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Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 3, episode 7 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guests guy merin, senior director of engineering, surface duo developer experience, microsoft ade oshineye, senior staff developer advocate, google søren lambæk, developer relations engineer, samsung foldables, games not only do we chat about the emerging trends in the foldable industry but how companies are working together to help developers create for this new and innovative technology listen download to this episode topics covered foldable industry trends growth of foldables target audience making foldables mainstream benefits of the foldable form factor extending a traditional app to a foldable device process for supporting foldables foldable device example apps consumer adoption challenges developer opportunities resources for developers companies working together on foldables helpful links large screen/foldable guidance large screen app quality jetpack windowmanager jetpack slidingpanelayout jetpack windowmanager foldable/dual-screens surface duo layout libraries surface duo android emulator figma - surface duo design kit surface duo blog surface duo twitch surface duo twitter adopting native language discover quality apps on large screens foldables design/development perspectives learn about foldables case studies 5 steps to large screen designing understanding layout code lab testing window size classes jetnews different screen sizes migrate to responsive layouts compose/activity embedding unfolding gaming potential samsung remote test lab samsung developer program website samsung developer program newsletter samsung developer program blog samsung developer program news samsung developer program facebook samsung developer program instagram samsung developer program twitter samsung developer program youtube samsung developer program linkedin tony morelan linkedin guy merin, microsoft, linkedin ade oshineye, google, linkedin søren lambæk, samsung, linkedin transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode seven recently i hosted a roundtable discussion on developing for foldable devices not only do we chat about the emerging trends in the foldable industry, but how companies are working together to help developers create for this new and innovative technology enjoy today's show, we're doing something pretty special i've got three guests on the podcast all from leading companies in the foldable space i've got guy merin, senior director of engineering on the surface duo developer experience team at microsoft guy merin 00 53 hi tony, good morning great to be here tony morelan 00 55 excellent i've also got ade oshineye, senior staff developer advocate at google ade oshineye 01 00 hi nice to be here tony morelan 01 03 and i've also got søren lambæk, developer relations engineer at samsung søren lambæk 01 09 hello good to be here tony morelan 01 11 this is amazing i've got all of you on the podcast at the same time we actually haven't tried this format before so let's take him for a ride and see how much fun we can have let me start with guy over at microsoft tell me who is guy merin? guy merin 01 25 hey, yeah, hey, folks so i'm guy the journey in microsoft a few years back started that windows went through the windows mobile, because mobile gadgets and devices are really my passion and then the last five or so years, i've been working full time on android, building a couple of software products, and recently the surface duo so this mobile and android is really my passion and i'm really at my dream job now working with developers, you know, reaching out really great on the personal level, i got recently into mountain climbing so just last weekend, we had a big expedition to summit, one of the washington mountains i live in seattle in washington, okay and that was a very, very fun experience that i found a lot of similarities to, you know, projects we have at work, climbing a mountain and summit thing is really a project on its own with preparation and planning and found a lot of interesting similarities tony morelan 02 29 it gives you a lot of time to think also, i'm sure that when you're climbing so are you like with ropes and rappelling or yeah, rope really guy merin 02 38 is, is more snow so it's ropes and ice axes and stuff but oh, gosh tony morelan 02 45 that is great how many feet would you say? was the summit? guy merin 02 50 close to 11,000 tony morelan 02 52 wow, that is absolutely impressive what was your journey to get to the state of washington? were you born there? or is this? the accent i'm picking up? i'm not quite sure is from the northwest? guy merin 03 07 no, no so no, i was born and raised in israel okay and i moved over to washington eight years ago, i've been working at microsoft in israel, actually doing some fun stuff with windows phone in israel and then pretty much my wife wanted to move over to seattle and that that made us take the trip and we love it here tony morelan 03 32 so now let's move over to google tell me who is ade oshineye? ade oshineye 03 38 so i work in android developer relations i've worked all over the different aspects of google over the last 15 years before that was in consultancy, when i'm not at a desk in front of cameras and things i'm out with a camera, taking photos in zurich, where we have really nice mountains that i like to climb them by sitting in a train that just gently takes you to the top and then i also play badminton and play go so between that i'm pretty busy i tony morelan 04 05 wonder if i understand you actually were born and raised in england is that correct? yes ade oshineye 04 09 so i'm an east londoner but now i live in switzerland, which is strange and very different to east london but i also live in the middle of a whole collection of british shops, so that i can get british food very easily really? okay yes tony morelan 04 27 tell me how did you get involved with foldables at google? ade oshineye 04 30 well, let's see well, me specifically, i mean, i started out with the samsung flip and then we've got this planet of surface duo for us as a company, it's more around the whole beat together not the same idea that the point of the entity ecosystem is that all of these oem can try different things users can try different kinds of experiences developer can try to serve all of them and we power all of that with the platform tony morelan 04 57 and from samsung tell me who is søren lambæk? søren lambæk 05 02 hello, i work at samsung as a developer relations engineer and basically, i building relationships between the games industry and samsung there are so many mobile games out there so we were reaching out to them at a technical level and try to help their games to run smooth on certain devices on a more personal level, i am one of those artists that just got obsessed with programming sure so my background is actually a lot of with art, drawing and music and that kind of thing but i just could see, the programming hat was so powerful so i just, i got this obsession is programming tony morelan 05 48 excellent and i know that you guys can't see on the podcast but soren has some beautiful guitars behind him and before we hit the record button, we were all having a nice conversation about music now, i understand you were born in chile, but raised in england that correct søren lambæk 06 04 and so i was born i was born in chile that's correct and i was raised up in denmark, hence my name and my name is danish and okay because then i guess such a small country and at the time, i wanted to do get a career we didn't have any games industry in denmark so i decided i wanted to go to england and when university studying games design, because there was art, but then i realized programming that's where the future is, for me and then so i was one of the only students that went from art to programming is usually the other way around yeah, tony morelan 06 47 so yeah, i would definitely think so so let's talk foldables back in 2019, samsung released the galaxy fold, which was the first foldable device to really hit the mainstream market since then, other companies like microsoft, motorola, huawei, have released foldable devices and in such a short amount of time, we've seen some really great improvements with this technology guy, you've been from microsoft, what are some of the trends that you've noticed in the foldable industry? guy merin 07 17 some of the trends one we're seeing, as you said, more, more oems picking those up? are you seeing more and more companies bringing for the world? and it's really starting to become a commodity but the cool thing about it that each one has their own different angle to it so you know, for the microsoft one, it's, you know, mainly around productivity and two screens, for others is mainly around more real estate or something that is a small form that can then go to, to a bigger form and it's all really about the form factors and the posters that you can really do with it so how does the phone react when it's folded when it's open when it's tilted 90 degrees? and i think we'll see more of those in the future tony morelan 08 07 are they are you seeing different trends for the way developers are designing and building apps? ade oshineye 08 12 so i think we're seeing three main trends one is the oems exploring the space of possible designs, does the device folding fold out full vertically filled horizontally full three times, there's so many different things oems are doing second stylus is becoming more and more mainstream, that's changing the set of available postures and then the final thing is the way keyboards and trackpads are blurring the distinctions between phones, phablets tablets so the whole notion of what is an android app is becoming this flexible, multi-dimensional space and there's always people exploring that space and trying new things yeah, tony morelan 08 55 yeah soren, what about the growth in this industry? is this been something that you think, you know, over the past several years, it's really been, you know, going much higher? søren lambæk 09 04 yeah so last year, we had 150% growth, and we are expecting that in the future, more and more people seem to get foldable phones and when it comes to games, it does have like quite a lot of benefits because you can use the second screen if you're put it in like a folder but sure you can you can change this from full screen to a two completely different mode where the bottom screen, you can use it for items or mini map and that kind of thing tony morelan 09 35 yeah, yeah you know, this technology is so new that it's at this time, i think we're still trying to figure out what is this this target audience a day? what are your thoughts on who is the target audience for foldables? ade oshineye 09 49 well, i think a good way of thinking about it would be to look at the flips and the surface drill as capturing the two sets of ordinances we see there are very often younger people woohoo, looking for cool new experiences, i tend to see a lot of those people walking around with a samsung flip but then you also see a set of people at the high end with a lot more money tend to be more business people, they tend to have the larger the fold or a duel or something like that, that has a stylus that runs multiple apps at the same time, that sort of almost a replacement laptop and those are the two sets of people i tend to see using foldables tony morelan 10 25 guy, do you have any thoughts on them? on the demographic of who is attracted to foldables? guy merin 10 31 i don't see it as a demographic thing i think i think it will become a commodity that more and more users across the world will? we'll see i think right now we're still seeing trends, because he's on the higher end, of course, yeah so we're seeing trend around there but when this becomes more of a commodity, and i think it will, and more of a mainstream device, i don't think it's going to be a demographic thing, just like we've seen with other form, form factors that are spread across the world tony morelan 11 00 yeah, yeah in certain you'd mentioned about gamers and tell me your thoughts on you know why something like foldable device would be attracted to the gaming community? søren lambæk 11 09 well, obviously, a big screen will have a big effect, not only can you see like a lot of graphics do you like and can change and you can have like, a different benefits doing tony morelan 11 20 that so what would it take for foldables to become more mainstream? søren lambæk 11 24 the price is it's a major one for reforms are quite pricey sure, reducing the price wouldn't make it more accessible for a lot of people tony morelan 11 34 yeah and i also think that really trying to teach developers how to build apps, you know, more education on app adoption is also important søren lambæk 11 43 yeah, definitely, we see a lot of games developer don't even consider foldable phones yet so i hope that is something that is going to change, where they could like start maybe changing the ui before they actually building the game guy merin 11 58 i think it would only if i may add one thing i think it's is a triangle of three things there is, you know, the users and the users’ need to see the benefit of why they should, you know, try a foldable phone or a large screen and then what drives that is apps so the more apps that we see that utilize it, that gives them benefits over using just a single screen, smaller device, the more apps that will use things like side by side or split screen or drag and drop between and just productivity and thinks that users can get more out of these apps when running on these new form factors i think that's another key factor and i think the third piece of this triangle is, in order to make the app better on those, you need to support it, that sdk level and the platform yeah, that's a lot of work that has been done by everybody here so mainly by google, because they of course, own the platform so the more we will see those things as standard like jetpack compose so how do you support foldables? there? how do you support all the other sdks, the more they will come native, the better the apps will get, the better the users will benefit from them? and i think that triangle, doing it correctly, will make it much more mainstream in the future ade oshineye 13 20 i agree with that i think one other thing that we've been pushing is getting developers across the chasm of thinking about this so we have a code lab, we put together with microsoft shows developers how to build for a world where the devices can be radically different sizes i mean, on my desk here, i have a samsung flip and a samsung ultra and they are radically different sizes, one of them can fold to be even smaller so if you want to build for both of these devices, and all the things in between, you have to think about am i going to be a responsive design app or when adaptive app, i had to think about which layouts i'm going to support which postures are going to support which aspect ratios, which resolutions, and developers for a long time, we've been able to sort of not really think very hard about that because most phones for a long time were fairly similar sizes now, the same kindle app that has to fold nicely on a surface duo has to also work on a giant tablet, for example, we have duo and meet and the same apk more or less that runs on your phone also runs on your television when we think of this as large screens, the screens can be very tony morelan 14 35 large what about google's quality guidelines? so the challenge for ade oshineye 14 39 us with quality guidelines is we don't want to stifle innovation but we do want to make sure that when a user downloads an app from our store, that it works well on the device, and that there are there's a well-lit path for developers in how do i give users the best possible experience so we have fatal guidelines and implemented shouldn't advice on what is a high-quality experience and then we have tiers of quality, so that you don't have to take a big jump, you don't have to eat the elephant in one bite you can, i think it's eat the rhinoceros in one bite, you can do it in, in lots of little bites so there are steps you can take to improve your quality and we have an easy-to-understand website that shows you, here's all the things you haven't done yet and you can decide which ones to invest in and when tony morelan 15 29 yeah, and i'll mention here that i know throughout this podcast that you guys will be referencing lots of resources for developers to really learn more about how to create for foldables, i'll be sure to include links in the show notes so that you guys can easily find this content so guy, tell me who do you think would benefit by developing for the foldable form factor and why guy merin 15 52 i think everybody will benefit from it the bottom of the funnel is the apps and the user so the users would benefit the most but i think you're asking more about the developers, i think every developer should look at is how they said here before my app is not going to run now only on a single screen, small device, it will span across others, every developer should think about their app what else can i do now that i have more real estate? and again, if it's a game, okay, what do i do with the second screen? how will my game maybe if i run the game, in a split screen with discord on the other side, because i'm using that for gaming as well, to start thinking about all these new scenarios that your app can now do? how can i provide content to the app that sits just beside me with drag and drop functionalities with these kinds of things? and i think every app, every developer, can benefit from those and you should start thinking about that, because this is preparing for, for the future and for more and more of these devices showing in market yeah, tony morelan 17 02 and i know the other day, a day and i were actually having a conversation about multi app user journeys ade oshineye 17 08 so we've tried to move away from thinking of use cases or scenarios to what we call cjs critical user journeys and part of that is because if i'm at home during the pandemic, i tend to have google docs open with meeting notes and then google meat open that if you move that to a foldable, well, that's one screen each but then i need to drag and drop things across them which means both developers need to think, am i a good citizen? does my app play well with others? historically, developers have tended to think about the user journey only within their own app but if you're a video chat app, you need to think okay, how do i work well, with a game with video content, somebody's watching, if i'm a video app, do i have picture in picture, if i have picture and picture, it unlocks all sorts of interesting new user journeys for the user if i'm a game, and i support multi window scenarios, it becomes possible somebody to play a game and live, stream it or play a game and have a chat conversation going on at the same time so trying to think about the user journey that's not just inside your one app, but it's across your app and other apps or even across multiple instances of your app tony morelan 18 17 store and tell me, what should the developer with an existing app do to extend it to foldables? søren lambæk 18 23 so there's quite a lot of sdk is that can be used already jetpack? windows manager is an android library that can help you with detecting if your app is expanding over multiple screens or not tony morelan 18 39 what about specifically game developers? maybe someone who's developing, you know, for unity or for unreal? are there resources out there to help them? søren lambæk 18 47 