Yandex Blog

In this blog post, I would like to share my reflections on the landmark settlement between Google and the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) (you can read the FAS press release here).

Today is an important day for Russian consumers as Google has agreed to take significant steps that open up its Android platform in Russia.  Under the terms of the settlement, 55 million Russian Android users will be offered a choice of search engines on their mobile devices.  Smartphone manufacturers will also have more freedom to select the apps that they preinstall on devices.

Several years ago, it became clear that the closed nature of Google’s Android inhibited our ability to provide a search option for Russian users on the most popular mobile platform.  Google required Android smartphone manufacturers to ship devices with Google search as the default search engine and to place the Google search widget on the default home screen.  Google also limited the placement of competing applications on Android devices. These factors created limits for how smartphone manufacturers could access the essential Android App Store - Google Play. These requirements made it challenging for search providers and other competing applications providers to pre-install their services on Android phones. Android was limiting options for users, smartphone manufacturers, and competitors – and all together restricting innovation. Yandex requested that FAS initiate an investigation into Google’s business practices. In 2015, FAS found Google’s practices to be anti-competitive and in violation of Russian antitrust laws.

As one of the largest internet companies in Europe, and the leading search and mobile applications provider in Russia, access to platforms is critically important for Yandex. Technology platforms make it possible for us (as well as other companies) to continue a rapid pace of innovation. But this is only possible if those platforms are sufficiently open to foster competition by allowing access to third-party developers. We are excited to have reached a solution that restores these necessary elements to ensure a more dynamic and competitive ecosystem.

I am thankful to the Federal Antimonopoly Service for applying the law in a manner that effectively and efficiently restores competition to the market for the benefit of Russian users.

I also want to thank Google, not only for their cooperation, but also for recognizing the value of openness. We have always thought Google plays a constructive role in the Russian market.  Competition breeds innovation. It’s our desire to participate in a market where users can choose the best services available.

For the past 20 years, it has been our mission to help users better navigate the online and offline world.  When I founded Yandex in 1997 with Ilya Segalovich, Elena Kolmanovskaya, and others, we shared a vision for the way search technologies would help people find information on the Internet.  Over the years, our machine learning capabilities have grown, and with it our aspirations. Our mobile services, maps, eCommerce, classifieds, and on-demand transportation services have expanded our ability to help users on the go and in the moment with contextually relevant information.

I’m excited, together with the entire team at Yandex, to continue building products and services that deliver exceptional customer experiences. With open platforms, our future is bright. With choice, the possibilities are endless.

Arkady

Yandex is rolling out a revamped version of its mobile app analytics platform – now under the name “AppMetrica”. The new platform features a powerful mobile ad tracking solution in addition to the pre-existing features – user analytics and crash reports. Now AppMetrica covers all key domains for marketers, publishers and developers – and they can access it completely for free and without any limits, in real-time mode and with a single SDK.

We released our analytics tool for the first time almost two years ago as Yandex.Metrica for Apps. It was our response to the lack of good user analytics solutions on market – we had to create our own to learn how mobile apps published by Yandex were performing. Then we thought it may be of interest to other people around the world, and opened it up for everyone – for free.

Since 2013 we’ve been getting requests from marketers and developers who love the way we do it – currently AppMetrica processes nearly one billion in-app events every day for apps connected to the service. However, users need more, and we got clear signals from our in-house mobile marketers who track Yandex’s app user acquisitions. The main problem is that they had to spend up to 15% of their budgets on mobile ad measurement tools alone, which is quite a lot even for us ☺. Another issue is that product analysts and managers couldn’t easily use detailed traffic source segmentation in analytics tools as the two are separated and usually developed by different providers. In the end, different tools require the integration of multiple SDKs, so project teams need to spend more time on development and testing. We spent almost two years solving these issues to turn AppMetrica into a fully-fledged, integrated, professional mobile analytics and tracking platform.

