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How to Submit to China's Top 15 Mobile App Stores

China's app store environment is quite divided with over 2 dozen widely used marketplaces. We provide step by step instructions on how to successfully submit your apps to the top 15.

Using Prerender.io for SEO

If you have built a single page application website, you will know how hard it is to make it SEO ready.

Top 88 Chinese Websites and Mobile Apps

Ever wonder who is who and what is what in China's internet and mobile digital landscape?

How to use gravity and layout_gravity on LinearLayout that includes TextViews

Impotant points and examples on how gravity and layout_gravity works on Android LinearLayout and TextViews.

25 Mobile UI Design Collections

The User Interface and the resulting User Experience is the critical challenge towards creating a successful mobile application.

How Web Animation Can Boost Your Business

Do you think your website looks a bit dated and it’s time for a redesign?

How to Submit to China's Top 15 Mobile App Stores

S.R. Schroeder // Last Updated: 2016-09-27

With about 450 million mobile users in China, there are around 30 app stores for Android and around 10 for iOS. However, most app stores are similar to each other, including the apps in each app store, the requirements and app submitting procedure. According to the statistics of TalkingData, the biggest app stores in China are app stores of Tencent, 360 and Baidu. In this article, we list 15 top app stores in China and introduce how to submit your app to each app store in detail.

1. 360 App Store

360 app store is one of the most popular and safest app stores in China. According to the statistics of TalkingData, the biggest independent mobile data service platform in China, the coverage and active rate of 360 app store is the TOP1 of China’s mobile app store. Compared to other mobile app stores, 360 App Store has the least ShanZhai app (ShanZhai app means an app that copy the functions and features of a popular app but with another brand).

Steps to submit apps:

  1. Go to http://dev.360.cn/, the 360 mobile apps developer platform.
  2. Click ‘Submit an app’.
  3. Sign in with your 360 account. (Create one if you don’t have.)
  4. Click the ‘Developer category’.
  5. Choose from personal developer or corporate developer and fill in the information according to the requirements.
  6. After you signed up successfully, enter the platform of submit an app or a game. Here I’ll use ‘submit an app’ as an example. Click ‘submit an app’ and then select the category of your app.
  7. Go to the page of submit APK, fill in the information according to the notes and then submit your app for review. After it’s reviewed successfully, you will be able to see it in the 360 app store!

Using Prerender.io for SEO

Ervin Musngi MCSD // Last Updated: 2016-09-13

If you have built a single page application website, you will know how hard it is to make it SEO ready.

Current practice, webmasters/developers create a “parallel universe” of content. Users with Javascript turn on will see dynamic contents, while users on non-javascript enabled browser (including crawlers) will see content that is static and created offline.

 

Google have been updating its algorithm on how it will support dynamic web pages (AJAX). Previously we are using the hash-bang approach. Which really doesn’t play well with other crawlers.

 

For our website, we will be using Prerender.io.

 

What is Prerender.io? it is a caching service, in which it creates a snapshot of every page on your website. These snapshots are created base on the final output of the page (yes AJAX is supported). This is good if you don’t have enough time to create two approach on your website that generate both dynamic and static pages.

Top 88 Chinese Websites and Mobile Apps

Alladin Legaspi // Last Updated: 2016-09-07

Ever wonder who is who and what is what in China's internet and mobile digital landscape? It is easy to get them all confused so here we have a complete overview of the top Chinese websites and mobile apps broken down into the following main categories that reflect China's online and mobile consumption trends: 

Table of Contents - Chinese Websites: 

  • Top 10 Financial & Personal Services Websites
  • Top 10 E-commerce Websites
  • Top 10 Entertainment & Leisure Websites
  • Top 10 Sports & Fitness Websites
  • Top 10 Tourism and Travel Websites
  • Top 8 Medical & Health Websites

Table of Contents - Chinese Mobile Applications:

  • Top 5 Communication & Chat Apps
  • Top 5 News Apps
  • Top 5 Household & Livelihood Apps
  • Top 5 Photography & Video Recording Apps
  • Top 5 Travel & Map Apps
  • Top 5 Reading & Audio Books Apps

How to use gravity and layout_gravity on LinearLayout that includes TextViews

Romel Barrera // Last Updated: 2016-09-02

Maybe some of you are confused, got stuck or wondered why the vertical/horizontal alignment of Textview is not working on your desired output. Following are important points and examples that may help you understand how it works:

  • Check the parent (LinearLayout) width/height.  Let us assume that you want to positon the TextViews vertically to the center of the LinearLayout. With the layout example below, the gravity and layout_gravity will not work since the parent layout(LinearLayout) height has the same size as of its children(TextViews) and the children have no space for movement.

25 Mobile UI Design Collections

Rey Magsino // Last Updated: 2016-08-23

The User Interface and the resulting User Experience is the critical challenge towards creating a successful mobile application. The User Interface alone can make or break the success of an app. Having a great UI is a must for every mobile application.

From mobile UI elements, UI animations, material designs to wearable UI, these are 25 websites that have the best mobile UI collections and inspirations to help you create the best UI for your app.

01. UI Haus

A showcase of the best mobile app designs ever made. Very easy to scan and their organization system of the website is quite good, where they show only one screenshot page per app, but you can select that one to see many more on each apps own dedicated page. Top recommendation.

How Web Animation Can Boost Your Business

Rey Magsino // Last Updated: 2016-07-24

Do you think your website looks a bit dated and it’s time for a redesign? Browsing the Internet to look for inspiration and latest trends could convince you that livening up your website with eye-catching animations is the way to go.  But is it?

Animation on the Web: the State of the Art

The human brain is biologically trained to be attracted by things that move and you can see the desire to capture movement and change in a vast number of artistic creations.

Although the web has started out as a fairly static medium of linked documents, developers didn’t take long to work out ways to introduce moving and blinking stuff to add more spice to web pages.  

I’m talking about primitive attempts, at times misguided like the infamous blinking text and forever animating GIF images, but at other times already aware of the opportunities for increasing usability that animation effects could offer.  The first rollover effects on buttons made possible by JavaScript are a case in point: by hovering over a button image a snippet of JavaScript code would swap the visible image with a second one, thereby changing the button’s appearance.  Using images made the button more attractive and closer to real life, while the rollover effect gave users feedback about their interaction with the element on the page.

The big jump in the quality and complexity of animation on the web came with Flash, a software by Adobe.  Despite being something of a usability nightmare, Flash allowed developers to do pretty amazing things on the Internet, including interactive games.

Today is a magic time for animation on the web.  We enjoy more standards supporting browsers, fast Internet connections, and high resolution retina screens to deliver immersive animated content.  Developers and designers have mostly stopped using proprietary technologies to embrace web standards and open source libraries to play animation directly in the browser.  Here’s a rundown on what’s out there.