yeah, so samsung got like, some tutorials that will help you to set up phone apps for unity and unreal, boston guy merin 18 56 tony, if i may i can add one thing on the first question, what can developers do with an existing app, we put up a three-step guide and it's not specifically for the microsoft surface device for large screen on older foldables and the really the three steps are crawl, walk, run so you should start with taking your app and just trying it out on these new form factors if you have access to one of these devices, just try it there if you don't, there is emulators for everything for foldables for a duo for a large screen so just try your app on the emulator that's step one just see that it behaves well on these new form factors using an email lender step two is what we call the low hanging fruit so don't super invest but start small, as they say, maybe think about how can my app behave when it's running within other apps? so maybe support drag and drop either is a source of or is or is a destination cause doing picture and picture, things like that these are things that are super easy that you know, there's samples, there's code snippets, and you can just go in and copy paste into your app and just support that these are really small additions you can do and then it will really shine on those new devices and step three, is where really all the magic can happen you know, you have more real estate now so there's many new design patterns, you can think about lease details, you can think about a companion plane and a few others so what now will you do in your app that, you know, you have more real estate, you can do things differently? this is step three, which is i think, you know, where all the big value will come but it's a journey towards getting there ade oshineye 20 43 definitely, i think one other thing you may want to include is, at the most basic level, you check things like if i rotate my phone, does your device crash? does the app crash? or does it handle it? and then use thing? okay, so you handle rotation, you don't lose state if i'm halfway through typing a message, and i accidentally rotate my tablet, do you lose my message? that's bad yeah so that continuity is an important thing, all the way up to things like handling hinge occlusion so if you've got a surface duo, there's a hinge down the middle, you've got to remember that there we have an api for that, handling different postures of the device, and even trying to see if you can use those postures to offer new functionality but for a lot of developers, it's stepping back thinking about all the different contexts in which people are going to try to use your app and then making sure that you've handled them tony morelan 21 31 yeah, and guy you had mentioned about them testing, i wanted to also bring up that samsung has their remote tests lab, where you can online access a real device for testing your app so another great resource for developers to, to work with guy merin 21 49 definitely, it's also that in the emulator, the emulator is also an amazing resource, because you can run it locally, you can run it on the cloud, we have some workflows that connect to a cloud emulator so every time you know we have a few samples, so every time we do a check in for the sample, it spins off an emulator and test it looks great so we have all these test steps and none of that is specific to us to the to the demo, you can run it with any other devices well, tony morelan 22 15 tell me what is the figma design kit guy merin 22 18 figma design kit is a tool for designers to start thinking about foldables and large screens and dual screens so when we started the journey with developers, we first were thinking about the developers, how do we support you with sdks and with samples and with documentation, that's step two, actually, step one is thinking about your designs and then we started looking at what are the tools that designers use so figma is one of them and there are others so we just created figma design kit for foldables so it lists out all the layouts that are possible again, the list detail, the companion pane and a few others, gives you all the frames and really helps you think about the scenarios you want to cover in your in your app for these new form factors and then you start working with the developers and the sdk, there's actually a step three that we're trying to do in the future, which is, how do we make it easy? taking a figma design kit or another slope and making that into code? that's going to be the next step in the future? tony morelan 23 30 are they tell me about the jetpack window manager and the jet news demo app? ade oshineye 23 36 so like many people, we have quite some quite old demos that were written in a world where you had a phone and you had a tablet and so we like everybody else had to think about, okay, how do we change this to handle different postures, different aspect ratios so we have an article where we walked through the process we went through to use jetpack window manager to handle a lot of these configuration changes to handle continuity, rotation, a lot of those things so we got actually pretty good article about this i think one of the things we don't touch on in that article that i think is really important, is if i have an existing app that people like, and it's too expensive for me to do a complete rewrite, how do i start adding some of the new things into it so we have a new thing called activity embedding, which lets you get a foot in the door of compose, or we're starting to add these new, more complex layouts so maybe your app was just, oh, i have a bunch of cards that go vertically up and down the screen but it's actually no longer a phone it's a device that folds out is not twice the size so now i need to think, okay, i need to go to a list detail view gmail is a good example of this you do that unfold or you rotate and now you have so much more screen estate the challenge is, how do i embed the new more complex layout index? system set of layouts i already have without having to do a rewrite so there's a lot of that functionality that we're trying to show people because we don't want to fall in the trap of the only way you can get to the new world is to burn everything down and start again we want to give people an incremental path from where they are to where they need to get tony morelan 25 18 i was at gdc, this past year in samsung had a great presentation this morning did you get a chance to see that that presentation at gdc? where they talked about developing for foldables? søren lambæk 25 30 yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, it was one of our team members, mike there was doing a presentation tony morelan 25 37 yeah, i'll make sure to include a link to that to that presentation it was great because they covered foldable optimizations for game engines like unity and unreal, talked about android jetpack apis, and window manager showed examples of things like flex mode and ui scaling, and even had an engineer from unity talk about adaptive performance 4 0 ade tell me what should a developer consider when writing a new app for foldables? ade oshineye 25 46 my immediate reaction to this is, first of all, should i use views? or should i use compose, but i'm talking to more and more of my colleagues, they all go? well, obviously, they should compose because composers the future so the official google recommendation, if you're starting from scratch, start with compose, it will mature as your app matures the other things to think about is what makes foldable special, it's the fact they have all these postures, they have all of these different kinds of usage scenarios that they offer and then you want to avoid littering your code with designs that are attached to a specific screen size, or a specific aspect ratio, or a specific resolution and instead, you've got to decide am i adaptive or responsive? will i try to scale the same design? or will i move the components around when the posture or the orientation or the size changes? it's a difference between an app with a list of cards and the cards just get bigger? and an app that says, well, when you rotate me, i go to a list detail view? tony morelan 26 52 guy, what are your thoughts on what a developer should consider when they're writing a new app for foldables guy merin 26 59 so i think a developer should consider a couple of things one, there's folding features specifically for duo, we have, we have a hinge in the middle so if you have like controls, do you want to put them in the middle, or maybe you want to lay them out a little? a little differently for game developers, we did a lot of work for example, with xbox so when you play a game, you can have the controls on one screen and the game on the other screen so the controls, you know, are now have their own dedicated space so maybe you can do some stuff with it so for example, the one thing we did is depending on where you are in the game itself, the controller themes and the way they look change so if you're now a pirate on a ship, and you're in a sword fight or something, the controller is changed to be a sword, for example, or things like that and then other considerations are the posters so what happens when the device is folded? what happens when it's open? what happens when you rotate it? and all these will change the layout of the app and show different controls and options for the use of yeah, tony morelan 28 12 yeah soren, what would you say are some of the common issues that could come up when designing around foldables? søren lambæk 28 22 i think it's important for developers to consider the ui because on the samsung fold, when the phone is folded, we got like a single display so the aspect ratio on that one is very different to when you're when you got it unfolded so the ui, you will have much less space for ui so that is something that's very important that the transition from going from single display to what's the display, that the ui will change so it fits, there's no point on like, you can see all the ui on when it's when it's unfolded and then when you go to the single screen, half of the ui is not a clickable or you can see it so that's very, very important that you test that on your on your phone tony morelan 29 11 yeah, and i know it's a gdc presentation that's one of the things that mike covered was how to have your game go from the single screen and then when you open up the device, how it transitions to the to the door screen søren lambæk 29 25 yeah, exactly ade oshineye 29 26 oh, actually, that reminds me one thing i, i keep mentioning continuity and mostly people think, oh, i have my device, let's say to tablet like this ultra i have in my hand and in in the vertical orientation that's easy and if i rotate, i don't want to lose my state that's typically what we've always meant by continuity but once you have a device that falls, especially if you've got something that has three screens and how to screen them into screens, i may launch something on the outer screen then i open it up and then the app has to move on or the activity as we found that out the screen to now maybe spread out across both screens and then if i fold it the other way, so i'm now on one of the inner screens, the app has to not lose state now we have a bunch of guidance on how you define normal apps, where it gets especially tricky is when it's things like camera, where you may not just be moving an activity across screens, but it may actually move it across cameras okay, so this is one of those places where, if you have a real device in your hand, you can see it and you can see how for a user, this would be a very comfortable, obvious thing, they would expect holding the device in their hands but for you sitting behind your keyboard, it might not leap out as you as an obvious thing for a user to do yeah, so if you sit with erica, with us a samsung flip, you can take a selfie on it, but you might just very easily rotating your hand and because you want to take a selfie with the other camera for your app that's a very complicated thing for the user it's the most natural thing in the world sure so it's important to think about continuity across the different surfaces of the foldable yeah, guy merin 31 07 yeah and let me give, let me give another example with an email app can be gmail, it can be outlook, it can be whatever it whatever you're using and i think foldable or dual screen is really a great way to read emails so if, if until now, i was used to, you know, in the morning to get to my emails on a single screen device so i just have a list of emails, and then i go into each one of them, read it, go back, go to each one of them, read it, go back reply, what have you, if you don't have a larger screen, you can have the least detail so i see all the emails in one place, i click them and then the other side, i see the actual email that i need to address and now if i have to, is a lengthy email, if i have to read it, i can rotate the device and then i get into this a form, that i across the whole screen, i just see the whole email as detail and then when i hit the reply button, it can go into this laptop mode that you know, the keyboard goes from the bottom and then i could start replying to it and when i'm done, i get back to the least detail up to my next email so it really can serve as a laptop replacement yeah, because you have a larger screen, you can do pretty much in a productive manner, which you can do with your regular pc or mac tony morelan 32 27 yeah, for sure so guy, do you think it's a misconception that developers need to do a lot of custom work, that's only going to be that's only going to add value to a foldable device guy merin 32 38 i think it's a misconception, definitely, there's actually not a lot of work you need to do as i said before, you could start small with just adding drag and drop functionality or picture in picture and that will work across every place, every form factor around large screen small screen, and you're using native api's and sdk to support a foldable, you don't need to pick up another sdk for it it's all supported natively and whatever you do will work across all these devices and again, in the future, it can work on the tv or other on a watch so whatever your app will do, consider all these layouts provide layout screens, for each one of those new form factors, a single app will work on all of it ade oshineye 33 28 yeah, i think something i did this weekend is i went and dug up all my old android devices, i have android devices, going back to the g one and even the ones before the g one that i'm not sure i'm allowed to talk about in public, all the way to the latest ones from today and as developer, handling all of these different scenarios, is actually increasing the maintainability of your app because if i think about the screen on the g one and the resolution of that, and i think about that, compared to the resolution, the pixel six, it's a huge jump, and the screens are so much bigger so think about the kinds of devices we'll have five years from now, how much bigger how much higher resolution will those screens be? how often do you want to rewrite your app between now and then? versus oh, it's just a bigger screen at all it's a different posture and being able to make it a relatively simple migration or maintenance that versus a yet another rewrite tony morelan 34 31 so tell me, soren, what are some good examples of existing apps that are taking advantage of the foldable form factor? søren lambæk 34 39 so we have seen a lot of retro games actually, you are utilizing the phone a lot so because retro games don't really have that much heavy graphics so they've got like, plenty of space that they can use so we have seen where people are using a virtual gamepad on one screen and using live small mini maps and that kind of thing so that's okay seems but i also think that like when you're watching it like a video and you start like folding it, and you just see the video slide up on just one screen, because it assumes that you want to put it on tape or something i think that is really clever and i would like to see more of that thinking tony morelan 35 19 in a day, what are some great examples of existing apps that are taking advantage of the foldable form factor? ade oshineye 35 24 so we see a lot, but actually, my two favorites were shown to me by guy, one was a battleships game where you basically have the device in a tabletop posture, and you basically rotate it the other way for the other person to play oh, i thought that was beautiful yes love that and the second thing he showed me was just the kindle yes so basically be able to have the kindle open like a book, but also be able to fold it the other way so like a like a cheap paperback, where you fold it and you hold him in one hand exactly i would never do that for any of my books, but been able to do that and like surface to that field like that is so nicely that i think was really compelling tony morelan 36 02 and that was the first thing when i when i pulled out the surface duo showed my wife, the first thing she did was grab it in, folded it around like it was a traditional paperback book that was so easy to hold she absolutely loved that that aspect of it guy tell me, what are some other examples of some great apps that are already taking advantage of a foldable, guy merin 36 25 i think two kinds of app one is apps for consuming and i think the kindle is a good example of flipping a page, which is supernatural i really liked that experience as well, but also apps around creation so for example, if you need to edit a video, or edit your photos, or edit the blog post, it's very easy with dual screen or with the foldable or our screen to have the actual video or photo on one side, and on the other side, all the controls, and then you hit a control and you see it real time, what happens, how does it change the other, it's really, really helpful to create and edit your memories that way so it's really a great creation tool, as well, not just for consuming tony morelan 37 12 yeah, i could definitely see that also be a great value with a program like adobe acrobat you know, i'm often editing pdfs and so i could see that would be a great use case for, you know, not only being able to read documents, but then you know, making edits ade oshineye 37 28 i can also imagine with that sort of notebook, passport, sort of novel types, device, where if it's light enough and thin enough, you can sort of fold it in half with a stylus, and just scribble it like you would have a normal notebook, basically, like a moleskin but it's a moleskin with an infinite number of pages there's, guy merin 37 49 there's also psychological sense here, about the folding, and that you can close it so for example, if i'm writing or scribbling or journaling with a stylus on the device, when it's open, when i'm done, consider if you're doing it on a regular notebook, what are you doing, you're closing it, and it gives you a sense that you're done you accomplished something and i think this is where foldables really shine because you're doing something you're reading an email, you're journaling, you're even playing a game, once you're done, you close it, even you hear that little click yes and it gives you a sense, you know, it's like checking a box in your to do and i think this is something that you don't see in other form factors and you see it only on this folding devices that really helps users stay in their flow and then move away to, you know, do something else that is not related to the phone so leave it off and you know, digital wellbeing and stuff tony morelan 38 46 yeah, it's funny that you say that, because that was the one of the