Creating AppLinks with Distimo Monitor

One of the most annoying things about App Development is what to do about your web presence post launch.

Ideally you would build a website for each product, or at least a spotlight page within your main website. But that’s alot of extra work when you are a single developer and your app is already done (ie you’re ready to move on to something new!). Not to mention, it’s another point of maintenance as you need to keep it synced with your current list of supported markets. This is maybe not a big deal with a few apps… but once you get 6 or 7 apps, multiplied across 4 or 5 markets, it starts to get a little ridiculous.

In addition to a web presence, you need to create some sort of App Link. These are links you can blast out to FB or Twitter, and when people click them they can download your app. This is integral to harnessing any viral effect for your game or application. These link pages take a while to build too… since you need to sniff user agents, embed your various appstore links and icons,, maybe you want some nice design, etc etc. You could direct them to your web site site, but that’s a bit lazy, and  probably not the most effective way to get downloads.

So that all adds up to a bunch of work. And not fun work either. Just shitty boring work.

Luckily Distimo Monitor just introduced a new feature that solves this in one blow.

If you’re not familiar with Distimo, they are a totally free service that provides stats for Sales, Downloads, Reviews, Rankings etc, of your Apps, and they support a ton of App Stores, including: iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, Blackberry, Windows Store and a bunch more. If you develop apps, you owe it to yourself to sign up with these guys.

Anyays… App Links. So now with Distimo, you can bundle any number of your apps into a link. Distimo will:

  • Create and host a web presence for your app
  • Displays the localized price for the App (or Free)
  • Scrape the AppStore’s for screenshots to  use in the design
  • Redirect all mobile user’s to the appropriate app store’s when they click “Download”
  • Provides Facebook/Twitter share links baked right in

Thats pretty rad. Lets run real quickly through setting one up.

Firt off, sign up for your free Distimo Account.

Second, hit up the “Funnels” section, and click “New AppLink

 

 

Next up, group all matching Applications from your various stores together into a shared link. In this case, I’m putting all 4 versions of PicShop Lite into a link:

 

The final step is to customize your page a bit. You can add a screenshot, select which Icon you’d like to use, as well as upload a custom 1900×1200 graphic for the Background:

You can also set a “Vanity URL”, which is a prettified shortlink.

With that you’re done! Hit publish to see the end result (Click the image below to see the page we just created):

Thats all there was to it :) The beautiful thing here is that there’s virtually no maintenance. You’re already maintaining a list of Apps within Distimo for monitoring purposes, so using that same list to auto-generate your app links is a perfect solution.

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