“Apple removes recommendation apps from the App Store because they suck,” writes Venture Beat, according to a new player in this market, Hooked Media.
Everyone still has a loud story about the App Gratis. When this application was withdrawn from the Apple store a month ago, a scandal broke out. Its perpetrators, the creators of the recommendation service, accused Apple of all mortal sins. You can understand them: they lost a base of 10 million downloads overnight.
Hooked Media Executive Director Prita Uppal believes that her project is not in danger of such a fate for two reasons. First of all, her project doesn’t suck. Secondly, Apple cannot delete it.
“The key problem for Apple was that no service solved the problem of increasing the visibility of applications,” says Prita in an interview with Venture Beat. – The main goal of any service was, first of all, to make money.”
What her development team was thinking, Prita did not specify, but when creating Hooked Media, it was decided to move away from the traditional path of developing recommendation services. That is, it does not come down only to the possibility of selecting the sections of interest. When forming proposals, the program proceeds from 46 independent factors, including time, day of the week, installed applications, remote applications, the sequence of working with them, and so on.
As a result, when using the Hooked Media service, companies have increased the number of installations by 30%, the time spent on games by 33% and the conversion rate by 22%, says Prita.
However, there is one slippery moment here.
Most of the recommendations occur in third-party applications. It looks like this: the player passes the level, and at this moment he is offered to try another project. This recommendation is not an advertisement, they do not ask the developer for money for it, but it improves the visibility of the application. Given that it is rigidly targeted, then, in theory, it should not cause dissatisfaction with the user.
This, or rather the fact that in order to use the service, developers need to embed its API into the application code, turns Hooked Media into a full-fledged platform that Apple, according to Prita, is unlikely to be able to destroy. Although it seems to us that Apple will not like this workaround.
Prita’s team has been working on the service for two and a half years, its beta version on Android has gained 25 million users. Hooked Media has also been featured on Google Play twice.