App.io Ads – Your game becomes the mobile ad, with try-before-install

I work in an ad tech company on the mobile product, and all of my coworkers are amazed by this. Congrats on actually innovating the mobile advertising space instead of another native ad/geolocation startup.

Certainly seems cool and I admire the way these guys have been pushing their company from when it was appfolio.

But a couple things worry me about these ads.

- If the user isn't in a mindset to look at another app, then could it be a bigger barrier to have something 'interactive' if they need to spend time waiting for menus , loading etc. At least a standard popup can show a screenshot and get straight to the point.

- Not being able to control the experience. If all networks were equal would be great, but how many users might come away thinking your app is slow , unresponsive etc because it can't stream the app in time ?

Seems like it could be great for expensive pay to install apps, but if the app is free anyway maybe it's just better to put the effort into getting them to download that, rather than play the ad.

This is pretty freaking amazing. I wonder how they intend to monetize sufficiently to support enough servers if this became popular. I think they need a little more information up front on the landing page, it took some digging to understand that this is essentially running a simulator build on their server and porting the bits to the browser and interactions back to the their servers and the app.

Apple should buy these folks pronto.

Our economics work out pretty well ;)

Good point on having more info. What we've found is that developers will want to get into the nitty gritty details, whereas ads people will want easy to digest info about how it will benefit them.

If you're keen to find out more, we have some pretty good documentation: http://docs.app.io/

Thanks so much for your thoughts. Co-founder here.

- We give the user the opportunity to download the app at any time. It isn't in the video, but along the bottom, a download button is available at all times so the user can get to the App Store as quickly as possible. On loading: We actively encourage all apps using the platform to bypass menus and get straight to the content. That converts much better.

- We do a few things to ensure every user has a great experience and apps are not presented in a negative light. As quickly as we can (generally 200ms), we run a speed test to ensure latency and bandwidth are sufficient for a good experience. We also allow advertisers to specify a fallback video or static image, so if we can't deliver a great interactive experience, we are able to offer an ad which is at least as good as the existing types.

I'll also mention that the video on the homepage is actually a live filmed demo of a trial campaign.