The new AppMetrica provides detailed ad campaign reporting. Users can drill down to analyse how well different creatives and ad placements are performing, see tracking link parameters breakdowns, and get user engagement reports by applying cohort analysis with retention and event conversion rates which gives a really insightful analysis of traffic quality. AppMetrica is integrated with the most popular mobile ad networks out of the box, including AdColony, InMobi, Millennial Media, Vungle, and many others. We keep expanding the list of ad networks, and users can also manually integrate traffic sources they need and set up postbacks in a few easy steps.

The new platform aids re-engagement improvements using state-of-the-art deep linking technology. Hardcore marketers have the opportunity to pull raw data from AppMetrica via its API so they can create in-house custom reports or use it in their proprietary software. They soon will get even more options to improve conversion: we are now working on integration with data export from AppMetrica to popular re-targeting and look-alike platforms.

AppMetrica works with Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps. Game developers will also enjoy our Unity plugin. AppMetrica is available for free and starts to provide reports in just a few minutes after rolling up an app with the integrated SDK. 

With more than 85% of the smartphone market in Russia, Android continues to be the country’s favourite operating system. The great variety of devices within a $200 price range supporting this platform, among other things, has contributed to Android’s popularity with Russians who are happy to compromise some of their smartphone’s technical quality, such as memory space, for its affordability. ‘There’s an app for that’ doesn’t really do it for a lot of budget smartphone users.

To make life easier for the owners of budget Android-based devices we have offered them an all-in-one application for their everyday needs – from current weather, currency exchange rates or traffic conditions to what’s on in the cinema around the corner or the shortest way to the nearest bank or restaurant. We have reissued our search app for Android to provide our users with a one-tap access to our key services on their mobile devices.

The new Yandex app has expanded its functions beyond search to include quick access to email, news, maps, city navigation, taxi booking, or any other service available in Yandex’s product range. To use any of these services one doesn’t even need to have a corresponding app on their phone – the refurbished search app will take them to the mobile version of the service at Yandex.ru. The new Yandex app allows the owners of low-budget Android-based smartphones to enjoy the full mobile experience without having to compromise anything.

First announced in 2011, the Yandex search app now has a weekly user audience of over three million. The new app can be downloaded from Google Play. The users of Yandex.Search in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan will be upgraded to the new Yandex app when they update their current version.

Nokia’s Android smartphone, Nokia X, announced at the recent Mobile World Congress, comes to the Russian and Belarusian markets equipped with the essential search functionality provided by Yandex. The Finnish company’s first in the X-series of phones premieres today on these markets with the Yandex.Search app already preinstalled and the Yandex search engine as a built-in search provider in the phone’s browser.

Buyers of Nokia’s new product in these countries will be able to funnel mobile apps for all their needs through our alternative Android app store, Yandex.Store, which is now featured in Nokia Store. Nokia’s range of Yandex-enhanced Nokia X smartphones will continue with Nokia X+ and XL with Yandex as a default search provider and Yandex.Store preinstalled.

Nokia’s smartphones have always been popular in Russia and the CIS, not in the least, because of the company’s ability to cater for the specific needs of their customers in each of the markets. It’s only natural for Yandex, who always placed a top priority on relevance of service to a specific user in a specific location, and Nokia to join efforts to make sure the user experience of their customers is locally-relevant, smooth and seamless, even when they go from desktop to mobile, or from one mobile device or OS to another. Nokia’s decision to choose Yandex’s products for their new phones in Russia and Belarus ensures comfortable user experience for their customers in each of these countries, who already know Yandex and its products very well.

We’ve been partnering with Nokia since 2011, when Yandex became a default search provider on Nokia’s Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 distributed in Russia. We’re now happy to have rekindled our old relationship through our support of the alternative Android ecosystem. The love of freedom of choice is what brings Yandex and Nokia together in this partnership.

