On mDevCamp 2015 Prague I gave a talk on auto-renewable subscriptions. One month earlier, at WWDC and the time leading up to it, I had learned a great deal about this subject and so I worked my experiences into a concise talk so that you will have an easier time implementing subscriptions into your apps.
mDevCamp is organized by AVAST. Yes, those are the virus lab guys. Some time ago they had acquired a Czech mobile development firm, one of whose founders is now the Chief Happiness Officer, Michal Šrajer. He certainly made sure that all speakers’ happiness got maximized.
I was happy to be invited as one of the few English speakers and so gave it my best. The conference was well organized and happened in a university building. You can see a hint of that if you look at the auditorium which you see a few times in my video.
Presentations where recorded by SlidesLive. This was awesome because the MacBook I brought was having severe performance issues and this way I could fully concentrate on giving the talk. I had slightly too high expectations though of the recording.
SlidesLive has a tool that captures still images off the presenter’s laptop every few seconds, every time a bigger change is detected. This works for 90% of presentations which are mostly static, but fails to capture the excitement that my elaborate Keynote animations are conveying. So – with Michal’s permission – I had to remix it.
Please forgive the slightly blurry parts, SlidesLive only uploaded the 360p version to YouTube and I didn’t want to waste any more time trying to get a HD version of it. I downloaded the video – which had great audio – and recorded the Keynote presentation in 720p. Then I put both together with Final Cut Pro X.
I think it is quite viewable. What do you think?
If you prefer the side-by-side version without animations you can still get that at SlidesLive.
I am hoping that this information is useful for everybody who is considering to monetize their apps with auto-renewable subscriptions. I am looking back on a successful launch of the app for which I had to learn of of this. If I didn’t have the labs at WWDC the whole process would have taken more than a month.
Conclusion
mDevCamp 2015 was great, even many attendees gave feedback that there should be more English-language content. The Czech and Slovak languages might be similar enough to each other, but not exactly accessible to the rest of Europe. Michael told me after the survey results were in that next year it will be even more internationally oriented.
Auto-renewable subscriptions are an obscure topic, undeservingly so. If you follow a few simple rules then they are a viable monetization alternative to ads, especially for productivity apps.
Categories: Presentations