first things i noticed when i closed my duo hearing that little click sound it's sitting on my desk i was like, ah, okay, put that away ade oshineye 38 56 yeah, yeah, that's actually not the interesting effectiveness is that with the foldables, initially, because of weight, and then eventually, because of new user journeys, they switch from being in your trouser pocket, at least for me to being in a jacket pocket and that's something changes all the places i use them tony morelan 39 14 interesting yeah and i know when i first got my hands on the z flip, folding it to that such small form factor and putting it in my pocket just felt so much better than some of the bulky devices that i seem to carry around with me søren lambæk 39 30 i actually heard that people who using the ac flip, use the phone less because they have to open it manually so for them, it actually helps them a lot to not like spend too much time on the phone so there, i guess there's some psychological effect ade oshineye 39 47 i mean, i've had the opposite with my flip in that because it's so small, and because it sorts of made me take more selfies i don't usually take selfies because well, i usually have a real camera with me, but i have this thing, it's small enough that it's in the back pocket of my jeans and it's just arms were nice and i would normally just take a photo of the place but as thing i can pull it out, then basically without having to unfold it, or unlock it just pointed on my face, click selfie, put it in my pocket again so for that one particular user journey, i use it more tony morelan 40 20 interesting yeah, i could, i could totally see that but tell me a day, what are some of the challenges that foldable technology needs to overcome to increase consumer adoption? ade oshineye 40 31 i mean, if i look at the variety of devices, i have the flip back pocket of jeans every time when it comes to the fold, i have to sort of look at the jacket i'm wearing and think about, okay, will the material the lining handles the weight, or should it go into my bag, if i'm carrying this surface duo, it's light enough that i can just casually put it in my jacket pocket, it'll be fine but it's too bulky for me to put in the front pocket of any of my jeans and it feels dangerous to put in the back pocket so weight is an issue cost is also an issue because the more expensive it is, the more careful you have to be when you put it away to think, will it be safe in this pocket but as these things get thinner, lighter, cheaper, and we discover more and more user journeys, i think that's going to be really interesting if i give an example, i have the surface level one, and it's great but every now and again, i see somebody surface two or two and i go, oh, they have a pen oh, that's interesting and i find myself thinking, well, that might be an interesting upgrade if it were thin enough and light enough, but then i'm thinking, but will it fit in my jacket? pocket? tony morelan 41 37 sure that's interesting guy tell me what do you think are some of the challenges that the foldable technology needs to overcome? i guy merin 41 45 think the first obvious one is the price point, they're still more expensive than other form factors so i think we're going to see the prices, the prices go down? for sure i think that would be probably my biggest one i think we did not hit the point of, you know, apps, enough apps are there, we'll see more and more apps, and then everybody will want to join the party i don't think we are in that stage yet and i think that will come soon tony morelan 42 13 and so on, what are your thoughts on what sort of challenges that the foldable technology needs to overcome? søren lambæk 42 19 the foldable phone at the moment is very bulky, and it's very heavy, it will be great that it was if it's lighter, i'd know that people that it actually puts people off some people that it is so bulky and heavy, where they will rather i get the flip phone for that reason i also think speaking of the flip, i think battery life is an it's very important i don't know how much bigger battery they can put in them without even giving more bulky and heavier but when you have like on the samsung one, there are three displays and if you use it for game watching films, it's really draining battery so that is i will say that is the big ones for me tony morelan 43 03 so guy, what resources would you recommend for developers interested in creating foldable apps, guy merin 43 09 i think you know; our modal is really meeting the developers where they're at so continue using whatever you're using if you're using a mac or pc, we have emulators for each one of those things so i would start with just following the recommendations you know, we have documentation samsung has google, start there, download an emulator, try it out and then just write a sample app, there was a code lab that we built with google, you could try there to test some of these new capabilities on the emulator on a specific device and then start your journey from there to commutations samples emulator we post a weekly blog, a weekly developer blog every thursday, that brings new information, for example, how to write again, how to use drag and drop, how to run side by side with another app, how to address the post changes, well, layout changes so we have a blog every week that covers code it's a developer blog with specific code and tips and tricks, try those resources and just reach out if you have a question and if you're blocked on anything, we are really here to help you out with your journey because we're creating the future and we want you to be successful with your app on all these new form factors tony morelan 44 34 yeah are there any conferences or events the that you know that you'll be attending? guy merin 44 40 definitely so google io was just completed a few weeks back, a lot of talks around large screens, you can still follow that and see some of the talks droidcon is coming up we just had droidcon san francisco a couple of days ago, and the next one is in berlin, and it's a worldwide conference google's probably going to have a few to prevent samsung has a few events microsoft build was just a couple of weeks ago and we also had to talk about tony morelan 45 08 foldables excellent and i know a day you shared with me a large list of links tells me, you know, what are some of these resources the developers can utilize ade oshineye 45 19 so for us, it's really three buckets there are introductory materials, such as our quality guidelines that i think are really important to sort of absorb into your bones so you can feel what a good experience will be like, and it will nudge you as you go on then we have a large collection of design resources, often at the material design website, but also woven through developers@android com and then the final piece is a set of resources for the developers things like how do i do testing the code library with microsoft but those three buckets of resources are the right ones for you to start with i'd also recommend come to door con berlin, were given a talk a teammate of mine, romano, france will be their co presenting with somebody from microsoft and again, you can go grill those people get lots of questions and of course, there will be future android events, where we'll have more stuff to share tony morelan 46 14 wonderful insight on what does samsung have to offer to help developers søren lambæk 46 20 so sometimes we got our own a game dev space where we posted blocks and tutorials, articles and we will have some when this podcast is out, we should have some tutorials available we also got the gdc presentation that mike did tony morelan 46 37 excellent so any more thoughts as we close the podcasts on this new technology in foldables ade oshineye 46 45 from my perspective, looking at my desk, i've got a flip duo, a samsung tab and that really captures just the variety of form factors that are happening on the android platform and i look forward to seeing more i think that's one of the things i learned here is that there's so much going on and there's so much more to come søren lambæk 47 06 i'm really looking forward to the future to see what new technology and what new devices coming out how the foldable phones will hopefully be more like lighter and more affordable and yeah, i'm really looking forward to see how developers is going to utilize them for all kinds of different apps guy merin 47 28 i think i think this is super exciting times, we are really in a pivotal point of, you know, something new, something a new generation of four factors evolving, and it's happening right now we started seeing the version one of the foldables and tools, we're now seeing a second version and a third version and i think we're going to see more of that and this is just amazing we are creating the future right now and i think developers are the most important part of it, because it will succeed based on the apps, and what developers will do with it and this is a great time now to join this ride and really create the future because i think 10 years from now, we will see things that really start happening right now with apps that take you to the next steps with foldables yeah, tony morelan 48 21 my key takeaway with the foldable industry is how many of these big companies in this industry are working together to further the technology it was great to have you know, someone from google from microsoft, and of course, from samsung, all on the podcast today before we close this out, i want to ask a question of each of you soren, what is it that you do for fun and when you're not at your desk working for samsung? søren lambæk 48 46 as i already said that i do like art to play music and draw and i have an eight-month-old son that's taking up a lot of my time at the moment tony morelan 49 00 wonderful wonderful yeah, congratulations on that thank you in a day, what is it the you do for fun when you can step away from your role at ade oshineye 49 09 google? so i do a lot of things but i think the main thing that occupies my time nowadays has been playing badminton it's an it's a huge part of the swiss culture and there's just a lot of people who play badminton, so it's a great game you can actually get seriously injured in it but you can also get very good at it so i'd recommend it tony morelan 49 32 in guy what is it that you do for fun up in the great northwest? when you get to put aside your responsibilities at microsoft i can see in your background now i noticed on your wall, you've got your own indoor rock-climbing gym guy merin 49 45 yeah, exactly so trivia in the last six months i've been training really, really hard to climb and summit some of the mountains around north washington goal is to get even bigger mountains but we did a couple of summits last weekend and really into climbing and something mountains now wow takes a lot of mental prep, nutrition, fitness level and i've seen a lot of similarities between the experiences i have with preparing for a climb, to even things i do at work it's really managing a project, a lot of insights i got from climbing that i apply in other places tony morelan 50 25 that's great that's great hey, i wanted to thank all of you for being on the podcast today it was wonderful to hear the different voices and get a chance to chat with you all ade oshineye 50 34 thank you very much for having us you closing 50 35 just looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 2, episode 1 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest drazen stojcic urarity urarity links urarity facebook - facebook com/urarity watchfaces/ urarity instagram - instagram com/urarity watchfaces urarity twitter - twitter com/uraritywatch urarity youtube - youtube com/user/romulicstojcic drazen stojcic linkedin - linkedin com/in/drazen-stojcic drazen is the 2020 galaxy store award winner for best watch face collection not only do we talk about his rise to becoming one of the top watch face sellers on galaxy store, but also his fascinating career path and it all started when he became an award-wining author, after writing his first novel at the age of 16 listen download this episode topics covered galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy store galaxy store badges social media photography videography animations sdc19 best of galaxy store awards transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow!, the samsung developers podcast where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season two, episode one on today's show, i interviewed drazen stojcic, the super successful watch face designer behind the brand, urarity, drazen is the 2020 best of galaxy store award winner for best watch face collection not only do we talk about his rise to becoming one of the top watch face sellers on galaxy store, but also this fascinating career path and it all started when he became an award-winning author after writing his first novel at the age of 16 enjoy tony morelan 00 48 so i have to start by saying i am extremely excited to kick off the new season of the podcast with one of my absolute favorite designers drazen from urarity drazen stojcic 01 01 hi hi, tony thank you for having me tony morelan 01 04 yeah, excellent i'm so excited to have you on the show let me first start by asking who is drazen stojcic? drazen stojcic 01 13 so well, i guess i could say the basics you know, i'm 38 years old i'm from europe, from croatia, and married and i've spent last four years designing watch faces for samsung devices and after a lifelong career in all sorts of media related stuff, i found myself in something that i really enjoy doing and it turned out i was pretty good at it and so now four years later, i'm i've received the award for the best watch face collection and is it's been like, you know, a crown after all that hard work and, and time and effort put into it tony morelan 02 07 so you're saying that if you started about four years ago, doing watch faces, that means you pretty much started at the beginning of this whole opportunity for designers to create watch faces for samsung so tell me like, how did you first learn about samsung wearables and, and then ultimately designing drazen stojcic 02 23 so i think it's a similar story with most early developers, you know, we are all a bit of gadget freaks and so i've had samsung, the very first samsung smartwatch was because i had a samsung phone as well and so when samsung made their first wearable, i was like all over it, you can customize it, you can do anything, it was just a device that could like measure your heart rate and stare at some very basic stuff, and had a camera on it correct and it had a camera on the wrist yes and you know, at that time, my whole life was around photography and so having, you know, a camera and a wristband that was like, awesome, you know, i just, i loved it and so when the new versions came out, obviously i was, i was upgrading and at some point, a friend of mine, who was my work colleague, actually mentioned, you know, you're pretty good at design and you all you have all this previous experience with i had some experience with designing mobile apps, for like 15 years ago, for before even android existed, you know, it was like, the very first touchscreen phones that showed up and i teamed up with a with a programmer, and we made a mobile keyboard and so i was doing the graphics and the design, and he was programming and so he knew all this because we talked about it and he said, you know, you have to watch you have the knowledge, why don't you try, you know, there's this cool software where you can just you don't need to know programming because i'm not a programmer and there's this cool software, you can download it and you can like make your own designs for your watch and so i downloaded the galaxy watch designer, and now it's a galaxy watch studio so and i loved it i loved it i within a week i had like, watch face ready, and i want to publish it yes it just started from that just you know, pure luck tony morelan 04 51 yeah, that's very similar to how i got my start i mean that you know, i attended this event at samsung where they you know, told everybody about gear watch designer yeah and came home that night and was so excited to be able to, in a sense, do programming without any coding so i could use all my graphic design skills, but yet create this, you know, interactive watch phase i mean, it's just, yeah, i bought in real quickly to it so i know that you've had quite the journey to get to the point where you are now as a watch face, designers doing lots of different, you know, jobs, but all within the same sort of family of everything related around media well, yeah so tell me how you got your start indesign drazen stojcic 05 37 so i guess i've always liked you know, even as a kid, i had like, these artistic tendencies so i would like draw a lot and i would paint and i would write and do all sorts of stuff, you know and so my first experiences were basically with computers, you know, and those were computers where you didn't even have an os on them i come from croatia, which went through an armed conflict war in the 90s and i was just a kid at that time, but after the war, my elementary school, got to the nation in, in computers, so none of the teachers had any experience with that and us kids obviously, never even seen a computer at that point and so i think it was like a un donation or some sort of a charity program and so yeah, and so they set up a classroom for us, that was like 15, or 20 of computers, and a teacher from arts and crafts was assigned to do something useful with those computers and he was an older gentleman who didn't know english, who didn't know it was just the oh, you figured this out and so he asked kids in the school, it was anybody interested and i always was fascinated by technology i think it was like four kids from the whole school that signed up for this that was like, first contact with, with computers and everything i did later on was, in some sense connected to it you know, i when i got my first home computer, i was just like, drawing stuff, all the all the time, i was just like learning software, sketching, stuff, making, i don't know, school, newspapers, stuff like that, you know, everything was, you know, one thing and then the next thing and so, after high school, i was into music at that time and so i ended up being on local radio station yeah and so because the station was part of like, a network that had newspaper and radio and, and a tv station, i spent next couple of years moving from one to the next and so i moved from the radio where i worked as a as a dj and tony morelan 08 07 so a dj, spinning music i mean, yeah, drazen stojcic 08 10 yeah that's great yeah, i actually really did some, like, nightclubs stuff so i would work during the day on the radio station and at night, i will be working like cocktail bars and really, tony morelan 08 22 dj drazen drazen stojcic 08 26 yeah, and so and, you know, this is all time before internet so there's no internet at this point and so obviously, being in a radio station gets you new music, and then you can, you know, use that music to put on parties and so, yeah, so it's like, using one job to make money on the side and so, and then i moved to the newspapers where i worked as a as a journalist, because i always enjoyed writing tony morelan 08 58 and i think i heard that you actually received an award when you were much younger for you you actually wrote, yeah, drazen stojcic 09 07 yeah, i wrote a novel when i was 16, actually and i, when i was 17, i got two major prizes for best first novel in croatia that's great from like, really a respected, you know, people in croatia who are basically in our top of the