For the majority of small or medium-sized Android device manufacturers, using the popular Linux-based mobile operating system, which is famously free to install, modify and distribute, is like being given a car without the key. It's nice and all but how do you drive it?

There isn’t much use of a free operating system if you cannot offer your customers all the basic features mobile users now take for granted. The Android mobile OS is free, but all the defining features of a mobile experience – app store, browser, email and maps – are all available under special, case-by-case agreements. 

Freedom of choice. We love it. We have been developing products and services to enjoy this freedom and share it with all internet users since 1997. With the explosive evolution in mobile industry, our key desktop products followed their consumers and migrated to smartphones and tablets

Yandex.Maps, Yandex.Mail and our search service were the first to appear on the world's most popular Android platform, followed by the stellar user interface solution UI Shell 3D, which is now known as Yandex.Shell. Last year, our application store for Android, Yandex.Store, Yandex.Browser and a cloud storage app, Yandex.Disk, joined the range of our Android solutions. 

While we primarily were working on covering all the bases for our users on Android devices, what we've got in the end was a full-fledged Android 'ecosystem'. A comprehensive, out-of-the-box solution, versatile and technologically honed enough to be offered to original device manufacturers as firmware that they can install on their devices shipped to the Russian market. This is the key to the car they were given for free and now they can drive it.

Yandex.Kit is a customisable suite of mobile components available for most versions of Android OS. It has all the basics indispensable for the up-to-date mobile experience. Vendors selling their original Android devices in Russia can enjoy the full Yandex.Kit package, which currently includes an app store, launcher and dialer, browser, maps, a cloud app - 15 apps overall. OEMs targeting other markets can enjoy Yandex.Kit as a trio of Yandex products – Yandex.Shell UI, Yandex.Browser and Yandex.Store.

And the best part is there are no fees. Yandex.Kit is distributed on a fee-free basis and performs well on virtually any hardware, including the not-so-powerful devices popular in Russia and the CIS. In addition, smartphones carrying Yandex.Kit can be easily branded under the manufacturer's name. In Russia, the manufacturer can choose to market their device with the Yandex logo, to piggyback on the existing customer affinity for one of the most recognisable and strong brands in this country.

Huawei and Explay, the early adopters of alternative Android software, will show their devices with Yandex.Kit on board at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in just four days. Their phones will be available to customers in Russia in March.

Reasons to love Yandex.Kit: 

One-stop authorisation gives the user an opportunity to have access to all Yandex apps after entering their name and password only once – when they are setting up their phone.

Instant contact syncing instantly imports the user’s contacts from their Google Account to their Yandex account.

Smart dialer uses information from Yandex's Business Directory to identify the caller's number even if they aren’t one of the user's contacts.

Yandex.Kit equips the Android device with a Yandex.Shell-based home screen, which transforms the device’s user interface into an interactive 3D space with useful panels and widgets.

Advanced contact book finds the user’s contacts even when the search doesn’t exactly match the contact’s name, and offers phone numbers of venues, companies or businesses, such as restaurants, pharmacies or cinemas, in the vicinity of the user’s current location.

Android app store, Yandex.Store, gives the user access to the inventory of over 100,000 apps, including most popular, such as Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Cut The Rope and others. Users of Yandex.Store in the Yandex.Kit package also receive a 10% rebate from every app purchase to their 'rebate account', which can be used for purchasing more apps. The classical 70/30 revenue share scheme, when the revenue from app sales is shared between the app developer and the store, also includes the manufacturer or provider of the device that carries Yandex.Kit.

Smart, secure and easy-to-use mobile browser, Yandex.Browser, offers smart search suggestions and saves the user’s favourite websites and tabs and arranges them into a single control panel.

Other reasons to love Yandex.Kit:

Yandex's cloud service, Yandex.Disk, is available for running on original devices as part of the package with Yandex.Store, Yandex.Browser and Yandex.Shell. The map library, featuring a worldwide map and detailed maps for the largest US and European cities, compatible with any geolocation app via a mapping API, is available with Yandex.Store or as part of the full package.

