Realtime Updates Breaking Change for Developers Using Facebook Payments
When we announced the migration from Credits to local currency payments last June, we also enabled developers to receive Realtime Updates to help reduce latency for their apps and provide asynchronous payment confirmation. We are now requiring developers to subscribe to and honor realtime updates to ensure order fulfillment and receipt of disputes from all payers by May 13, 2014.
We want to provide the best payments experience possible for people on Facebook, and part of that is ensuring they are able to receive the in-app objects they paid for and that they are receiving timely responses to their disputes. Please visit our documentation on realtime updates to learn more and our documentation on disputes to update us on status of handling disputes.
The teams from Facebook and Parse are keeping busy this month with a number of events. Check out where we'll be in February, and join us if you can:
ICE International Casino Conference – February 3 – 5, 2014 – London, UK
Facebook will be present at ICE in London in the first week of February and will be speaking on a variety of panels: Partner Manger, Will Collins, will be contributing to a panel on February 3 about understanding the on-going convergence between online and social gaming, and thinking of the mobile channel as the future. Marketing Solutions Manger, Tarquin Henderson will be joining representatives from Big Fish and Plumbee to discuss how mobile gaming is leveraging loyalty programmes, social, virtual currency and brands. Partner Manager, Guy Cross is taking part in a panel on social gaming, where he’ll explain how to monetize social gaming and explore the role of Facebook in casual gaming success.
Apps World North America – February 5-6, 2014 – San Francisco, CA
Facebook + Parse will be hosting a booth at Apps World North America, and Developer Advocates Christine Abernathy and Bear Douglas will be doing two different talks. This is a great opportunity to learn more about Parse and Facebook from our team, and stop by our booth afterwards with any questions.
Casual Connect Europe – February 11, 2014 – Amsterdam, Netherlands
London based Partner Manager, Bob Slinn will be opening the show with a keynote on The Power of Platform, discussing the Facebook ecosystem, local success stories and how the platform can help any game developer build a great social game, acquire high quality users and monetize.
IndieCade - February 14 - 16, 2014 - New York, NY
AJ Glasser will host a panel on the state of free-to-play indie games with panelists from PuzzleSocial, SpinPunch, and Disruptor Beam on Sunday, February 16th at IndieCade. Besides the panel, visit our Night Games booth on Saturday to compete in a tournament for the top score in Dead Trigger 2, a new cross-platform game from indie developer Madfinger games, or stop by our table in the exhibitor hall to ask questions any time.
DeveloperWeek - February 15-18, 2014 - San Francisco, CA
Parse engineer Bryan Klimt, of the always popular Promises blog post will be keynoting at DeveloperWeek this year. Besides his not-to-be-missed talk, we'll also have members of our sales and advocacy teams on hand at the Expo to answer any questions you have about building on Parse.
Unity Meetup - February 18, 2014 - Montreal, QC
Come to the Montreal Unity Meetup to see games partner engineer Colin Creitz speak about the Facebook Unity SDK and how to integrate Facebook identity and social features in your iOS, Android, or web game.
February Bay Area Parse Developer Meetup - February 19, 2014 - San Francisco, CA
Our first Bay Area Meetup of 2014 will take place in San Francisco at the 111 Minna Gallery. Join us for drinks, snacks, and great talks from the Parse team and customers. Register to join the group today for notifications on all scheduled meetup events in the Bay Area.
DeveloperWeek After Party - February 20, 2014 - San Francisco, CA
Parse and Facebook are hosting the DeveloperWeek After Party at Local Edition in San Francisco. Join us to to celebrate the end of a great conference and meet some of the Parse team. RSVP today!
Mobile World Congress - February 24-27 2014 - Barcelona, Spain
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's Founder & CEO, will be delivering a keynote on Monday February 24 at 18:00 CET which can be watched live here. At The Emerging Markets session at 14:00 CET on Wednesday February 26 Chris Weasler, Mobile Director and Chris Daniels, VP of Business Development, will be participating. Also at 14:30 CET on Wednesday Erick Tseng will be participating on a panel as part of the Carrier WiFi Summit.
