What Happened To Appsee.com?
Appsee.com was an enterprise that said its goal was to help “companies deliver the best possible customer and user experience in their mobile apps.” The firm indicated that its offer was driven by the realization that many people were spending more time on their mobile devices, making it crucial for organizations to deliver a great user experience to their customers (Source).
Appsee would later be acquired by ServiceNow, a company that delivers technology to transform the “old, manual ways of working into modern digital workflows.” About a year after the acquisition, Appsee.com went offline.
What could have happened to the company that once claimed it was “used by hundreds of companies that leverage [its] SaaS platform to optimize their mobile apps?” (Source) We follow the history of the company and look at the services it provided. The article ends by looking at how you can optimize user engagement in your app.
The History Of Appsee.com
Appsee was established in Tel Aviv, Israel, by Yoni Douek and Zahi Boussiba in 2012. Borussia was the company’s CEO. He holds degrees in Business Administration and Computer Science. He also has previous experience in the Israel Defense Force as a Research and Development Manager (Source). Douek became the CTO at Appsee. He holds a BSc degree in Neuroscience from Tel Aviv University and an MSc in Molecular Computing from Weizmann Institute (Source).
Assisting App Designers Improve User Experience
Appsee claimed that its customers included companies from several sectors, including gaming, news, travel, finance, and real estate (Source). But what specific services did the company deliver?
User Recordings: After integrating the Appsee SDK (software development kit) into their app, a developer could record user behavior. This made it possible to understand how the users used the app, the challenges they were meeting, and how such problems could be fixed.
Touch Heatmaps: Was a feature that recorded “all touch gestures (taps, swipes, pinches) in each [of an] app’s screens, and aggregated them into a visual touch heatmap.” This made it possible to determine which parts of the app users were focusing on. Such knowledge helps determine which parts of the screen should be enhanced, and which ones could be removed (Source).
Real-Time In-App Analytics: Made it possible for an app publisher to know where users spent most of their time while using the app and the rate at which users quit each screen. Publishers could also determine how users moved from screen to screen. Screens with a confusing user interface (UI) were identified (Source).
Conversion Funnels: Made it possible for app publishers to configure a custom conversion funnel by inputting critical processes within their apps. This made it possible to track and measure the conversion rate, and know the reasons behind the failure or success of the conversion funnel (Source).
Crash Recordings: Provided information regarding the exact sequence leading to a crash while a user was on the app. It helped developers immediately detect where the bug is located by knowing the page or buttons tapped before the crash (Source).
ServiceNow Acquires Appsee Intellectual Property
On May 13, 2019, ServiceNow announced that it had acquired Appsee’s intellectual property. Reporting about the acquisition, on the tech news website Techcrunch.com, Ron Miller refers to “a carefully framed deal.” Miller emphasizes that ServiceNow did not acquire Appsee customers (Source). The deal’s financial terms were not made public.
Why did ServiceNow want Appsee’s intellectual property? Senior Director of Platform Product Management at ServiceNow, Boaz Hertz, had the answer: “With Appsee, ServiceNow will be able to optimize its own mobile apps and desktop web experiences to bring consumer-grade mobile experiences to our customers.” He continues, “Over time, customers using the Now Platform will be able to analyze better how their end users are using the Now Platform to make their work simpler and easier” (Source).
What Then Happened To Appsee.com
As part of the acquisition deal, Appsee co-founders and its research and development team were expected to join ServiceNow. Appsee was to wind down its business in 12 months (Source).
By mid-November 2019, a visit to Appsee.com was being greeted by the message, “AppSee’s In-App Mobile Analytics Platform has been acquired by ServiceNow” (Source). The website disappeared from the Internet in the first half of 2020. ServiceNow has not indicated what it did with the website.