App Development

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Embrace raises $4.5M for its mobile application performance management platform

Embrace, an LA-based startup that offers a mobile-first application performance management platform, today announced that it has raised a $4.5 million funding round led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $7 million. New investors Greycroft, Miramar Ventures and Vy Captial also participated in this round, as did previous investors Eniac Ventures, The Chernin Group, Techstars Ventures, Tikhon Bernstam of Parse and others.

Current Embrace customers include the likes of Home Depot, Headspace, OkCupid, Boxed, Thrive Market and TuneIn. These companies use the service to get a better view of how their apps perform on their users’ devices.

As Embrace CEO and co-founder Eric Futoran, who also co-founded entertainment company Scopely, argues, too many similar services mostly focus on crashes, yet those only constitute a small number of the actual user experience issues in most apps. “To a large extent, crashes are solved,” he told me. “The crash percentages are often 99.8 percent crash-free and yet users are still complaining.”

That’s because there are plenty of other issues beyond code exceptions, which many tools focus on almost exclusively, that can force an app to close (think memory issues or the OS shutting down the app because it uses too many CPU cycles). “To users, that looks like a crash. Your app closed. But in no way, that’s a crash from a technical perspective,” Futoran noted.

Raising this new round, Futoran told me, was pretty easy. Indeed, Pritzker approached the company. “It was not fundraising,” he said. “They sat us down and said, ‘we want to fund you guys,’ which I find pretty unusual. So I’ve been calling it a pre-emptive round.” He also noted that having Pritzker involved should help open up the mid-west market for Embrace, which is mostly focusing on enterprise customers (though Futoran’s definition of “enterprise” includes the likes of digital-first companies like Headspace).

“We saw many organizations trust Embrace’s seamless and innovative optimization platform to quickly identify and resolve any user-impacting issues within their apps, and we’re optimistic about the future of the company in this growing market,” said Gabe Greenbaum, an LA-based partner for Pritzker Group Venture Capital. “We look forward to this next stage in the company’s growth journey and are honored to partner with Eric and Fredric to help them achieve their vision.”

The company plans to use the new funding to increase its go-to-market capabilities, and grow its team to build out its technology.

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Cloudflare introduces free network monitoring tool for mobile app developers

When Cloudflare acquired Neumob, a mobile performance startup last fall, it was a sign that the company wanted to move beyond web performance into helping mobile app developers understand what’s happening at the network level. Today, the company introduced Cloudflare Mobile SDK, a free tool which could help developers understand network-level performance problems.

Cloudflare’s co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince says developers have had tools at their disposal to understand why apps crash on the device itself, but they have lacked visibility into the network, which can be a major contributor to app instability.

Developers access the monitoring capability by adding a couple of lines of code to their iOS or Android apps. After that, they can log into a web console to see network performance metrics. The tool is designed to surface problems like dropping packets because of a poor signal or moving from WiFi to a mobile a network, each of which can cause an app to hang or otherwise misbehave.

Screenshot: Cloudflare

The tool gives you the ability to see how the network is performing in various parts of the world and where you are seeing issues and as it gathers and display information, it should help correlate performance issues with a flaky network and the impact that could be having on app performance.

Over time, he says they will be partnering with other monitoring tools to give developers a single place to check their performance issues. “Our goal is how can we get networks to perform better and give app developers better insight about network behavior.” Prince said.

Prince says, for starters they are providing some basic suggestions on how to improve performance, but in the future, they plan to integrate the network monitoring tool more deeply with the rest of the Cloudflare toolkit to make it easier to tweak performance problems.

Cloudflare also sees this as a way to build a better understanding of how networks are performing in general, and as they pull this data together, they plan to publish a mobile network reliability report. “We expect as this gets built into [more apps], and gives us visibility into mobile network providers, we will able to see who is providing the highest level of service and who has spotty or bad data services,” he explained.

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Apple’s widened ban on templated apps is wiping small businesses from the App Store

 Following its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple released updated App Store guidelines that included a new rule allowing it to ban apps created by a “commercialized template or app generation service.” The understanding at the time was this was part of Apple’s larger App Store cleanup, and the focus was on helping rid the marketplace of low-quality clone and spam apps.… Read More

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Requiem For The App Revolution

too-many-apps-fb The app revolution is dead. In fact, it died years ago. It had been a good run, but a revolution is no longer a revolution when the model is the status quo. With new apps created every day, the revolution has definitely been televised, commoditized and capitalized. But while the app revolution is dead, a new movement is rising to take its place — the experience evolution. Read More

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Lessons Learned On App Design For Fast-Growth Markets

globe, mobile apps One of the typical mistakes developers make is thinking that because they’ve had success in one corner of the globe, they should be able to employ the same strategy to drive adoption elsewhere. The truth of the matter is apps that are wildly successful in the U.S., Europe and Japan often fail to gain substantial traction in areas like India, South America and the Middle East; these… Read More

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Our Nine Favorite Companies From The 500 Startups Demo Day

500 Startups batch 9 It’s that time again: 500 Startups just put on demo day for its ninth batch of companies at Microsoft’s conference building in sunny Mountain View, Calif. The seed stage investor and startup incubator showed off 29 products and services that range from making it easier to get a home loan to a marketplace for 3D printed knick-knacks. Read More

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