We hope that you can join us at one or more of the great events we'll be attending and hosting this month!
When Parse joined Facebook, we immediately started looking for ways to improve our SDKs by comparing code and learning from each others' successes. We found that there were a lot of small, low-level utility classes in iOS and Android that we had both implemented. Rather than continue to have two version of these components, we decided to collaborate on one common library between our SDKs. Today, we are open-sourcing that library to make it available to others.
Bolts is a collection of low-level libraries designed to make developing mobile apps easier. Using Bolts does not require using any Parse or Facebook services, nor does it require having a Parse or Facebook developer account. Simply download the jar or framework file and drop it into your project. Or you can download the source directly from GitHub. Documentation for all of the components in Bolts is available on GitHub as well.
The first component in Bolts is "tasks", which make organization of complex asynchronous code more manageable. A task is kind of like a JavaScript Promise, but available for iOS and Android. For example, if you have an asynchronous method for saving an object in iOS, you can have it return a BFTask*, and handle the result in a continuation block.
[[object saveAsync:obj] continueWithBlock:^id(BFTask *task) {
if (task.isCancelled) {
// the save was cancelled.
} else if (task.error) {
// the save failed.
} else {
// the object was saved successfully.
SaveResult *saveResult = task.result;
}
return nil;
}];
The equivalent code in Android would be:
object.saveAsync().continueWith(new Continuation<ParseObject, Void>() {
public Void then(Task task) throws Exception {
if (task.isCancelled()) {
// the save was cancelled.
} else if (task.isFaulted()) {
// the save failed.
Exception error = task.getError();
} else {
// the object was saved successfully.
SaveResult saveResult = task.getResult();
}
return null;
}
});
Tasks have many advantages over the other models for asynchronous development on these platforms, such as AsyncTask and NSOperation. For more information and example code, please see the platform-specific README files on GitHub.
More Bolts will be coming soon!
Today we are introducing a new way to re-engage your mobile app users with Facebook ads. You can now advertise to people who have taken specific actions in your app through an update to Custom Audiences which allows you to segment your users without uploading any files.
With this update, you can now advertise to groups of people based on actions they have taken within specific time periods in your app. You can also choose to exclude people by actions they have taken, to make sure you are reaching the right people at the right time. For instance, you can reach users who have purchased an item in the last 30 days, but not the last 7 days, or people who have purchased an item over $5 but under $100, or even people who have added an item to their cart, but not completed the purchase.
Since we began testing this in October, we have seen several developers experience significant success driving engagement through Custom Audiences from mobile apps. JackThreads tested this new capability and achieved over 8x Return on Ad Spend by targeting people from their mobile app who added items to their carts but did not complete a purchase. And in another campaign, JackThreads achieved over 4x Return on Ad Spend by targeting purchasers from the last 30 days, but not from the past day.
We are also rolling out an update to Custom Audiences for websites that, similarly, allows you to add a few lines of code and reach people who have taken actions on your website by creating a new Custom Audience. For example, Seeking Alpha, a leading financial news app, saw their CPI reduced by 28% when they targeted their website visitors with mobile app install campaigns using this capability.
We will be rolling out the ability to create Custom Audiences from your mobile app over the course of this week, and Custom Audiences from your website over the next couple of months. We have made it our goal to invest in measurement, targeting, and optimization tools available to our developers and will continue to look for ways to do so.
To learn how to create Custom Audiences from your mobile app, please see our tutorial for a walk-through and some common audience creation scenarios. To learn about more new Facebook targeting improvements we are releasing, including Custom Audiences from your website, please see the Facebook for Business Blog.
Today, we’re introducing a major update to the App Insights product to help you understand how people interact with your app. App Insights 2.0 is more actionable, more reliable, and has better support for mobile apps. We've also made several improvements to the way we organize and report metrics.
1. Simple, clean interface
We’ve redesigned App Insights around how your apps integrate with Facebook as opposed to how users interact with Facebook. This should help you better understand the value of the your integration. For example, the new Overview dashboard shows the most important metrics for common functionality like Login and Sharing, and makes it easy to click to get more details.
