Apple Pay with ANZ (including VISA) in Australia today

This is an update from our previous post back in November 2015 where we announced that Apple Pay had hit Australia in a limited way. At the time, the service was limited to American Express cards issued by Amex themselves only.

Well, that all changed today after ANZ and Apple finally reached an agreement over fees that Apple charge to provide the gateway between their devices and the merchant/clearance facilities that the banks provide.

The "interchange fees" that the card-issuing bank can charge the acquiring bank (the bank handling merchant services for a business) are capped at 0.5% in Australia, so there's only a fairly small pie for those card-issuing banks to share with Apple.

It all comes down to tenths of a percent, but all that adds up to big bickies when you have - potentially - billions of dollars in transactions processed every week.

So, as of today, you can use Apple Pay if you have an iPhone of the correct flavour (iPhone 6/6 Plus or newer, any Apple Watch, or iPad 2/Pro/Mini3) and an ANZ card (Visa or Amex ... but not Mastercard, ANZ Access or ANZ Corporate cards).

Looking at ANZ's info page (http://applepay.anz.com/), they have a delightful little slam of their opposition in the Terms and Conditions (point #2:  "Apple Pay is not currently available at NAB, CommBank or Westpac"). Gotta love the bravado, but hope they remember to change that bit in a couple of months when the other banks finalise their own negotiations!

Remember that not only does Apple Pay mean easy payments for consumers at the checkout, but Apple Pay can be integrated into apps to pay for real-world goods and services without the 30% cut that Apple take for in-app purchases. Uber already has an option to pay for rides using your credit card using Apple Pay in some regions.

If you have an app idea or an existing app that could benefit from Apple Pay integration, give us a shout.

Confirmation of ANZ Visa card added to Apple Watch Wallet

Ready to start spending money using ANZ Visa via Apple Watch

Announcing our Parse Migration and Hosting Service

As of January 2017, the party is over and Parse will stop operating. Hundreds of thousands of apps that rely on services provided by Parse will stop working entirely and developers need to get their apps converted to other platforms or providers before this date to avoid being rendered inoperable.

Facebook have, however, been kind enough to create a number of tools to help migrate data from their Parse platform - and more importantly have open-sourced the server itself (without a few of the features).

The team at Creative Intersection, being app development experts across a large number of platforms, have started to offer our help to owners of soon-to-be-orphaned apps to migrate to open-source versions of Parse Server hosted by us ... or to migrate the services baked into those apps across to bespoke solutions (like those that we create and use every day for apps that we develop). Such bespoke solutions are not dependent on any one vendor and therefore are portable between hosting providers and support teams.

Check out our Parse Migration and Hosting page for details.

If you are one of the unfortunate app publishers or developers left out in the cold by the Parse shut-down, drop us a line and we can talk about what is needed to help you keep your app alive.

Parse is shutting down.

The Dangers of using Third-Party App Backend Services

We often meet with would-be and current app publishers to discuss taking over their partly-finished apps from overseas and local developers when the wheels have started to come off the cart. It is a sad fact of life, but you tend to get what pay for and choosing shortcuts and cheap outsourced options often brings with it some fairly predictable outcomes.

We don't judge, and are (almost) always happy to lend a helping hand to finish apps to a Release stage if they have failed to be completed.

Unfortunately, however, we also come across situations where an inappropriate platform has been chosen and that platform simply won't get the app the rest of the way to a completed, scalable product.

Sometimes it's because previous developers have chosen to create a "cross-platform" app using any number of tools that are yet to work and perform perfectly on any platform.

But the more heart-breaking scenario is when previous developers have deliberately chosen the latest and greatest service platform that then gets shut down because it was just isn't making money (or start charging huge sums of money for existing apps to remain active).

One platform that we have talked with a few app publishers about in the past is called "Parse", a "Mobile Backend as a Service" (or MBaas) product. On the surface of it, it seemed like a good idea to them - owned by Facebook since 2013, it enjoyed a good following and made it easy for less technically athletic developers to create complex services such as Push Notifications and server-side data storage/API's.

Mark Zuckerberg presents at the Facebook Parse Developer Day in 2013.

Pic courtesy of Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Our Managing Director, Ian Exaudi, recalls having meetings with several prospective and current app publishers as recently as last year, who were keen to save budget by getting their app to work via Parse instead of a bespoke API such as those that Creative Intersection builds and hosts.

"It's a tragedy when an app publisher spends $50-80K on an app through another developer only to discover that the app will soon stop working and need to be completely re-built because someone has decided to kill off a third-party service", says Ian. "We feel the pain of these entrepreneurs who are having a red-hot go at doing something cool with a new app but have gotten themselves stuck after receiving ill-considered or inexperienced advice early in their venture".

Last week's announcement from Facebook is a case-in-point. Parse will be shutting down in January 2017, leaving many app developers and publishers stuck and needing to invest in massive changes to their apps and systems just to keep going.