crops and so that was also a push that led me into journalism eventually, right and, and during my journalist days, i had a situation where we were a photographer that was supposed to cover an event with me, he couldn't make it and there was no one else and because at that time, people from my newspapers already knew that i was like into computers, and i have a like, always chasing something and so my editor said, you know, we just got these funny new digital cameras, maybe you could pick one up and just take two shots, it'll be fine for the print, you know, just try to keep people in frame, you know, it was and so that was my first experience with digital photography and i was instantly in love with that and so, actually, that day, i would always ask that i take my own shots and basically, i would, i would take photos of what i'm supposed to do, and i wouldn't, then i would spend the rest of the day shooting like, anything i could find and i would, i would intentionally only leave some of the photos that i thought were good i would leave them on the cart for photo editors so they can see that tony morelan 10 55 they can see your work that's great yeah, drazen stojcic 10 56 exactly and so after a while, i got a call from the from the photography editor and it was all like this transitional period where they were moving away from film and classic film cameras into digital yes and so he said, you know, are you? are you leaving these photos on the cards? because i kind of liked them? and i said, yeah, well, you know, i liked this thing you know, this digital photography seems to suit me and within a month, i wasn't working as a journalist anymore i just really, yeah, i just moved on to photography overnight wow and so my photography work, then, you know, i learned a lot of stuff from the, from the more experienced photographers there but i was also able to get on this train really early of, of this digital photography that was just coming in a lot of older photographers had a problem with this, they couldn't adapt so well so, so quickly, you know, it required working with software and all of that stuff that i basically was used to and so a few years later, i, i partnered up with a very senior and well-respected photographer here in my town and he had a big production company that was basically multimedia we had like a video cruise, we had cgi designers, we had sound crews, we had, you know, full multimedia production along with design and so i did basically the same thing i did before i did here so i would move from one to next position and i just kind of learned along the way, too, i have no formal education in either of these things yeah so it's all just learning from other people and learning on your own trying to, you know, get something new, i had a desire to express myself and so it was always something media related, and now share all of these things from the past and especially i don't know, there's a lot of, in my past a lot of work with marketing so working with marketing companies with like, production teams, and you'll learn what clients want, how they think how all of this kind of came together and lead into, into urarity tony morelan 13 34 yes, yeah, that's, that's, it's amazing i mean, i have to say, i'm extremely surprised to hear that you say that you don't have formal training yeah, but hearing about the experiences, all of the years, and all these different areas that you've, you know, had an opportunity to work in, it really shows because i think that's where you urarity stands out from many of the other watch face developers, it's all of the other assets that are required to be successful you know, when you see your videos in your photography, you can tell that someone with excellent expertise is putting this together, because it's not just a computer rendition or a 3d model that's rotating i mean, you actually are taking a camera on a dolly and doing rotation with it and to me, that's what really stands out because that's pretty unique to see from a from a developer, you know, marketing on samsung platform it gives it such a realness, you know, where you actually see the product and it gives confidence when you're thinking about it, should i make a purchase? so i think that is probably one of the biggest factors for your success when i see the work that you do i agree and that's basically the whole logic i started doing this right from the beginning because drazen stojcic 14 51 i kind of knew that it wasn't enough to make just the watch face itself look good so everything else to look at the same level, yeah, so, and obviously over the couple of last years i've, i've, i've advanced further and my, my designs have become better and my marketing materials as well but the core idea is still the same, you know, if you make, you can make the best watch face ever yeah, but if your presentations is not good, it's just the customers won't get it tony morelan 15 30 exactly so i understand that you've already is not just draws in that you actually have partnered with someone who has expertise in, in these areas of like social media and marketing and whatnot, that's helping you so tell me a little bit about the other person that is involved with, with the urarity success drazen stojcic 15 51 so at first, it was just me and you know, for probably first two years, i did all of this stuff on my own but then, as i advanced and as i got more and more customers and more and more of this production behind this, i realized that i needed help and my brothers do dumb, ugly he just came fresh out of college that had marketing as one of the major classes in it and so he knew about my watch faces, and he would frequently helped me he and i came up with the name the urarity tony morelan 16 35 yeah, so tell me that tell me the history that you came up with that name drazen stojcic 16 38 yeah so because my brother has this knack, for, for coming up with funny names for stuff and so we would frequently do that for like, all sorts of statements will make up names for the products or for name for names for companies or find, you know, funny word plays and stuff like that, when i figured out that i needed the brand, and i couldn't just, you know, be just me, it needed a brand name and so we're just talking about this and so a lot of people think that your urarity is basically you and urarity, which it is but the main idea behind it is basically because the first four letters of the word urarity actually mean watchmaker in creation tony morelan 17 29 that is great drazen stojcic 17 31 yeah, so we started from that, you know, it was like, because even today, you could see like these shops around the town that had like this art so it was just, you know, we're just making fun and your charity just popped up somewhere, because i knew it would work well in english although it is a bit of a tongue twister i still liked how it sounded and how it looked and i like this double meaning because it worked in, in our language as well and so he and i came up with this name and then over time, he just kind of started helping me more and more and at some point, i said, okay, now, i think you could probably handle a lot of this stuff better than me, because you actually do have an education process and so my brother has been helping me ever since he's basically the whole marketing and customer support and all of that is his work so i'm purely doing the creative stuff tony morelan 18 39 that's great that's great yeah, it gives you an opportunity to really focus on your expertise and, and allow him to focus on his expertise so is your urarity, pretty much your full-time job drazen stojcic 18 51 yeah, it has become over time for a long period i also did a lot of side jobs, but the pandemic changed a lot of that because this is a job that you can do from the comfort and safety of your home yes, and my side jobs that were mostly photography related basically, there weren't there anymore when all of this started and so for me, it was like the perfect the perfect job to do during these times where you had to stay at home a lot either i've actually used the opportunity to do a lot of the stuff that i would previously maybe put off so i did a lot of housekeeping you know in the store, cleaned up the descriptions and all that stuff that usually just you know, you don't have enough time to do all of that and i kind of fine tune to everything that we did so for us it's been a positive effect in that sense tony morelan 20 00 yeah, no, that's, that's, that's great i mean, there has been a lot of challenges during this past year for many people on all different areas, i will say you are not the first person who has said that, you know, this opportunity that samsung has provided to developers, you know, really the, you know, indie designers like yourself, you can still continue to work from your job where it is safe so that's, that's great absolutely and i mean, even before this, having the opportunity to work from home has been quite a refreshing change for me, because a lot of the work i did before, involved, a lot of traveling a lot of staying out of home, which is, you know, it's great fun for a drazen stojcic 20 42 while but then as you get older and you need, you get a wife and a house and all of a dog and all of that, of course, you prefer staying at home, it's not as a lot of people are thinking i don't want to stay at home no, i'm fine i'm not complaining tony morelan 21 05 so yeah, back when we were allowed to travel, that's actually when i first met you, because you came out to san jose and attended our conference sdc 19 so it was great to actually meet you in person, i was very aware of your work prior to that so when i actually got to put a face to the to the brand, you were already that was a great moment for me, i was honored to meet you so tell me about that what was that experience like for you to come out to san jose and get to actually see the samsung people in person and also be at the conference? drazen stojcic 21 35 i think it was probably the biggest milestone for me, it changed so much in terms of perspective of what this whole thing is about because up until that point, i would have contacts with people from samsung and from other developers as well and i still do, but you know, actually deciding to get on a plane and fly on to another side of the world, and then be a part of this great event and the whole buzz and all of these people from all over the world, it was just eye opening for me because as many developers or better to say designers in in galaxy store i don't have a lot of experience with these tech conferences and so, you know, coming to san jose meeting people from samsung meeting, meeting other developers having a talk with them, and just exchanging, you know, opinions and ideas and i loved it that that's it you know, i wanted to do this for real now yeah, i think that was the point where it shifted in my head that, okay, this is serious stuff and there's a great support from samsung, which it always was there but just putting a face to the name of all these various contexts they had, it just made all the difference tony morelan 23 02 and i have to say one of the highlights for me was sitting in a room with who i thought were the rock stars of the designers i mean, here i was, you know, chatting with you and next year was matteo dini and then bergen, tomas from vienna studios and i'm like, oh, my gosh, man these are the designers that are just making incredible watch faces on the store and we're all in this one room together, just you know, having great conversations so it was wonderful to be able to meet face to face with many of these top designers drazen stojcic 23 36 absolutely and i especially enjoyed talking with you i think it was one of the best conversations i had there just i think we clicked really early on and definitely you have two perspectives on the on the whole thing, you're started as a designer, and now you're in samsung, so you can kind of relate better to the stuff that we're talking about tony morelan 24 00 exactly yeah, that was one of the main reasons why i took the position and i think one of the main reasons i got the job was that samsung really wanted to have someone with that voice internally so that i could be the liaison between taking the suggestions and the challenges that the designers have and trying to give a route to solving some of those issues and making the platform even better exactly unfortunately this year, we couldn't have the conference because of the pandemic as many people know we did an online award show and i was absolutely honored to be a part of the team that awarded you the best watch face collection and you know without a doubt, your collection just is amazing you know i still i look at the animated watch faces you do i see the videos that you put behind your watch faces as far as the project goes, and you are clearly deserving of this top honor so tell me, how did you first learn that you were winning this award from samsung? drazen stojcic 25 10 okay, so first of all, it was really an awesome thing you know, i was just blown away by the fact that i got the award i never, i never really expected it, when i started making watch faces that will end up in me getting some sort of an award for this or making all of this success that that has happened in the past years, actually, that how i found out was because i got this strange email that said, you know, just to notice that there will be an online event at this time and date and let's stay in touch i mentioned this to matteo dini, you know, did you see there's going to be an online event? and, you know, he said, i didn't get any email about this she was the winner last year, she said to me, oh, wait, i know what this is you probably won an award so i basically found out about this from a matteo tony morelan 26 18 that's funny that's funny i want to kind of go back a little bit and let's talk about your actual workflow when it comes to designing watch faces what is the first thing you do? are you grabbing a pencil and a piece of paper and starting to sketch? do you just dive right into the computer? drazen stojcic 26 34 i think it really depends sometimes i will just get an idea from a totally random spot like one of my most successful watch faces, the inspiration for it came from the blue glow around an elevator button that i just liked tony morelan 26 55 and which watch face says that drazen stojcic 26 57 it was the pulse series yes, yeah and so i was in this elevator and he was like some hotel and then there was this button that was beautifully glowing, like pulsating blue and i was just looking at it and i loved it and so i wanted to use that glow and have the similar effect on a watch that i came home and i started i started up after effects and i made this blue ring that was glowing, but it just wasn't working, you know and so i started playing with motion and then i figured out that it'd be cool if it looked like it was coming out of the screen like it was slowly moving out to the edges and so i had this thing, and there were no watch hands, no numbers, and nothing else, just this pulsing thing and i loved it tony morelan 27 52 so you've created this glowing, really cool animation what's the next step? i mean, you've got to be able to turn this into a watch face so are you just playing around with different shapes to create the you know the form? drazen stojcic 28 05 because most of our watch faces are animated, i would do the animations and then i would just grab one on screen from the animation series and then i would start like playing in in just pure to the trying to figure out what can i do? where could i put some of this simple code stuff going to work one with another? where are the watch hands going to be? is this going to be a digital watch face? or an analog watch face? is it going to have like a lot of info or not a lot of info and so it's going back and forth so i would sometimes start with an animation and then edit it 15 times over until everything fits one within another and it's just it's really a tedious process once you start complicating things with animations and animations do complicate things is immensely you know, i sometimes envy designers that can make really awesome watch faces they're not animated, because i don't know how to do that so anyway, that's funny yeah, yeah and it's also funny when they tell me oh, you can make all these awesome animations and i'm thinking yeah, but you don't have to make them and you still make us and watch faces tony morelan 29 26 at that point, are you using illustrator or photoshop? drazen stojcic 29 29 yeah, i use a lot of software so i will use basically the whole adobe package so everything from, you know, premiere photoshop, illustrator, and i also use 3d software like cinema 4d or even sketchup for some of this stuff you know, if i just want to make a quick idea to see how it works it's just a whole bunch of stuff you know? various software's that i'm used to, from before, you know, there used to from my previous work so it's not like one thing, you know, i'm sure people could do just fine using probably one serious graphics software but because of the animations, it's just not enough you need to have like all this other stuff, too tony morelan 30 20 of course, just to mention, we both are very familiar with tomas just checked from vienna studios, still astounds me and if you haven't listened to this podcast, go back and listen to it i'll let you in on a little secret tomas uses powerpoint to create his design so when i hear you talk about, you know, all the complexity of creating these animations, and you know, truthfully, you know, you have to become somewhat of a pro with photoshop and illustrator really to leverage all the tools in there yeah, to hear that tomas uses powerpoint, i know that you were surprised as i was drazen stojcic 30 51 i was blown away i met tim us for the first time at sdc and, and we had a really nice time talking and so naturally, we came to the, to this talk about software, and you know, and he said, you're never going to guess what i'm using to make my watch faces i was thinking, maybe he's using like, i don't know, some game or something like that some of that free graphics software or something more simple and so when he said, powerpoint, it blew me away because and this is what i was talking about so there are developers, they can make really awesome successful watch faces with software that wasn't even intended for this year and, and they can have great success yeah, so it's, it's just so awesome and i have huge respect for what he does and, and i totally recommend also listening to that podcast it was so cool tony morelan 31 53 i will say one thing that you guys have in common would be the photography after you've created the watch face so just like yourself, tomas is doing real video recording of his watch faces you can see his gloved hands come on to screen and do all the tapping interaction on his face so again, it's extremely important to find your unique way to showcase your work and both you and in tomas have done that drazen stojcic 32 23 yeah, yeah tomas especially with in because he, he is a he makes premium, like high end premium watch faces that are basically like for, for general public and so him using the gloves and having all these nice backdrops and everything it just sort of fits within the brand and with the whole identity and everything that he does and so i when i start making videos, and i started right from the get go, because i realized that people needed to see this thing in action because it was animated i also wanted to set up like some of the basic standards, how i'm going to do this, what's going to be the approach and so