Android device manufacturers can also enjoy original branding opportunities for Yandex.Store and freedom to choose a search engine for Yandex.Browser on their mobile device equipped with Yandex.Kit.

OEMs and mobile providers can discover more business opportunities at our stand E33, Hall 5 at Mobile World Congress in Fira Barcelona Gran Via, on February, 24-27.

¡Nos vemos pronto!

Jolla, an independent mobile developer from Finland, has chosen Yandex.Store for the Android app distribution on their new smartphone. Yandex.Store will be preinstalled on the highly-anticipated Jolla device.

The Finnish smartphone maker has been attracting a lot of industry and media attention for their Sailfish OS, a Linux-based, open mobile operating system, which they have been developing based on previously Nokia-backed MeeGo. Former Nokians did what they do best: they developed a smartphone – a smartphone that would carry Sailfish OS ‘to offer choice, to bring something different to an industry [which is] stagnating under the Android + iOS duopoly’.

What Jolla also did was make their Sailfish OS Android-compatible and pick Yandex.Store for their Android app distribution. Yandex.Store, an alternative Android app store, which currently features over 85,000 apps in 17 categories, offers the best and most popular social networking and communication apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Skype, Viber, WeChat, as well as games, productivity apps and music apps. The up-and-coming alternative Android app store has an in-app purchase opportunity and is available on smartphones and tablets in 37 languages.

"Jolla's strategy is always to work with the most applicable service partners in specific markets and create long-term strategic partnerships. We analysed a number of alternative Android app stores to use for our first markets in Europe, and quickly found out that what Yandex offered was very competitive and that they were very interested in developing their app store together with us for their future needs and for the needs of Sailfish customers", says Sami Pienimaki, co-founder of Jolla.

Jolla and Yandex.Store were made for each other. We both like dialogue. We both like to talk to the developer community and to our users, and we both want to hear them. We both support community-based initiatives promoting choice and fair market. Jolla is the initiator of Sailfish OS, an open mobile operating system, aimed ‘to bring innovation to a stagnating market and help mobile industry players to stay on the bleeding edge of the mobile OS development’. Yandex.Store is a supporter of One Platform Foundation, a global open-source initiative, whose aim is to help users, app developers and OEMs to cope with Android fragmentation.

Jolla and Yandex.Store were united by one purpose – make the life of every Android app developer easier. Yandex.Store, created and supported by app developers, understands better than anyone else what app developers want. And what they want is a quick and easy way to distribute their apps to a maximum number of stores. Now, anyone submitting their Android app to Yandex.Store can enjoy a new distribution channel – Sailfish OS on Jolla smartphones.

– and will tell you all about it just in a couple of clicks

Other than being one of the most popular search engines on the planet, we also make mobile apps. Just like everyone else. As of today, there are 25 apps published by Yandex, from maps and photos to cloud storage and navigation, enjoyed by millions users on their iPhones, iPads, Windows Phones, Android phones and other devices all over the world. Our users have always been our first priority; naturally, to meet all their expectations and maybe do more, we want to know who they are – where they come from, what device and operating system they use, which language they prefer for their interface, what type of connection they have and which provider they use, what they do in the app and how long it takes.

Like any other mobile developer, we tried and tested all sorts of mobile analytics solutions, free and paid. Some of them allowed us to view how many users we had per day or how many of our users were from London. Others went a step further and told us how many users from London we had per day. At a push, we could also see how many users from London per day we had on Android devices.

Only a few of the mobile analytics solutions that we tried could provide us with information in real time. All of them required quite a lot of time and effort to create data reports, which would combine a large number of parameters. We wanted to know more, we wanted it fast and we wanted it to be easy. So, we made an app usage analytics tool of our own - Yandex.Metrica for Apps.