2. Actionable data
We’ve re-organized the data you need to make a decision in one place. For example, we now have a single dashboard which tells you how much traffic you receive from Facebook, whether it's coming from Open Graph stories or Requests.
We realize that it’s difficult to make decisions in a vacuum. Now, you can compare key metrics for your app to those for other apps. For example, if you see an abnormal spike in the mark-as-spam rate for your app’s stories, you can see if the spike is isolated to your app or if other apps also see the spike. Note: metrics are aggregated and anonymized – Insights will never show your app’s metrics to another developer.
3. More reliable
We performed a comprehensive audit of our data sources and logging to significantly improve the quality and reliability of the data, especially for metrics that come from mobile on iOS and Android. In addition, App Insights will now display warnings on dashboards when there is an outage or a known issue with the data.
Over the coming months we will be working on further improving Insights 2.0 by bringing over more features from the previous version and introducing several new features. Until then, we will continue to support the App Insights 1.0 product as the default option. To try the beta, simply go to your App Insights overview page and click “try the new App Insights.”
Monetization is a difficult problem for mobile app developers, particularly as people move toward downloading more free apps and advertising dollars lag behind time spent on mobile. We faced some unique challenges when we first integrated ads into the Facebook mobile experience, and we believe we’re now well positioned to help other mobile apps.
We are running a small test to explore showing Facebook ads in third-party mobile apps. In this test, we’ll be extending Facebook's rich targeting to improve the relevancy of the ads people see, provide even greater reach for Facebook advertisers, and help developers better monetize their apps.
While we have run similar tests in the past, this current test is more like a mobile ad network in that we are working directly with a small number of advertisers and publishers, rather than an outside ad-serving platform.
This test is currently limited to a few advertisers and partners. We are not currently accepting additional participants, but if you are interested in receiving future updates on the status of this test, please let us know.
Parse and Facebook are starting off the New Year with several events in the month of January. We hope to see you at one or more of the following:
MIT Independent Activities Period – January 8-13, 2014 – Boston, MA
Parse MIT Alums Jamie Karraker, Christine Yen, Christine Abernathy, and Stanley Wang will be leading sessions, having office hours, and hosting a happy hour during MIT's winter Independent Activities Period.
Microsoft Facebook Hack - January 17-18, 2014 - Menlo Park, CA
We're excited to invite you to spend two days with Microsoft and Facebook engineers to integrate Facebook Login and other social products into your Windows and Windows Phone apps. Food will be offered and prizes will be given for the best hacks. Register today.
January NYC Parse Developer Meetup - January 22, 2014 - New York, NY
We're starting off the New Year with a Parse meetup at Offsite NYC. Join us for drinks, snacks, and great talks from the Parse team, friends, and customers. Register to join the group today for notifications on all scheduled meetup events in New York.
Global Game Jam at Facebook - January 24th - 26th - Menlo Park, CA
Facebook is hosting a site for you to hack for the 2014 Global Game Jam. Free food and transportation from San Francisco included. Get a team together to create a game in one weekend! Register today.
Happy New Year from all of us at Parse and Facebook, and we hope to see you at one or more of the events we're hosting this month.
Games and apps can now give Facebook users a taste of what it's like to use their app by adding videos to their App Details page in App Center. As the number two source of installs on Facebook, App Center is a great place for users to discover and start playing your game. Videos will automatically start playing without audio when people land on your App Details page on Facebook.com, giving them a way to instantly experience your game.
How it works
Adding video to your App Details page is simple. Developers can submit videos for review in the App Dashboard under the App Details tab, just as they do for other image assets. Please review the App Center guidelines for video submission criteria. After your video is approved, it will be added to your App Details page.
You can even customize your video for international audiences by adding other versions of it for different locales. Those videos will be shown to people who have set their preference for that locale in their profile settings.
Get started
Already, people can see videos on the App Details pages of games, including Baseball Heroes, Candy Crush Saga, ChronoBlade, KingsRoad, Marvel: Avengers Alliance, and Words of Wonder. Get started by uploading a video of your app today.