most of my videos are like have colorful lighting, and a lot of motion they're always in motion i don't make static videos because that's also something i wanted to emphasize the animations give a lot of motion to the watch faces and so the videos are kind of like even more emphasizing that there's this you just need to figure out what is the main point what are you trying to do with your designs and then have that same idea taken from the watch face to the screenshots to your app description, to your videos to your online social media it just all needs to tie into one nice bow and then it works tony morelan 34 02 definitely i would say another thing that really stands out for me when i think of the brand urarity is color you do not shy away from color i can tell that you must spend a great amount of time thinking about color i know we're on a podcast and you can only hear us at this moment but i can actually see you and right now your background in your room is changing in color you must have some sort of led lighting the chest tell me about color and how important it is to you because i can tell it is a big factor drazen stojcic 34 34 yeah, it is it is and actually you know funny things you notice about the background because i would frequently set up my room lights to go with the with the colors on the of the watch face that i'm working on that's great or sometimes i will i will just like use these i have these cool led lights that you can customize and all that remotely and sometimes i will just like mix these colors in real life and just see what's, what fits you know what works? and a lot of it helps me having experience within photography, you learn what colors work one with another? how brightness functions, how do we perceive brightness on a screen, it's kind of like, when you're framing the shot for that photograph it's not that different from setting up various elements on the screen, because you're still trying to get that golden ratio or intuitively program to like certain shapes and certain forms and certain ratios, and certain colors as well yes and so depending on the mood, i guess i'm trying to make or the effect that i'm trying to get, i will use a lot of color, or i will use muted colors and some sometimes i don't think a lot of people notice it, but not all of my watch phases have like black backgrounds, although they look like they do, they have a slight tint, and it can be just the tiniest amount of maybe blue or green it and, and for me, it makes all the difference i spend huge amounts of time with color i don't stop until i'm perfectly satisfied and now having my brother in all of this a lot of the times i you know, i will be happy and he will say i'm not so sure i think you need to make like, i think you need to change this and then i was like spend another week changing colors so it's a long process it's not yeah, you know, you don't do it in one night tony morelan 36 42 i loved hearing what you said just about black that that truthfully, black is not just black, you can have warm black, you can have cold black and so i often do that where i'll use the color picker in photoshop and you know, if i've done my design, i'll try and find the sort of the feel of the of the face the you know, what's the tone of it and i'll sample that and then within color picker, i'll go down to the to the almost to black, but it has just a little bit of hint of that yeah, whether it's like an orange or a blue or something because that then like you said, it ties in that background, that the foundation of the watch face still picks up what feels like that ambient lighting from the other elements exactly drazen stojcic 37 25 that's exactly what i'm talking about i take a lot of time perfecting my watch faces and that's why i guess that's why i don't make a lot of them you know, i'm not like this super producer i didn't make like 100 watch faces a year? yeah, it's always maybe 10 or 12, or 15 tony morelan 37 48 so how many total? would you say you have available on the store? drazen stojcic 37 51 yeah, so at the moment, i think we have around 100 or 110 okay, i've made a lot more actually, in these four years, especially in the beginning, i would make a lot, a lot of i think a lot of developers go through this, they will just churn out just bump, bump, bump but after a while you see that? it's just it doesn't make sense it's very few hold backs, you know, let it sit for a while get everything polished to the very last detail and then once you're totally satisfied, then you publish yeah and so as time goes on, i'm more focused on making the watch faces as perfect as they can be, rather than getting them out as quickly as possible tony morelan 38 41 yeah and i think that also what comes into play is the support that comes around that watch face so what you have to do from a marketing standpoint, all of the different, you know, elements that are key to successfully marketing your watch face if you have hundreds and hundreds, it's hard to maintain that this way it sounds like you can focus on you know, a smaller collection, but still be able to then put a lot of time into the marketing drazen stojcic 39 05 side of things exactly the more watch faces you have the bigger problem you have down the road when it comes time to update and eventually does so i really think that this is a like a situation where you need to think about not the quantity but rather the quality because in the end, the customers also recognize this, you know, if they see you made 300 watch phases in a year and the year has 365 days, you know you're not sending the right message and i will frequently go and be very critical of my own work and so after a while i see a bunch of mistakes i did or i'm not totally satisfied with some of my older work and i will just remove it i will just take it, take it down, clean up the portfolio, polish it so when a customer comes, you know, they only see the very best, or at least the very best for this moment that i added i mean, you know, of course, yeah tony morelan 40 08 so would you mind sharing? how many downloads total? does he already have? drazen stojcic 40 15 so we're close to 700,000 downloads now, wow, stretched over a period of four years and a large part of this was paid watch faces, or, you know, i don't know, the exact percent, which was, some of them were free and will frequently use free watch faces to, to promote, or other things that will, for example, in terms of marketing strategies will frequently do like, buy one, get one? yes and stuff like that, you know, where a customer still gets a free watch face but, you know, we also turn them into a painting into a paying customer as well tony morelan 41 05 so let me ask you, how do you approach that? does the customer have to show proof of purchase? what's your, what's your approach to that? drazen stojcic 41 13 so we asked them to show us a screenshot of from their, from this store, or sometimes will like, be fine if they can just show a photo of their watch, with our watch face on it, or things like that, you know, any proof is fine we're not really playing detectives here or anything yeah so on one hand, we want to give something for free on another hand and a lot of these customers are our returning customers, because they, they are familiar with our watch faces and with our system, and we know a lot of them over the years, there's really been customers that have supported us right from the very start tony morelan 41 58 what's your approach with marketing on social? are you doing much in the way of that? drazen stojcic 42 03 when i started with watch faces, my main kind of venue was youtube, because of the animations and all of that, i just needed a video service that could, you know, show the watch faces in action so i was building up this youtube channel for a long time and then after a while, i also started doing facebook and instagram but it takes time, it really does and i didn't really realize how much it can be useful until my brother took over and start doing it like for real sure you know, he had only this one thing to focus on for example, our youtube channel is close to 2 million views now and we only have our watch face videos so that does kind of tell you a lot, there's a lot of things that you can do to promote your watch faces and so over time, we are also we've also teamed up with some of the more popular tech channels or people who are doing watch face reviews, or who have an interest in this and so we would team up with them, have them promote some of our work, give some of coupons for free sure, something like that some discount stuff like that and facebook has also been very good for us instagram, and, you know, i my brother does so much stuff that some of it even i don't know, you know, he's like, doing stuff on reddit, on the forums tick tock, really are the place yeah, i really don't mess into this so i gave him like free rein to do as he thinks because obviously, this is something that he does and knows better than, than me tony morelan 44 06 yeah okay excellent and i'm sure across all of this, you're leveraging galaxy store badges is that correct? drazen stojcic 44 12 yeah, absolutely you know, we, we were actually a part of the galaxy badge pilot program and so quickly, we, we kind of got this additional step into our workflow so we will use both individual badges for like certain watch faces, but we are also frequently using our, like, our main badge that leads to our whole portfolio because and as you mentioned, you know, we i think we have a strong portfolio so sometimes the first thing they see is the whole layout, everything we've done so and it's been very useful in terms of, you know, following the clicks and all of that the statistics and there's a lot of science in this, i guess it's very interesting when you start analyzing the data that you can get from these badges and clicks and all and see what works what doesn't yeah, yeah because obviously you're trying to maximize the effect, you're not going to spend time or, or money or effort into something that doesn't work tony morelan 45 19 yeah, definitely so tell me what is in the future for your entity? is there anything that we can anticipate? drazen stojcic 45 29 well, so as i mentioned before, we had a lot of success with our mechanical watch faces that have these highly customizable appearances and so for the last couple of months, i've been toying with this idea of trying to do the same thing, but with digital watch faces and getting that same wow effect for customers that, you know, oh, sorry yeah right, great so just today, i got my new the 21 ultra tony morelan 46 20 oh, did you okay, drazen stojcic 46 21 yeah, yeah, i just arrived this morning and so i, like 10 minutes before we started this, i had to transfer all of the data and settings from my old phone, of course, and one of the things that it transferred was also the alarms so i switched off the alarm at the old phone, but i forgot about the new one so that's why i went off tony morelan 46 47 that's too funny right so you were talking about in the future, doing some animations with digital? yeah, drazen stojcic 46 53 yeah so i mentioned before that we had huge success with our mechanical watch faces that that had really customizable appearances and so for the last couple of months, i've been playing with this idea of repeating that same thing, but with digital watch faces and it's, it may seem like it's a simple transition, but actually, it's not and it has its own unique challenges, because making digital watch faces is completely different idea behind it and different visuals, and it just needs a different approach and so i'm kind of messing with that i'm trying to find the best thing that that i think it will be like good first watch face to try and repeat that same success sure tony morelan 47 44 that's exciting to hear because i would love to see that your urarity face in a in a digital form so super excited to know that we can anticipate that so before we close off this interview, you know, i have to say your english is amazing you're from croatia, but you speak perfect english i know, there's a little story behind how you learn to speak english can you share that? drazen stojcic 48 07 yeah, sure so i mentioned before, you know, we had this war thing here when i was a kid and so during the war, it's not that different from the pandemic, you know, yeah, you spend a lot of time indoors, you know, you can go out, you can play your little kid and so it just coincided with this period where we got like, first cable tv and so before that, there was like, three channels all in one language and that was it and then, you know, we got like these cool things like cnn and cartoon network and all of that stuff and i didn't know a word of english other than, you know, seeing some of the movies and stuff like that and so i was just like, i would watch hours and hours of this and a cool thing was that it was subtitled so yeah and so just, you know, listening to the words and seeing the translation below, it just helps so much, you know, with the meaning and with the phrases and with the correct pronunciation and all of that stuff and then later on came to computers and with the computers, eventually there came a period where i did a little bit of online gaming, and then you would talk to people from all over the world and then you just hit too, you know, you got to start speaking and i would frequently talk to people from the us or from england, or even people from other parts of the world and you know, english was always something i enjoyed, and i just fit so perfectly and because i travel a lot, it's also proven to be really useful for me yeah, of course tony morelan 49 56 so what you're saying is that you learned english by watching ren and stimpy? drazen stojcic 50 01 yeah, pretty much that's pretty much tony morelan 50 04 that's great hey drazen, it’s been excellent to have you on the podcast thank you so much for joining me and much luck in the new year drazen stojcic 50 13 thank you for having me and just you know, i'm very, very happy and honored to be on the podcast i always enjoy talking to you and i hope that this year sdc will be possible and that we will meet in person and see the other developers as well, you know, i really missed seeing them last year tony morelan 50 37 yeah, no, it'll be great to get everybody back together exactly excellent all right well, thanks, drazen drazen stojcic 50 43 thank you, tony outro 50 44 looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 51 00 the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 1, episode 3 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host charlotte allen community manager, samsung developers guest tony morelan developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin in this episode of pow, the tables are turned and i am the one being interviewed hear stories from my past life as a freelance graphic designer, like when i designed madonna’s first website, recorded a knock-off version of the final countdown for nokia, and had a chance encounter with a ferrari that launched my career at samsung listen download this episode topics covered watch face designing galaxy watch designer galaxy watch studio mobile ui theme designing themes studio check out the samsung developer program website at developer samsung com to learn more about designing watch faces using samsung’s galaxy watch studio previously named gear watch designer and galaxy watch designer , as well as designing mobile ui themes with samsung’s galaxy themes studio be sure to sign up for the samsung developers newsletter to learn about the latest from the samsung developer program helpful links facebook instagram twitter youtube linkedin forums transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 02 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow! podcast of wisdom from the samsung developer program, where we talk about the latest tech trends and give insight into all of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, we're going to do something a little different we're going to switch chairs, and i'm going to be the one being interviewed i sat down with charlotte allen, she's the one in charge of our outreach, finding the best opportunities in building the relationships that drive our developer program charlotte is also the person i called when i said i wanted to work for samsung hope you enjoy 00 39 hi, tony hey, charlotte, tony morelan 00 40 how are you? i'm doing fine how about yourself? charlotte allen 00 43 i'm good excellent can i tell you i'm really excited to have the opportunity to interview you today? yeah, this is this should be fun so how long have we known each other maybe a year that's actually a year and a half charlotte allen 00 54 year and a half it seems like longer in some ways tony morelan 00 58 but i think that's a good thing in a good way, charlotte allen 01 01 yes so i'm excited because in the year and a half, we've been working together, you've done so many amazing things and i'm excited for the community to get to know you and to learn about some of the things that you've done yeah so tell us a little bit about tony tony morelan 01 17 sure so before i started working at samsung, my entire career, i was a freelance graphic designer at a nice office at home, i got to work on a lot of nice projects i got to set my own hours i mean, really, it was it was a great gig charlotte allen 01 31 tell me a little bit about some of the cool projects that you worked on as a freelance designer tony morelan 01 37 sure yeah i did a fun project for nokia i didn't animation for the conference okay and they wanted some music to go with it i don't know if you know the song the final countdown yes, yes done by a band called europe, right so they wanted that song and i said, well, you can't just go and take that song i said, however, how about i record knock off version of that song yes charlotte allen 02 02 okay, so musically inclined as well tony morelan 02 05 yeah so you know, back when i was a kid, i thought i was going to be a rock star and okay the band and did that for about 10 years and realized, yes, charlotte allen 02 13 you had your own band yes, tony morelan 02 15 yeah and so when they said, hey, they wanted this song, i said, i can do that for you the next year, they loved it so much they said, come back and do us another one so then they asked me to basically rip off a u2 song and that was a lot of fun i still managed to, you know, plug in my guitar every once in a while, even the music that you're listening to today on this podcast, right? that's my alter ego is the atomic tone? yes so yeah, so i, you know, good opportunity here i still get to, you know, do a little recording have a little fun so yeah, all the music that you're hearing today is from the atomic tone was fortunate to actually get my start right around the same time that the internet was really starting to grow i actually worked on hp’s first website, but i would say, you know, the craziest project that i worked on was i actually designed madonna's first website charlotte allen 03 36 so wait a second so madonna the material girl, yeah, yes, madonna wow, that's pretty cool tony morelan 03 46 yeah, so i was doing some work for sony music the internet was totally new they didn't even have a website for their music division and they were wanting to bring their artists online so i designed a site for madonna, bruce springsteen, ozzy osborne i mean, even britney spears, you know a lot of the big names at the time yeah, so that was a lot of fun charlotte allen 04 05 so the material girl madonna, how was it working with her? tony morelan 04 10 really the only feedback madonna kept giving for the