Our good, old and trusted web analytics tool Yandex.Metrica has been measuring site traffic, visitor behavior and ad efficiency for Yandex since 2008. From 2009, the year when Yandex.Metrica became publicly available, millions of websites, online services and advertising clients have been using this tool free of charge. So, we tweaked the analytics tool we loved to use for websites to use it for our apps. And now, our Yandex.Metrica for Apps becomes available to all mobile developers anywhere in the world to use for free.

Yandex.Metrica for Apps is a combination of all the lovely qualities that any mobile app developer will love:

User-friendly 
Yandex.Metrica for Apps has a no-nonsense, easy-to-use user interface. It takes only a few clicks to create personalised, high-precision, comprehensive profiles of your app’s audience.

Easy-to-read, custom-made reports 
Using Yandex.Metrica for Apps, you can create app usage reports according to your specifications, which can include any combination of the following parameters: users’ country, app’s version, operating system and its version, device type (tablet or smartphone), model and manufacturer, screen resolution, user interface language, mobile provider, connection type, user actions and time of user sessions.

Real-time information 
Yandex.Metrica for Apps shows you the app’s usage data that is only a few minutes or even seconds old. You can also see what happened in your app hours, days, weeks or months ago.

Crash reports
Yandex.Metrica for Apps offers you detailed, customised reports on your app’s crashes. If there are any.

Popular mobile platforms
Yandex.Metrica for Apps is designed to work on any of the popular platforms. It will seamlessly build into your Android, iOS or Windows Phone app.

Any mobile developer can now see almost in real time a day-by-day breakdown for one week of the number of new users, say, in London and San Francisco who made an in-app purchase using the 1.01 version of the app on Samsung Galaxy S4:

Or, the number of new users of the app’s 1.10 version in the U.S. who spent 30 to 60 seconds interacting with the app, by device:

Or, all the crashes your app had in one week, by device type:

Or, the number of crashes the new users of the app’s version 1.02 on tablets in Germany had in one week:

To start generating personalised reports on your app’s usage, register at appmetrica.yandex.com, receive the API key and integrate SDK Yandex.Metrica for Apps into your app. Your reports will be available for viewing in your account at appmetrica.yandex.com within just one minute after integration.

The next version of Yandex.Metrica for Apps, on which we are working hard right now, will include marketing tools, which will complement the existing statistical tools. The new options will give developers an opportunity to see their traffic sources and funnels and use advanced event settings. We cannot wait.
Let us know what you think of our new mobile analytics solution Yandex.Metrica for Apps.

And those of you in London on October 22 or 23 can come and see Yandex.Metrica for Apps in action at our stand 437 at the developer conference and exhibition Apps World in Earls Court. Alex Kochubey, our very own Yandex.Store developer, who spends more time segmenting his user audience than enjoying any other of life’s pleasures, will show and tell all about it.

Following the success of our automated translation app, Yandex.Translate, for iOS (over 230,000 downloads since launch in March; about 100,000 translations per day), we are now bridging the communication gap for Android smartphone users by releasing the first edition of Yandex.Translate for Android.

With the English language user interface, the app is of good help to anyone in need of a quick and accurate (well, as accurate as it gets with a machine) translation between English and eleven other languages – Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Czech, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish and Dutch. What makes it much better than your standard robot language is our database of billions of word combinations. We scour the content of huge amount of webpages for patterns and collocations and use statistical algorithms to calculate the best possible equivalent for any given word combination.

Yandex.Translate for Android shares some of its most popular features with its iOS counterpart – predictive typing and simultaneous translation. Just like in Yandex.Translate for iOS, the Android app can translate the source text as it is being typed, while predictive typing can accurately predict the next word in the source text, which cuts input time by more than half. Try typing on an Android smartphone a 40-character phrase, “My flight was delayed due to bad weather", in 14 taps. Yandex.Translate can do that!

Instead of continually changing translations trying to guess what the user wants to say by each new letter they type, Yandex.Translate makes sure the new letter is the end of the word and only then translates this word. In result, the translated text makes sense. In most cases.

