App discovery becomes easier

iOS release 2.10

November 28th, 2015

We have just published Highstreet version 2.10 and updated all shopping apps on our platform with this. Let us tell you what’s new.

A new app store category: shopping

Apple took the unusual action to add a new category to the app store and it is dedicated to shopping apps. This is great news! Until now, most shopping apps were either categorised in Lifestyle or Catalogs. These categories were alright but a dedicated section is of course much better.

This step is a sign of shopping apps continuing to become more popular. And of mobile becoming more important in e-commerce. We have published all Highstreet apps in this new Shopping category.

New ways to discover your app outside the app store

Recently, Google’s head of search Amit Singhal announced at a conference that “Apps are fundamentally a far better way to render the same information than rendering on the Web.”

However, until now, Google Search only showed web content. That’s why this year, Google has been starting to index the content of apps. Around the time of writing more than 100 billion app content pages should be indexed by Google Search and shown on mobile devices.

Of course, your shopping app should be part of this. So to make sure Google is able to index Highstreet we have implemented the Google search tools into our framework. We have no control of when Google will start to show these but we will monitor this closely and keep you posted. SEO for apps is now a thing.

Universal links

One of the highlights of version 2.9 was support for universal links. As a reminder: universal links is a feature of iOS 9. By enabling it, the app opens directly when customers encounter a link to your website somewhere. So if customers, who have downloaded the app, tap on a link in Google, your app will open right away, instead of going to the website first. It’s a great feature as it provides a much smoother experience for customers.

Flinders and PME Legend have implemented this already so if you want to see how it works search for their products on Google. In 2.10 we have improved universal linking behaviour further and removed an issue that occured when customers opened the same link, a second time. To support this feature, some configuration on your web server needs to take place (to securely link your site to your app).

New feature: product call outs

Most of you, use special labels for products that are on sale or are new. Until now, these monikers were only visible on category level. With this release we have incorporated them on product detail pages.

Checkout experience unified

We have now unified the checkout experience on iPhone and iPad Both now use a simple one page overview, inspired by how Apple also designs the checkout in their shopping app.

Smoothened lookbooks

On certain devices, especially iPad, browsing the lookbooks was not as smooth as it could be. There could be stuttering when going from photo to photo. We don’t like stuttering, so we optimised the performance and browsing is now very smooth.

Continuous optimisation

Besides this, we have fixed a lot of small issues and rare crashes. The app is very stable and keeps a 99.9% crash free ratio which is very high. We do everything we can to keep it that way.

Thank you for reading. If you have any technical questions about any of the above, please send a mail to support@highstreetapp.com so that our support team can help you further. For other questions don’t hestitate to reply to this message.

All the best from the Highstreet team!

Thijs

Originally published at www.highstreetapp.com.