website was make my picture bigger make my picture bigger so we would do rounds and rounds and wrath of the website and madonna's picture kept getting bigger and bigger i charlotte allen 04 21 don't think anybody's going to be surprised by that right? tony morelan 04 23 no, no, no, when i think back that was probably one of the most unique projects that i got to work on charlotte allen 04 29 wow so tell me about your journey tony morelan 04 32 to samsung how i got here yeah, so that that was unique also, i had no intentions of leaving my freelance gig truthfully it was it was amazing however, i came across an amazing opportunity a friend of mine who was also a graphic designer knew about samsung she invited me to attend a workshop here at the campus in mountain view where they were going to teach you about the software called gear watch designer has since been changed to galaxy watch studio the free software that samsung makes available to designers to create interactive watch faces without doing any coding as a designer, that was like all i needed to hear and then when she said that there was free pizza, i thought hacky? no, why not show up for me? that sounds like a great evening charlotte allen 05 17 that's something we have in common yes tony morelan 05 23 interesting enough that was when i first met you because you were the one who was actually putting on this workshop that evening, i went home and actually stayed up all night creating my first watch face you guys were kind enough to actually give me one of the watches so i created this design and i put it on the watch and i sat there and stared at it and thought, oh my gosh, i've just created this like interactive moving animated artwork that's sitting on my wrist and knowing that i could then take that design and upload it to the galaxy store and start selling this, i thought, oh my gosh, what a great gig i thought of it as sort of a fun hobby at the time but i found myself over the next six months, spending more and more time designing watch faces and then eventually becoming approved to design phone ui themes when i learned about that, i just was so excited about this new way to be creative, to actually get my designs out and available seriously around the globe i mean, that first time that i published a watch face, i woke up that morning, and saw that i had a sale from argentina i had a sale in russia, mexico, united states, korea i mean, it was just amazing to see all these sales from around the globe that just got me even more excited charlotte allen 06 46 yeah, that is amazing and i personally have seen some of your designs, which are amazing thank you so i talk a little bit more about your design yeah tony morelan 06 54 so you know, when i started doing the artwork, i wasn't thinking so much like what's going to be the top seller, it was more of this as a creative outlet you know, i'm a huge fan of artists like miro and mondrian and matisse i love cars i love industrial thing so i found myself being inspired by just things that i saw out in the world that could be turned into a watch face so i was grabbing my phone and snapping pictures and, and getting inspired but all these, you know, different unusual objects that i could turn into a watch face charlotte allen 07 24 so is that what inspired my most favorite designs that i've seen of yours? and i remember they're these amazing car wheels and these are jags yeah, tony morelan 07 34 exactly so i was at a stoplight and again, a ferrari pulled up next to me and i see his wheel and i thought, oh my gosh, it's like a perfect watch face so that inspired me to create a watch face that i call to sorrow charlotte allen 07 48 to sorrow yeah, that mean tony morelan 07 50 like that in italian it means treasure, which i thought hey, you know this is a great a great word it was great inspiration for the for the watch that watch face ended up becoming like top seller, what was nice was right around that time, samsung started to take notice of my designs, they wanted to feature that design on a banner on the homepage on the galaxy store it was huge i mean, it was from that design that i really started to see, you know how much money can be made off of doing these watch faces i then realized that i'd love this way too much started asking myself that question, could i go work for a company? could i actually go into the corporate world? i mean, a lot of times people start in the corporate world, and then they go home and they start doing freelance work while i'm doing it reverse, then the question was easy to answer and that was yes you know, i wanted to do this so i made a phone call and that phone call was to who? me? yes it was to i don't know if you remember that phone call? absolutely charlotte allen 08 45 yeah, the phone call you said i want to come and work for you and this is i should say after a number of conversations that we actually had already had, where you are providing some really great feedback to us about the design process areas and we could help you even come to some of our follow up meetings and they are you are already supporting some of the other folks who were also from the workshop and who are in the design process so that was kind of this natural thing that started to happen tony morelan 09 13 yeah, i found myself actually not only teaching the other designers that were invited to come to these meetings, but i was actually teaching the samsung people how to use the software that's when it gave me the confidence like, yes, i could go work for samsung, because i knew i had something that i could offer 09 34 tell us about your role here at samsung tony morelan 09 37 so my title is senior developer evangelist but i often tell people, i'm a teacher and there are different sides to that so one side of being a teacher at samsung is going out into the community so i will speak at conferences, i will conduct workshops, i will teach at universities, lots of different ways to get out into the community and teach how to design and create for samsung here at the office, though i am writing blogs creating youtube tutorial videos, we've now been doing this podcast series we've also launched a webinar series so a lot of different ways where i can help the community but being here in the office, so it is all about assisting designers and developers on creating for samsung charlotte allen 10 21 yeah so you touched a little bit on something that i wanted to ask about a webinar series, which is something that was just launched very recently, where you did just some amazing work, i mean, from building the studio, which is really cool, just doing cool vibe to our webinars to come up with a name, which is wow yes and talk a little bit about, wow, sure everybody wants to know what that means and then also, the recent webinar you did, tony morelan 10 48 yeah, yeah, we launched this new webinar series called wow, which stands for webinars of wisdom and the idea is to not just teach but do it in a very fun sort of quirky way so if you have seen any of the episodes of well, please go check them out, you can find them on youtube, just search samsung developer program and just put in wow and it'll show there the latest webinar that we did was about how to become a themes ui designer, what it takes so you have to submit a portfolio of a mockup of a theme and once it gets reviewed and approved, then you get the ability to download the software and start creating themes charlotte allen 11 26 and so well then led to what we're doing right now yes which is pow, so pow talk about what that means yeah, a little bit about so tony morelan 11 33 pow is podcasts of wisdom i mean, it took me off about two seconds you know, when we were done creating wow, i thought hmm, we have to come up with something for podcasts what could that be? and it was pretty quick it just came up with pow podcasts of wisdom so lots of great plans with that we're actually putting together our schedule already of all the interviews that we're going to be doing so we'll be interviewing some internal people here at samsung they can share a lot about our technologies and processes and how you can be successful using our tools we're also going to be interviewing designers and developers that are already successful with samsung so we've already lined up quite an impressive list of people that i'll be interviewing on pal that can share their journey how did they become a designer or a developer selling for samsung? so super excited about that? charlotte allen 12 20 yeah, i'm super excited about it as well another thing that you've worked on, that i've been really impressed with is you've created some amazing tools to support designers and the cool thing about you, tony, is that you've been on both sides of the fence you've been on this side of the fence as the freelance designer who attended our workshop and now you're on the other side of the fence of knowing the kinds of challenges that designers sometimes face and have come up with some amazing solutions in the way of tools and so if you can share some of those tools that you've put in place, yeah, tony morelan 12 52 for sure the first tool that i created is called the asset creator i noticed that when i was doing watch face design means that i was spending just as much time creating the graphics that are needed on your seller page as i was creating for the watch face, so i needed to find a way to speed up the time that it takes to publish your watch face the asset creators have photoshop template file that automates a lot of what is required when it comes to saving all the different images if you're interested you can go to our website which is developer samsung com actually wrote a blog and even created a youtube tutorial video on how to use the asset creator so you can just search asset creator in the search field and there'll be a link for downloading the asset crater itself charlotte allen 13 34 so asset creator and i think there's a recently yes little that you just created tony morelan 13 39 yeah, so inspired by the asset creator i created some lifestyle photos; the photos are unique pictures of the watch in use so i've taken the watch and i've put it into unique backgrounds so i've you know, placed it on a leather jacket or i've found some tech looking, you know, vent or a pipe or you know, just different lifestyle pictures of these photos and what's unique is that you can just copy paste your watch face into the layer in photoshop, and photoshop will automatically position at depth of field blur, it will do all of the necessary adjustments to the picture so that it is embedded into the scene so it's a huge time saver lots of unique pictures out there so again, you can find the lifestyle photos on our website, going to developer dot samsung comm charlotte allen 14 26 so one of the important things that you said a couple times with both of the tools is, is this time saver? yeah what kind of time are you talking? tony morelan 14 33 so i would say, you know, i would spend half a day creating the assets for your seller page charlotte allen 14 39 absolutely and that's why i wanted you to share is a huge time saver so you've done so much already, in just a year and a half anything we should look forward to tony morelan 14 48 yeah, one of the things i'm most excited about, we're actually doing a partnership with the art institute of dallas so we're going to be conducting an 11-week course for the students there that'll be really exciting we're going to dive really deep into watch face designing and all these students will get an opportunity to publish their designs and make those available to the world so really excited about that and we'll be doing some additional outreach so i know that we're going to go to how design in boston this year so that'll be a ton of fun we're going to set up a booth, we'll have some interaction for people to come in and actually design watch faces on site you know, in the past, we've gone to adobe max, that has been a wonderful experience in we have plans of returning there again in the in 2020 charlotte allen 15 30 yeah, i'm excited about both of those house new to us we haven't been there before, but been planning what we want to do there so it'd be really exciting so hopefully, we might be able to meet some folks there as well yes so what's the biggest challenge with your role here at samsung? tony morelan 15 43 i would say public speaking i mean, i'm a very chatty person, but you know, i have not had much experience getting up on stage really? charlotte allen 15 52 wow, tony, i'm really surprised to hear that i would not have thought and tony morelan 15 55 he must have forgot about that time that i bombed we were hosting about 100 different here at the campus, and i was i was asked to just give a short presentation i mean, maybe 10 minutes, the presentation could not have been easier i mean, all it has to do is talk about myself i just started at samsung, like, two months earlier, i was just going to show a few slides and talk about me as a designer and how i got to samsung well, just before i was going on stage, i was in the back of the room and a developer guy comes up and he starts asking me about all these technical questions about our watch i mean, i didn't know the answers i'm a designer i didn't know how many biometric sensors there were and the specs behind what they did so he turns to me, and he says, i'm surprised samsung hired you so now i'm doubting myself, you know, i mean, was i qualified to do this job and they announced my name to come up on stage so i run up to the stage and i grabbed the clicker to start going through my presentation and i grabbed it upside down i click the button, and i don't realize it but i'm actually going backwards to the presentation that was given before mine, and i don't realize this kind of talking away, and then i turn and i look at the projection screen, and i realized, i'm not even in my presentation so i click the other button, but then i click it too many times and i end up advancing like three slides into my presentation and at this point, i'm just totally lost you know, i'm nervous, and i start to feel this wave of anxiety come over me and i don't know what to think i don't know what to say and i just froze it just froze us looking at the audience and they were looking at me, it honestly, it's the weirdest thing i just could not function someone actually came up onto the stage and grabbed the clicker from me and together we just bulldoze my way through the rest of my presentation i mean, it was fine i mean, looking back at it, i'm sure it wasn't as bad as i made it out to be but you know, what it did tell me was that i needed to get some professional training public speaking so sign up for a few classes you know, here we are a little over a year later in this past year, i actually hosted the samsung developer conference award show so, yeah, that was a lot of fun charlotte allen 18 16 so how can the community find you? are you on social media and want to reach out to you possibly even see some of your work? tony morelan 18 24 sure, sure so when i started doing my workspace design, i'd created a brand name that brand name is axeir so it is a x e i r charlotte allen 18 32 have to ask again, is there a meaning to axeir or tony morelan 18 35 actually no, i wanted a five-letter domain name i can give a little advice is pick a domain name that people don't have to ask you how to spell it unfortunately, with axeir people don't know how to spell that so yeah, that wasn't that wasn't the best choice but you know what, i got the domain name can find me online under axeir on social channels is axeirbuzz so you can find me on twitter and instagram you can find me on linkedin, you know, just search my name is tony morelan happy to connect with you on linkedin and another way that you can reach me is just through our website you know, i'm active on the forums so you can go to our forums and post questions there charlotte allen 19 13 so it's been a blast talking to you today, i've learned some new things i didn't really know how popular you were with all the stars and but it's been great talking with you and working with you and thanks for sitting down and taking some time tony morelan 19 27 thank you outro 19 30 looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or software for designing apps without coding it all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developers program produced by tony morelan with special thanks to charlotte allen and music composed by the atomic tone
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 3, episode 2 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest derrick lee, polycube galaxy themes, galaxy store not only do we chat about their approach to designing and marketing compelling themes, but also how polycube is looking to expand their use of contract designers from their home country of korea to include designers from all around the world so that they can create for a global audience listen download this episode topics covered history of polycube best of galaxy store awards publishing on galaxy store galaxy badge use of stock imagery design workflow diversity and inclusion helpful links polycube facebook - facebook com/friends polycube polycube website - polycube co kr/v2/ polycube instagram - instagram com/polycube_friends/ polycube youtube - youtube com/c/polycubeinc galaxy themes - developer samsung com/galaxy-themes samsung developer program homepage - developer samsung com samsung developer program newsletter - developer samsung com/newsletter samsung developer program blog - developer samsung com/blog samsung developer program news - developer samsung com/news samsung developer program facebook - facebook com/samsungdev samsung developer program instagram - instagram com/samsung_dev samsung developer program twitter - twitter com/samsung_dev samsung developer program youtube - youtube com/samsungdevelopers samsung developer program linkedin - linkedin com/company/samsungdevelopers tony morelan linkedin - linkedin com/in/tony-morelan transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode two on today's show, i'm joined by derrick lee, content manager at polycube winners of the 2021 best of galaxy store award for best steam collection not only do we chat about their approach to designing and marketing, amazing themes, but also how polycube is looking to expand their use of contract designers from their home country of korea to include designers from all around the world so that they can create for a global audience enjoy hey, derrick, it is great to have you on the podcast derrick lee 00 51 hello, tony it's, it's great to see you thank you for having me tony morelan 00 55 so i like to start the podcast with who is derrick lee? derrick lee 00 59 um, well, i'm a person who appreciates and enjoys all forms of art, like paintings, digital graphics, music, everything i actually majored in industrial designing myself and i also love singing you know, as i said, all forms of art, tony morelan 01 13 i had no idea that you had a big appreciation for, for art and for music i actually do myself derrick lee 01 19 well, i see a guitar i see several guitars behind it right now yeah tony morelan 01 23 and the folks listening to this it's only for their audio but yes, we've got some cameras, derrick can see i've got a few guitars in the background i like to pretend that i know how to sing but still have yet to get the courage to actually sing in front of somebody so yeah, great to hear that you have that appreciation in that ability yeah, derrick lee 01 41 i'm not that good at singing either i just love it tony morelan 01 42 that's awesome that's awesome so derrick, you are a content manager at polycube tell me a little