The Android app can voice fragments of translated text of up to 100 characters in English, Russian, Turkish, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Czech and Polish. Enough for the user to learn how to ask for a bill, say thank you or offer help in a foreign language. 

Both, the iOS app and the Android app detect the input language automatically and, of course, just like the iOS app, the Android version has an extensive dictionary with full entries, which include word definitions, usage examples, transcription and an opportunity to sound the key word.

Our mobile apps for automated translation use proprietary machine translation technology based on statistical regularities rather sets of rules and complement our eponymous web-based translation service, which runs since March 2011. 

Yandex.Translate for Android is available for free on Google Play and in Yandex.Store.

We have long been witnessing a trend for the internet to go mobile, with more and more users accessing websites or looking for information online on their mobile devices – smartphones and tablets. The information that is required ‘here and now’ is easily provided by means of a portable contraption found right in your pocket or handbag. More than 10% of all searches on Yandex come from mobile devices. The Yandex.Search app available for all major platforms has been downloaded 3.7 million times by mobile users all over the world.

Today, we are taking yet another step towards our mobile users with the launch of our own Yandex.Browser for Android smartphones and iPad. The new mobile Yandex.Broswer features advanced search functions by Yandex available in Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. This is the first version of the browser, which was designed for devices most popular among our users – smartphones operating Android 4.0 and above and iPad.

The mobile Yandex.Browser follows Yandex’s desktop browser released in October last year and utilises the best technologies and innovations implemented in it. Since its launch, the desktop Yandex.Browser has gained the monthly audience of more than 8 million users only in Russia. Our mobile users, however, have their own needs and expectations when they go online. With this in mind, we have added to the mobile version of Yandex.Browser a number of features that would facilitate the users’ internet experience specifically on their mobile devices. 

The key feature of the mobile Yandex.Browser is that it helps users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey to solve problems on the move by offering them a shortcut to the required information. Using the browser’s Smartbox, a unified address bar and search box, allows to enter either a web address or search query, as well as the name or description of a site, and be taken straight to the required web page bypassing the list of search results. 

The Tablo panel offers instant access to favourite and frequently visited sites. Popular searches instantly retrieve ready-made answers – videos, news, pictures, locations on a map. Upon searching for a photos of Saint Petersburg or café nearby, the user immediately sees a selection of pictures of the city or the nearest café on a map, without having to click through to them. The mobile Yandex.Browser also supports voice input.

The Yandex.Browser for iPad users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey caters to their popular need to quickly pick something online – a hotel, a recipe or a product. The browser’s iPad search interface has the Split View feature: users can see both an open web page and search results on the same screen and quickly switch between them.

Thanks to Opera Software-licensed Turbo technology, just like the desktop Yandex.Browser, the mobile browser quickly loads webpages even when the connection is slow. When you are on EDGE, for example, the browser’s Turbo mode turns on automatically to compress webpages on the server-side by up to 75%, saving your time and also money, if you are on a pay-as-you-use plan.

Yandex.Browser for the iPhone and for Android tablets will be available later this year.

In the next versions of the mobile browser users will be able to synchronise their passwords, user names, tabs, autofill entries, search history, browsing history, favourite websites in Tablo with their desktop browser. In addition, the later versions will support notification for unread messages from social networks.

Most features of the browser are available for users in Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus – the countries where Yandex provides locally-tailored search services that are deeply integrated with the browser. There is also a version with the English user interface available to anyone who would like to try a fast and secure mobile browser on their Android phone or an iPad. 

The current international version of mobile Yandex.Browser has Google as the default search provider, with Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex offered as options, which can be changed manually in the device’s settings. To our users in China we offer Baidu as the default search engine, with Google, Bing and Yahoo! as alternative search providers. The next editions will give users an opportunity to choose the default search provider right at the first launch.