Here is Parse's own announcement.

Lesson:  Own as much of your product as you can!

If you would like to talk about how to get your Parse-based app working again, give us a shout.

(update 3/2/16): We are now offering a Parse Data Migration and Hosting service.

In-depth Analysis Competition Winner Drawn

Congratulations to Jennifer Barraclough from Tassie who was drawn at random from the 574 entries we received across Facebook and Twitter during our competition.

We have been in touch with Jennifer and are excited to see how her great app idea will change the world!

Infinitely scalable Google Play badge

Time to give a little something back to the community in the form of a Google Play badge that is infinitely scalable (in other words, it is a vector version).

Even though Google is one of the most recognised brands on the planet they are actually pretty terrible at managing their branding and disseminating the necessary files to the developer community to use for consistent branding (at least compared to the likes of Apple) ... and so as we were creating the artwork for a pull-up print banner (850mm x 2000mm in size) and needed a resizable "Get it on Google Play" badge that could scale up to half the width of the banner, it was nowhere to be had.

Sure, Google Play have a developer resource page that lets you create the various badges, but they only ever output as PNG files that look absolutely terrible at large size.

We had the same problem a few years ago when creating signage for our old office that needed a huge Google logo (we were doing SEO at the time).

So, we created a scalable version of the "Get it on Google Play" badge by pulling together a number of different resources. Any developers or publishers needing to create large artwork (for print, usually), feel free to take it and use it as you wish. We claim no copyright over it, but would love a hat tip via Facebook, Twitter, or an email if you find it useful.

Need a scalable version of the "Get it on Google Play" badge?

Android Pay coming to Australia in 2016

On the back of the recent launch of the Apple Pay service in Australia (tied to American Express cards only), Google have announced that they have signed up ANZ, Westpac, IGNG Direct, Bendigo Bank, Bank SA, and a number of major Aussie retailers to their Android Pay service and will be launching it in Australia sometime in the first half of 2016.

The feature-set of the Android Pay service is almost identical to the Apple Pay service, in that it works with contactless payment systems already in place at many retail locations in the form of "PayPass" and other branded services ... as well as offering app developers the ability to integrate the service into their apps for fast in-app payment for real-world items such as T-shirts, hotel bookings, etc.

Android Pay will be able to store your Mastercard and Visa credit (and debit) cards. No word on whether bank-based American Express cards (or direct Amex cards) will work.

This is all good news for app publishers because it further cements the use of the mobile phone as a method of payment and thereby provides even more opportunities to make a grab for customers' wallets at points in time that are convenient to them.

Android Pay is hitting stores in Australia in the first half of 2016 (pic courtesy of Google/Android Pay)

If you have an app idea or would like to know more about what we do, give us a shout.

Got an App Idea? Win a Free In-depth Analysis

This month we are trying something new at Creative Intersection ... A competition!

We usually provide a free meeting to come and discuss an app idea with our experts at our Milton office, and then our clients either engage us to flesh out that idea or do some more homework themselves before we can properly quote on the costs and time needed to make the idea come to life.

This month, however, we are going to try something a little different:

For every Like on Facebook or Retweet on Twitter, we'll enter you into a draw to win a 10-hour scoping project worth just under $2,000.00!

This is an awesome chance to find out if your cool idea is worth pursuing. Get in front of our app experts and get the benefit of their years of experience in designing and developing mobile and web applications.

Get Social and Win ... Like or Retweet to win a Free In-depth Analysis "Scoping" Project

The Prize:

We have a chat over a cup of coffee (or your favourite beverage), after putting in place our normal Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), so your idea is protected.

We meet with you for a couple of hours, getting a good understanding of what your concept entails and giving you some immediate feedback and thoughts as we go.

We then work through the technical and market potential of your idea to see if it has legs, and provide you with a report outlining our findings and an initial scoping document that you can take to other developers for costing (and of course we will provide a quote too).

How to give yourself the best chance to win:

Facebook ... Like our Creative Intersection Facebook page for a chance to win
Facebook ...  Like our competition post for another chance to win

Twitter ... Retweet the link to this blog post and mention us (@C_Intersection) for a chance to win

Best of all, the scoping project prize is transferable ... so if you have an idea just get your mates or followers to Like or Retweet ... and if your friends win the prize but don't have their own cool app idea to get off their chest then they can give the prize to you.

So, if you - or a friend - have an idea and you'd like to flesh out and see if it's a go-er, do your thing!

When will we draw this cool prize?

We will draw the prize on 1st January 2016 and will announce it via Twitter, Facebook, and this blog.

Update 1/1/16:  We have had such a great response that we have decided to extend the competition until 11:59pm on Sunday 3rd January 2016. Enter before then and we will include you in the draw.

Note:  Unfortunately this competition is for Aussie residents only so although anyone can enter if you are not in Australia then if you win you will have to give your prize to someone who is an Australian resident.



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