bit about that role derrick lee 01 50 well, that role is essentially giving out guidelines for designers coming up with something good visually, i think it could be better if somebody is giving out guidelines on which designs can you know resonate with people a little bit more, not just with themselves that's my role at polycube tony morelan 02 05 my background is really in graphic design okay, that's where i spent much of my career and i've worked with many art directors so it sounds like even though you call yourself a content manager to me, it sounds like that role really fits that art director derrick lee 02 20 role yeah, well, anyway, you can call it yeah tony morelan 02 24 so how long have you been at polycube? derrick lee 02 26 um, i have been at polycube for about three years now tony morelan 02 29 just about the same amount of time that i've been at samsung oh, okay so you had said that you that you majored in industrial design interesting i actually minored in industrial design okay okay, so we've got a few similarities, not just in music and singing but also with industrial design yes, we do i understand that coming out of college, you didn't just dive right into tech that you actually were selling donuts from a truck? derrick lee 02 57 yeah, i have been selling donuts for about, i think about 18 months and i really enjoyed it you know, don't get me wrong i didn't quit doing that, because i didn't like it but i really wanted to be involved in a design business in any way, shape, or form sure that's something i wanted to do more and i figured out that, you know, polycube was a company that was designing themes, and i thought it could be exciting so i jumped in that's great tony morelan 03 21 so now polycube is from seoul correct that's where your headquarters is? yes and that's where i'm assuming that's where you live? derrick lee 03 28 yeah, i live like 20 minutes away and it's a beautiful city, i hope in the future when there are no barriers such as covid-19 i hope our supporters all around the world can visit for a nice trip tony morelan 03 39 so you're in seoul, korea, but your english sounds so good i can tell you must have spent some time in the in the states here well, derrick lee 03 47 when i was five years old, my dad got a job in the states in new orleans, actually and we lived there for about nine years wow and then even after i came back to korea, i you know, i stayed in korea for a year and then in new orleans for a year and i've been going back and forth but in korea, military surfaces mandatory i stayed here for two years and then i started selling donuts as i mentioned earlier, so yeah, it's been a while and now covid yeah, so i've been staying in korea for a while but yeah, i do miss new orleans tony morelan 04 18 so i'm guessing that your love for music probably came a bit out of your time in new orleans derrick lee 04 24 oh, yeah, definitely i love jazz i love you know, stevie wonder cars, though those were the those were the artists that really, you know, you know, set a fire inside me yeah tony morelan 04 35 oh, that's great that's great now i was fortunate that actually a few months before covid hit i actually went out to seoul korea because that is where samsung's headquarter this so i got to spend a week there absolutely beautiful city so much to explore, but boy do i want to get back there was a lot that i did not see derrick lee 04 54 i would like to be your guide if you happen to come again one day yeah, tony morelan 04 58 i'll take you up on it for sure so, so about polycube, the company itself, they've been around for quite a while and i know that they do much more than just theme so tell me a bit about the history of poly q? and what are some of those areas that they also work on? derrick lee 05 12 you know, we have quite a history and actually 2021 was our 20th anniversary wow, we came a long way developing apps, making games and designing themes, watch faces and whatnot yeah, tony morelan 05 24 in the name polycube, i'm wondering, is there an interesting story behind that name? derrick lee 05 29 um, well, our founder wanted a name that emphasizes the importance of diversity in a group and if you look at the etymology of poly, you know, it means many sided sure so our founder thought that it was a perfect name cube was added, because, you know, if you look at the cube the shape and as it also has many sides, you know, you have to have many sides to form a cube, right so that's how poly and cube got together and formed the named polycube, you had mentioned that you do more than just themes well, we also make a lot of games, you know, one that we're really working on these days is a game called poker master it has been around, but we're trying to, you know, find rooms for improvement sure tony morelan 06 06 to update the game so that more people can enjoy it now, is that game on the galaxy store at the moment? yes, it derrick lee 06 13 is excellent and we're, we're trying to make it better and better, and has been around for a while, but we're trying to improve it all the time sure and we also design themes and watch faces, we're really trying to improve our watch face designs these days so i hope you know it will get bigger and bigger tony morelan 06 29 yeah, i was checking out some of your designs earlier i love the very classic feel of many of your designs derrick lee 06 35 that means a lot coming from you because you're a designer yourself tony morelan 06 39 thank you thank you that's actually how i got my start with samsung for those that don't know how, okay, when i was doing my graphic design gig started designing watch faces selling them on the galaxy store okay, got noticed by a few people at samsung made a few phone calls and before you know it, i was working for samsung teaching how to design watch faces, derrick lee 06 59 then that really means a lot coming from you tony morelan 07 03 polycube, i think it's you said it's about 30 employees derrick lee 07 07 well, 31 exactly and we have 11 designers among those 31 employees okay, tony morelan 07 13 now, are these split between full time employees? and are some contractors, you have derrick lee 07 18 full time employees and contractors altogether? 31 okay, and all of our 11 designers are all full, they work full time tony morelan 07 26 wow okay, that's great so, you know, i know a lot of designers and developers listen to this podcast always looking for opportunities to, you know, look for new work okay, by any chance is polycube looking for new designers, derrick lee 07 39 we are actually planning on recruiting a lot of designers from abroad sure, starting this year, because we want diversity in our group i guess the best way is you can look us up because we have a website but also, you can send an email, the email addresses master at polycube co kr okay and if you send an email anytime we will take a close look at it and yeah, we'll pay attention tony morelan 08 04 that's awesome so what is the web address for polycube? derrick lee 08 07 oh, it's very simple it's www dot polycube co kr got it and that's p o l y c u b e very simple tony morelan 08 16 how long would you say polycube has been designing themes? derrick lee 08 19 paula cube has been designing themes for about six years now because we started on 2016 tony morelan 08 26 so six years, i would guess that you were probably one of the first theme designers to get onto the platform so how did the people that polycube first learn about the opportunity to design themes for samsung and sell them on the galaxy store? derrick lee 08 39 you know, we were just normal galaxy phone users at first and you know, we naturally just got to know about themes on our phones, because we were using our phones, obviously and we kind of had some time to sit down together and talk about it because we thought we could really jump into and make a business out of it tony morelan 08 57 yeah, you know, it's funny, every designer that i have interviewed on the podcast, has said the same story that they were first just a user and you know, saw the opportunity to customize their own phone and they thought well heck, i could do this myself so what about some of the other areas of theme designing? are you guys also selling you know, wallpapers, aods, icon packs, things like that? derrick lee 09 17 yes everything you just you just said right now we do sell wallpapers, icon packs yeah, aods tony morelan 09 25 so last year, we had the 2021 best of galaxy store award show and polycube was the recipient of the best theme collection award yes, we were tell me what that meant to you and your company for winning that award? well, first derrick lee 09 42 of all, of course, we are very grateful for the awards and this award is to us is something that really started such a positive momentum for us because ever since we got the news that we were winning the award, we are feeling you know, we actually feel a positive momentum that started from that board so it's something that started such a positive momentum for us tony morelan 10 03 that's great yeah and you're a truthfully your collection is amazing i do sit on the board of the folks here at samsung, they get to vote on the winners yeah, i was very happy to see you win the well-deserved award for best thing collection oh, in what ways? have you promoted winning the award? derrick lee 10 21 through, you know, the mainstream social media such as youtube, facebook, instagram? yeah, we're everywhere tony morelan 10 27 are you using galaxy store badges to help promote what you do at polycube? derrick lee 10 32 we are always looking for chances to utilize our galaxy badge everywhere we can use it because it's a good system, you know, the galaxy badge, all you have to do is just click on it and then you can take a look at our you know, collection of themes tony morelan 10 43 sure and when it comes to discoverability, what are some of the platform some of the techniques that you guys do, just to help people find polycube out there in the in the world? derrick lee 10 52 we have, we do have links that lead to our facebook and instagram page and all of the descriptions and the themes that we publish tony morelan 10 59 so you had mentioned youtube, and i know that that is one of the best tools that designers are using to help promote their work so i'm assuming then you guys are creating videos derrick lee 11 09 yeah, we are creating videos i don't have the exact number with me right now but i think we have more than 4000 videos tony morelan 11 16 that's great and then you're leveraging those videos also on platforms like instagram yes, we are now you had mentioned facebook, tell me what is the best way for people to find your facebook page? derrick lee 11 26 well, it's www facebook com/friends poly cube tony morelan 11 32 yeah, that's easy i love that polycube friends thank you you know, when i started my company for doing themes and watch faces, i added the word buzz to the end so you could find my instagram axeirbuzz derrick lee 11 44 buzz? buzz? okay, that's a positive vibe to it tony morelan 11 47 so polycube friends, is that pretty much the handle that you'll use across other platforms? so like on instagram? yes, it is yes now you had mentioned 4000 videos, but i know you guys have a lot more when it comes to themes what would you say? your total theme count is right now, derrick lee 12 01 in total, we published 6387 themes tony morelan 12 05 that's crazy what would you say are the total downloads that you have on those 6000 themes? derrick lee 12 10 about 25 million? tony morelan 12 13 that's crazy i was excited when i got to my first million downloads i'm a long ways away from 25 it's very humbling when we think about it with that many themes, i'm sure that you're starting to look at different topics, different areas so you can see really what is resonating with the with the customer base? what are some of those categories that you would say your themes fall under? derrick lee 12 34 um, we're always looking for diversity in our designs, but there are some categories that really resonate with people more than others for example, design skulls, and butterflies and flowers i think those are, you know, some themes that really resonate with people a lot, you know, regardless of country, regardless of gender tony morelan 12 54 yeah, i noticed i saw one of your themes was school, but it was a steampunk school and i love steampunk i love that look derrick lee 13 02 oh, yeah, i think i know which one you're talking about tony morelan 13 05 yeah, that's, that's a great theme so outside of some of those areas, seasonal wise i mean, do you see like, importance to design themes related to holidays or two seasons? derrick lee 13 15 oh, definitely is especially christmas and halloween i think those are two holidays that really, i'm sure really boost the market, if you will i wish there were more designs on like mardi gras since i'm from new orleans yeah, but halloween and christmas are you know, the two holidays? tony morelan 13 32 yeah, i've heard that from many other folks as well great times to be stylizing your phone for sure derrick lee 13 38 yes, yes, it is tony morelan 13 41 so you know polycube, had a lot of success and you know, it's obviously this wasn't overnight, because you've been doing it for a while but tell me was there like one sort of pivotal moment in your history that you were like, oh, my gosh, this really is starting to take off? or was it truthfully, just a gradual growth that you've done over the years? derrick lee 13 57 it was gradual, to a certain extent but when we first started to actually design themes and tried to make a business out of it, the first six months, i don't think we weren't getting a lot of downloads to downloads that we were expecting and, you know, the support that we were expecting, i mean, of course, we had some, you know, very good supporters that, you know, kept us kept us going when we weren't getting the results that we wanted but after six months, we were seeing the growth when it comes to numbers when it comes to you know, this porters and things like that tony morelan 14 29 yeah, i know and speaking with a lot of other designers, i mean, it takes an investment and time before you start to see really any in any bit of return some of that comes to just getting your name out there and it's not just publishing your themes, your watch faces on galaxy store, but it's that additional marketing that you do so, you know, once you put some time into your instagram or into your facebook page yes that's when you start to see the return yes, definitely so you've got a lot of designers on hand yes where are they? designers getting their ideas derrick lee 15 02 first, our designers, you know, just come up with literally a sketch on their notebooks with their pens but also, where we get ideas is from the reviews, ah, our supporters all around the world, they are not just helping by supporting, they are actually really helping out through reviews, because when we read them, they really offer some great ideas and insights tony morelan 15 20 got it so when people are posting comments after they've purchased one of your themes, you guys are really looking at those comments to think like, okay, what could we either, you know, expand on this topic? or maybe the comment is, and this one isn't really for me, and then maybe your team, you'll start to look in other areas? derrick lee 15 35 yeah, well, you know, sometimes the reviews are very specific it's not just i like it, why i don't like it there are a lot of reviews that say, i don't like it, but i would like it if it was this, if it was that those are the reviews that really give us really good ideas that's great tony morelan 15 50 to hear so a lot of companies leverage stock photography, when it comes to creating their designs, yes which i know can kind of be a hot topic, because truthfully, you know, there's licensing that that gets involved whenever you're using stock imagery and also the reality that that anybody can go and, you know, purchase a certain stock image and build a theme out of it but what are you guys doing to help set yourself apart when you are leveraging stock imagery, derrick lee 16 18 of course, there are a lot of good sources out there that can be utilized and be modified, integrate themes but as you just said, there are some, some issues when it comes to just, you know, using those stock imagery and turning them into themes, right so we have a whole team that really looks into the licensing parts to prevent any legal issues, if you will and we have designers that really keep that in mind that you just don't take the stock imagery, and just copy that and just put it in your phone and that doesn't really make a theme, you know, we go through plenty modifying and we add ideas to it and, you know, all of a sudden, it's not just that stock imagery, it's something totally different tony morelan 16 57 that's great i've actually spoken with many other theme designers on the podcast, and they've all said the same thing that, you know, they leverage the use of stock imagery, but they take those images and build them into an image that is their own that is something that is unique yes, yes so you had mentioned pencil sketching, so tell me what the workflow is i mean, do you are your designers actually traditionally grabbing pencil and paper and, and starting to sketch some of their concepts? derrick lee 17 23 yeah, it's 2022 but that's, that's still where it starts, you know, first, you know, they literally come up with a sketch with a pen or a pencil and then we actually have a meeting, we look at all those sketches, and we discuss which ones we will actually go for yeah, once the designs materialize, we sit down again, and discuss whether there's room for improvement, or revising and then after that, we publish them in hope that our supporters enjoy them tony morelan 17 48 that is excellent to hear you know, in my experience, as a designer, i would often tell other designers that yes, that is the first step is to grab pencil and paper because you don't get caught up in all the tools that you know, software allows you to do or limits you to do you don't get caught up in colors or specific, you know, shapes that may be in the way you truthfully see the skeleton of the design and if that skeleton works, then you know, it's something that's worth pursuing yeah, yeah great to hear that the that you guys take that approach to design? so you know, the process of starting with sketch and then going through meetings and developing the designs all the way to publishing? how long do you think that typically takes your team to do? derrick lee 18 31 um, from just a sketch on a notebook? to an actual theme? i would say one theme takes four days, maybe five? tony morelan 18 39 i would say that's a pretty quick, aggressive timeline sometimes it would take me weeks to do derrick lee 18 45 yeah, because we don't want you know, we don't want to keep our supporters waiting so sure you work hard tony morelan 18 50 what applications are you using when you are doing your design work? adobe derrick lee 18 55 photoshop, adobe illustrator and after effect, oh, tony morelan 18 58 so after effects for doing videos, okay yeah are you doing any animated like wallpapers where you're leveraging motion graphics? derrick lee 19 06 yeah, we actually have a whole there's a team that really focuses on only the video parts, okay, the animation parts that really help out if another team comes up with the sketch shirt and you know, the basis then, you know, there is another whole team designing team that really helps out with sophisticated designing when it comes to the videos tony morelan 19 25 okay, okay that's great so i know a lot of