The English language version of the browser is available for download on Google Play for Android smartphones and in Apple App Store for the iPad.

What any app developer goes for is number of downloads. The bigger is the app store, the tougher is the competition, the harder it is for an app to get noticed even if it's a good app.

The largest app store on the Android market naturally attracts both developers and customers, but it's not the one and only place where Android apps can be published and downloaded. There are over 30 alternative Android app stores in the world, including global and local carrier and OEM stores and independent publishers, each with tens of thousands apps. The number of white-label app stores, such as carrier stores using out-of-box solutions for their back-end processing, is innumerable. Alternative Android app stores cannot compete with the market leader by number of apps, but the average number of downloads per app in alternative app stores is quite comparable with that in Google Play, and, taken in total, they can easily beat the Goliath. 

The primary reason why app developers may not be too eager to submit their apps to multiple alternative app stores, including the leading app distributor, is that publishing individually to each app store is quite time and effort consuming. Each of the existing app stores has a format for app submission of its own.

To streamline the publishing process to multiple Android stores, Yandex, together with Opera and SlideME, supported the Android developer community’s initiative One Platform Foundation. This initiative was created to make Android app publishing more fluid and open for all.

The One Platform Foundation team have developed a universal application description file for app stores, AppDF. Using the HTML5 AppDF Editor, an Android app developer can quickly and easily create a ZIP archive with an .appdf extension, which contains a full application description and links to other files in the archive, such as APK files, screenshots, promo graphics, video, etc. Then the developer can submit the app directly to any number of stores supporting this format in just a few clicks.

AppDF is available for free to any Android app developer wishing to expand their distribution channels. You can learn more about AppDF and wrap your APK files into a unified format right now.

The AppDF format is currently supported in Opera Mobile Store, SlideME, CodeNgo and Yandex.Store, with a number of other app distributors on the way to implement this format.

Here is what OPF partners say:

Victor Shaburov, VP Storefront Services, Opera Software: "AppDF is a great tool that allows cross-store app submission. It simplifies the work of developers a lot and is set to drive them a lot of new users."

Chris Jones, Co-Founder of self-publishing platform CodeNgo: "We believe that AppDF will significantly lower the obstacles for developers trying to monetize their apps and also enable a healthier alternative app store ecosystem."

Vassili Philippov, OPF Founder and Head of Mobile Product Distribution at Yandex: “Most Android developers are forced to limit their distribution opportunities to only one or two stores, while other app stores lose their chances to host good apps, just because of the imperfect publishing routine. To help everyone resolve this issue, we developed an open standard for application description – AppDF.” 

George Christopoulos, Chief Executive Officer, SlideME: "The AppDF initiative from One Platform Foundation is a step forward for app publishers. AppDF eliminates most hurdles faced today for major app publishers with a large amount of apps to manage and ingest their apps into multiple stores. We expect in due time, users will have access to more quality apps from major app publishers on even non-Google Play enabled devices operated by alternative stores, provided that user trust can be built via stricter approval processes." 

AppDF is an open standard. Each change or amendment to the standard is public. Any member of the OPF community is welcome with their commits.

OPF is opened for any Android app store, here is what to do if you want to join us.

The next item on the OPF's ‘to-do’ list is streamline in-app billing for Android. Right now each app store requires a new build for an app with the in-app billing feature. Tweaking an opportunity to pay for things or levels in a game for each new app store may take days and even weeks depending on complexity of each new In-App Billing API. The OPF aims to create the Open In-App Billing API, which will be indispensable for those app stores who care for their clients a little more than others and those who simply lack an In-App Billing API of their own.

App developers will benefit from the open-source library the OPF team are currently working on. The Open In-App Billing Library allows app developers support in-app billing APIs from multiple app stores with one piece of code, which dramatically cuts the time required to build versions of an app individually for each app store.

Both AppDF and Open IAP Library allow Android app developers publish apps to multiple stores regardless of their language, thus significantly expanding their distribution market.