your database or some text file you can read 
periodically)  So, while we had 12,000 registered users

< ASIDE: (not bad for a early 2000 App --  which proved IMHO that the 
resistance to "download desktop internet enable app"  was not as high as 
some thought in those days --Richard's line! />

But the actual downloads of the quarterly issue of the magazine were 
only about 500. So, I know we had 500 or so really dedicated users. We 
could also track downloads of back issues. We had people in India who 
would download 20-30 giant PDF via our app. Andre did a really good job 
with that part... our app would maintain connectivity and make sure they 
got their issue and try again... could keep a standing connection 
running for hours and hours....

I think looking back, had I removed the registration requirement, we 
might have got even more users... as, in the end it was the downloads of 
the issue that proved to be the key metric, not installations or 
registrations. I install and even register for lots of software myself, 
that i never use.

So: think different -- set up some key component that must be used by a 
"dedicated fan" and track that... and perhaps you will come close to 
your goal: "

  I feel that, at least, I’m owed the satisfaction of knowing that educators and students use my work.




Swasti Astu, Be Well!
Brahmanathaswami

Kauai's Hindu Monastery
www.HimalayanAcademy.com



William Prothero wrote:
> However, I notice that many apps (Apple’s for example) ask for the user’s permission to send this diagnostic information to Apple.
>
> So, I’d like to get some feedback on what you consider the “best practice” for this situation.