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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