Quick Facts:
- Uplike is an online photo-sharing and social networking service based in France that enables users to share photos, videos, websites, gifs and music.
- Uplike has been recognized as France’s fastest growing tech startup by The Next Web and was named 2013 European Startup of the Year at the European ICT Awards.
- Uplike’s mobile app has over 2.5 million monthly active users in 100 countries and is available on iOS and Android. It is among the Top 25 Lifestyle Apps on iOS and Top 10 Lifestyle Apps on Android.
@Uplike is a popular lifestyle application that enables users to share their inspiration from across the web. The app encourages users to share photos, videos, gifs and music within their Uplike content stream. With over 2.5 million monthly active users, Uplike is one of the most popular lifestyle apps in both the iOS and Android app stores.
With a small team of nine, Uplike faced the challenges of many startups — focusing time and resources where it has the biggest impact. The team had three pain points to solve in a short period of time: crash reporting, improving sign-in flow and integrating native advertising into the app.
The lack of crash reporting caused a major drop in ratings over the December holiday period. The team submitted a new version of Uplike to the App Store shortly before the holiday shutdown. Without crash reporting software, they realized too late that the app was buggy. It took three new versions and several weeks to permanently fix the bugs. In the meantime, poor reviews dropped the rating to 1.8 stars, a large problem for apps trying to drive new user adoption. As Uplike co-founder Jonathan Chemouny put it, “Had we had Crashlytics, this wouldn’t have happened.”
In addition, Uplike faced challenges with the sign-in process: users could sign in through their social login or email. Users were becoming increasingly wary of using their social login to sign in to other apps, and the sign-in process through email was time consuming. Worse yet, email sign-in often left users creating duplicate accounts when their password was forgotten. This inevitably led to a backlog of accounts which had to be manually merged by the Uplike team. This created a poor user experience, consumed support time merging duplicate accounts and harmed Uplike’s marketing efforts to onboard users.
Finally, the team wanted to begin integrating global advertising into Uplike, but it was time consuming and expensive to build an ad server. With only nine employees, they needed to find a solution that wouldn’t take time away from app development.
Uplike chose to use Fabric’s suite of tools to perform crash reporting, integrate native advertising and improve the sign-in process.
Uplike used Crashlytics to quickly find the bugs causing crashes. Crashlytics identified when the app crashed and where, in real time, enabling developers to quickly find and resolve crashes. For Uplike’s team, Crashlytics became much more than just a crash reporting application. As Chemouny described, “Today we use Crashlytics like a project manager, commenting on bugs and issues. That’s how we know we are ready to ship.”
MoPub was an obvious choice for Uplike’s global advertising. Chemouny explains, “MoPub was the only complete native ads solution that allowed us to serve native ads immediately, and required minimal integration.” In fact, the integration was so seamless that during the Apple review process, even the App Store was unable to recognize the native advertising. The high quality of ads served by the MoPub Marketplace matched the natural flow of Uplike and did not impact user experience. Since rolling out MoPub, Uplike has not received any user complains about advertising.
Digits was implemented to improve sign-in. Its intuitive sign-in process made it easier and faster for users to sign in to their accounts. Digits reduced support inquiries for password issues. That time and cost savings allowed Uplike’s developers to focus on what was truly important — building a world-class app.
MoPub enabled Uplike to yield a $2.00 CPM at minimum and maintain a superior user experience. Ads are displayed in exactly the same format as Uplike posts, creating a seamless experience for users.
Crashlytics improved stability and boosted favorable reviews in the app store. No more broken builds have been shipped with Crashlytics installed. Best of all, Uplike’s average rating increased to 4.5 stars.
Digits dramatically improved the sign-in process. In the first month Digits was launched on Uplike, 46% of users began to sign in with Digits. Forgotten password emails decreased by 55% and average login time through Digits was nearly 50% faster than login by email, providing a much better and faster experience for the end user.
Thanks to Fabric, Uplike was able to reduce support costs and improve their users experience. Through monetization using MoPub, improved sign-up process with Digits and visibility through Crashlytics, Fabric’s tools gave Uplike back its most valuable resource — time. As Chemouny explained, “Fabric allows us to save time. When you’re a small team, it’s something you need. Saving time means saving money.”