designers utilize the strategy of free when it comes to marketing, their apps so tell me about your experience well, what's your strategy when it comes to free themes free? watch faces? derrick lee 19 42 yeah, we are offering free themes every week, and we promote them every friday and i think our supporters deserve free themes you know, sure, every once in a while and you know, if you check out our facebook and instagram page, you'll see that there are actually quite a lot of opportunities to get some awesome themes for free yeah, tony morelan 19 59 i think that i think that that's great i know what i teach typically is that it's nice to offer up a free app a free design but you don't want to inundate the market with too many of your free yeah, themes free watch faces because then everyone's going to expect that there's always going to be some good free stuff out there so use it as a way to encourage the community to get to try out your stuff, your themes, and then that way, they're more inclined and more trustworthy to actually put money behind some of their purchases and buy some of your items, derrick lee 20 30 especially for people who never, you know, use the theme before, but you want them to really get to know what a theme is, you know, why theme is exciting to have a theme on your phone, tony morelan 20 40 let's talk about some of the challenges because i know you know; this whole market is not as easy as just creating something nice and posting it so what are some of the challenges that you face when it comes to designing themes and marketing those themes? derrick lee 20 55 we hope that our themes satisfy as many people as possible globally, because themes are global but sometimes figuring out how the taste like differs depending on cultures and countries, it's not it's not the easiest thing to do you know, we come up with one design, but people here like it, but people there don't we are greedy, if you will, in a positive way we want to satisfy as many people as possible globally so that's not so that would be a challenge tony morelan 21 21 of course yeah no, that is that is and i know that a lot of times designers are leveraging the ability to have localization for their app so this is where you know, you're selling the theme globally but you can say, you know, in the us market, this is what the description looks like in you know, a market in asia, this is what the description looks like or in germany yes, i know that, you know, designers do see a nice increase in revenue when they are utilizing localization so i'm assuming are you guys using that feature as derrick lee 21 49 well? yes, we are the descriptions look all different, depending on the country, the language, you had mentioned tony morelan 21 55 covid earlier? obviously, we still are in the middle of covid how has that impacted polycube, derrick lee 22 01 of course, covid-19 is very negative but for us, it has done nothing but booster motivation, because covid-19 stopped people from expressing themselves through their faces by making them wear masks right so sure, we were more motivated to help to help people express themselves on their phones instead, through well designed customized themes tony morelan 22 21 you know, that was nice to hear it's something i hadn't really thought about that yes, the face is being covered by your mask so how else can you express? you know, your look your style? yeah and that's where people are customizing their phones, obviously, to represent themselves? derrick lee 22 37 yeah, because nowadays, i think your phone is your second face, for sure it shows who you are tony morelan 22 42 so what is in the future for public cube, derrick lee 22 45 you know, we are actually planning to come up with some very innovative designs that have never been applied to themes before you know, if you look at themes, of course, there is diversity, you know, you can see all sorts of designs in the themes market but sometimes, you know, you run into some designs that make you think that oh, this is nice, but it might not look well on themes, but we are trying to break that wall and come up with some very innovative designs that have never been applied to teams before nice tony morelan 23 15 i'm really looking forward to seeing what polycube produces out of that now, you had mentioned diversity and i love everything you've been talking about, like when it comes to diversity with your designs and the global reach for that tell me specifically about polycube, what are you guys doing when it comes to diversity and inclusion? derrick lee 23 34 we are actually planning on recruiting designers from abroad it doesn't matter where you're from sure, you can be from united states you can be canada, you can be from japan, wherever because we don't want to end up stuck in one way of thinking when it comes to designing and promoting yeah, and i think that's, that could be one of the best ways to stop that from happening tony morelan 23 55 sure because i know just culturally wise you know, people from specific cultures just have a way of approaching their designs so to hear that you are looking for designers, you know from other cultures, i think is a great way to ensure that that you really are offering up great work globally yeah, thank you so you know there are a lot of other theme designers out there a lot of companies have had success is there one company that really comes to mind when you think of a theme designer that you really like derrick lee 24 27 i think that a company called echo visuals yes yeah if you check out their themes they're excellent and we took a lot of inspiration from them tony morelan 24 35 yeah no i've heard that from many designers echo visuals does amazing work and i know that they are very active on facebook and other social media platforms really doing a lot of stuff around marketing so just another good example of how a company does more than just create their things but they have to do all that work behind the marketing yeah so i know you sound very passionate when it comes to your work at polycube but what is you do outside of polycube to have a little fun well, derrick lee 25 04 i obviously love themes, but i don't think about them 24/7 i need some time off to you know, re-energize myself i trained jujitsu do yeah, i actually had a dream of becoming a commentator in mixed martial arts really? yeah, um, you know, that never came to fruition, obviously, but i'm still a fan of the sport i really follow it and it doesn't just help physically it helps mentally which ultimately leads to better productivity tony morelan 25 32 i love hearing that aspect of it you know, for me, i do a lot of cycling now okay and it's not so much for the exercise part of it it's the mental side of getting out eating away being unplugged, either taking in the sights or enjoying the, you know, the fresh air derrick lee 25 49 yeah, i totally understand one last tony morelan 25 50 question for you derrick lee 25 51 okay tony morelan 25 53 what is your favorite donut? derrick lee 25 55 my favorite donut? um well, i always go with the classics chocolate donut scores yeah, well, not just with donuts, like with i think that's just how i am with anything i always go with the classic like hamburgers like everything i always like the original yeah and actually, do you know what being aids are? no, i don't know it's, it's kind of i wouldn't call it a donut but some people do call it call them donuts yeah, it's something that you can have when you come to new orleans oh, i'll tony morelan 26 25 have to give that a try is there anything unique to korea when it comes to donuts? derrick lee 26 30 i'll get to korea when anything comes to korea like what when pizza first came to korea? sure you know, it was a long time but korea like really likes you know, making 1000 flavors of pizzas 1000 flavors of hamburgers 1000 flavors of everything yeah ice creams yeah so yeah, i think that could be one thing that you can enjoy if you know people from abroad, travel korea, you know, there are things that you wouldn't have imagined tony morelan 26 58 how funny that you say that so when i was in korea, i remember going to a restaurant that it was strictly cakes it was like you said it was like 1000 different cakes and you would go in there and walk through all the showcases of everything and then you would pick your slice and it was amazing derrick lee 27 15 yeah, i can't even imagine like what flavors it has it was a tony morelan 27 19 dream but hey, derrick, i really appreciate you taking the time it was great to chat with you i'm looking forward to 2022 to see what more polycube does when it comes to creating beautiful designs? no okay, thank you closing 27 33 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 27 48 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 3, episode 4 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest chris benjaminsen, frvr games, galaxy store chris benjaminsen, founder of frvr, the super successful game publisher with over 70 titles on samsung services not only do we chat about monetization and game revenue strategies, but how the frvr platform has allowed them to scale their global reach all music from today's show is from frvr games, composed by rasmus hartvig listen download this episode topics covered frvr publishing on galaxy store marketing discoverability monetization generating revenue in-app purchase iap in-app advertising iaa interstitial ads galaxy badge best of galaxy store awards acquiring games/studios diversity and inclusion helpful links frvr - frvr com frvr careers - careers frvr com frvr linkedin - linkedin com/company/frvr frvr youtube - youtube com/c/frvrgames gold train frvr - goldtrain frvr com chris benjaminsen linkedin - linkedin com/in/chrisbenjaminsen/ chris benjaminsen twitter - twitter com/benjaminsen galaxy badges - developer samsung com/galaxy-store/gsb-promotion samsung iap - developer samsung com/iap samsung developer program homepage - developer samsung com samsung developer program newsletter - developer samsung com/newsletter samsung developer program blog - developer samsung com/blog samsung developer program news - developer samsung com/news samsung developer program facebook - facebook com/samsungdev samsung developer program instagram - instagram com/samsung_dev samsung developer program twitter - twitter com/samsung_dev samsung developer program youtube - youtube com/samsungdevelopers samsung developer program linkedin - linkedin com/company/samsungdevelopers transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode four on today's show, i'm joined by chris benjaminsen, founder of frvr, the super successful game publisher with over 70 titles on samsung services not only do we chat about monetization and game revenue strategies, but how the frvr platform has allowed them to scale their global reach and the music from today's show is from frvr games, all composed by rasmus hartvig, enjoy hey, chris, welcome to the podcast chris benjaminsen 00 50 hey, tony thanks for having me yeah, so tony morelan 00 52 so i'm excited to chat with you because, you know, we've had game developers on the podcast, but never a game publisher let me first ask you though, who is chris benjaminsen? chris benjaminsen 01 02 like? that's a good question like, if i were to define myself, i think there's like two defining characteristics, like one is i must make things and the second one is, i detest repetition so if you come to my place, it's not unlikely i will cook but it's very unlikely i'm cooking something i made before so you know, it might be good might not be good, right? but you know, that, that drives and making things like it, it can be origami, it can be computer games that can be like, doesn't really matter, as long as i'm sort of producing something, and then i really don't like doing things twice right you know, like, anything that's routine is just boring tony morelan 01 41 so you're an explorer, then? chris benjaminsen 01 43 i guess so i guess so yeah tony morelan 01 47 so you're with frvr? what exactly is your role? and what is frvr? chris benjaminsen 01 53 like, like, i'm the i'm the original founder, the company, right? you know, and my role today is mostly around working together with massive companies such as samsung, i lead a team at frvr that does that and if you're, if you were to describe frvr, as a company, we're a platform and a publisher okay, so we have a platform that allows game developers to make fantastic games and with all the services that they need to do to do so basically, anything in between a, a game developer and a consumer, and then we also the publisher, we actually make sure that the games get in front of the right user, and they have an opportunity to play those games tony morelan 02 29 okay, what does frvr stand for? it's an acronym, does it have a deep meaning? chris benjaminsen 02 35 no, it's not like, like, a lot of people are sort of asking us if we have french vr company, which we're not yeah, but, but like, like, if rbis is technically forever, without the vowels okay, you can trademark frvr you can trademark forever, at least, not unless you have apple liberal money, right? so so if we say if i'm yeah, because if you could locally use you sort of the full pronunciation you can actually use the trademark so there's a bunch of stupid rules there tony morelan 03 07 interesting interesting so before we dive into frvr, tell me about your journey what led you into the mobile gaming area, and then specifically into creating frvr, chris benjaminsen 03 17 i've been in the, in the games industry for like, more than 20 years, my first job, sort of professional job ever was to make a real time multiplayer games in javascript and if i'd be honest, my seventh startup in total and my second year, and my third platform company over also have like a long history of sort of building companies in this space and i've been very fortunate i never managed to go bankrupt but one of these companies so far, right, you know, so little bit proud about that tony morelan 03 48 oh, that's great it definitely plays into you know, when you first started, you had said that, you know, you're not going to repeat much so you said seven companies that you've started, chris benjaminsen 03 58 you had all very different companies, and some of them were like, like, like, very small and, and never got successful, anything like that right? it's just like the companies apparently gets bigger and bigger every time i try yeah, there might be there might be new startups in the future as well but for now, if rbis is a very exciting company to work at, and definitely want to want to spend my time tony morelan 04 20 so i know one of those companies you had started you actually, it was a pretty successful company that you ended up selling but you came away with that from with a lot of lessons learned, i would say is that correct? chris benjaminsen 04 33 yeah so like, like, in a previous life, build a platform company that did infrastructure for cash or mobile, social and in that company, there was a lot of people building games on top of our infrastructure and 1000s of developers right and, and there was there's a few significant learnings from that so one was that building a company that just charges other people for services is not a particularly good business, a lot of money was made by the developers on top of our platform where we are not making quite a lot of money so you know, make sure that that you actually participate where, where the value is if you want to be a publisher and then the second learning was that the successful developers were not the ones who had the best at making games, right? so there's, there's not a strong connection between sort of making games that are fun to play and the economic success that those developers were able to see so if you want to be successful in the game space, and this is particularly true in the in the mobile game space, you need to be good at a lot of other things that has nothing to do with game development, such as a user acquisition, and revenue optimization, and data and all these things and that, you know, i don't think there's anything wrong with that but if you are somebody who really loves making kickass games, you're missing the 90% if you also want to be successful at that tony morelan 05 57 it's interesting you say that, you know, i had on the podcast a few weeks ago, peter and tobias from biodome games, they have their game gold digger, frvr yeah and it was peter, who had a great quote, saying that he was chatting with one of his partners, who had said, you know, for once, can you stop trying to be so artistic in your games and just build a game that can be successful? and, you know, we all had a good laugh at that chris benjaminsen 06 23 yeah and, you know, i think all industries are like that, right you know, you probably have to be good at a multitude of different disciplines to be successful but, but the games industry, being one of the most valuable entertainment industry, two worlds is, of course, also one of the most competitive and that competitive landscape it's a very, it's a very hard place for, for most people to compete and, and the market sentiment is sort of dominated by survival bias yeah right you know, like, like, the people who won the lottery yeah you know, like, like an among us are like flappy birds so like these, these small teams that had an outsized hit, right, but that's like winning the lottery good luck with that yeah and tony morelan 07 04 i think a great example of that right now is wordle, in the phenomenon behind that chris benjaminsen 07 08 absolutely fantastic game, right you know, and i like these small puzzle games once in a while to come along i was like, 2048, as well, which was also originally made, i think, by an italian game developer, you know, just as a small example, fantastic, fantastic game as well yeah, tony morelan 07 25 definitely, in kind of going back to, you know, what i mentioned, peter, and tobias, they said that for them, you know, the key to their success was partnering with someone like frvr, so that they could just focus on creating the game and let everybody on your team handle everything that when it comes to publishing and marketing, so i think there's a huge value with where you guys are in this space chris benjaminsen 07 47 i hope so like, that's what we're trying to do we're trying to allow developers focusing on making fantastic games and then we took care of all the nitty gritty details of making those games available and i think we published the 39 platforms and then while also helping those developers make sure that the right users come into the games yeah, yeah because it's not it's not only just about the volume of people who play a game, it's more important to make sure that the right user plays the game sure, to get the kind of games that i like, it's not necessarily the kind of games that you like, right, for tony morelan 08 17 sure so let's talk a bit about the history how long has frvr been in existence? chris benjaminsen 08 22 so i think i think technically, they were written, sort of in the integration of the company was founded in must be 2016 okay and their written version of frb apps was decided to be the biggest, baddest lifestyle company you have ever heard of, and sort of sort of allowed me to go and travel the world without having to worry about expenses and it did that it did that very well like, very successfully however, like i'd had a corporate job in corporate america, i had moved to san francisco at this point in my life after having sold a previous company and i sort of managed to convince myself that everything that was wrong with my life was working it turned out everything that was wrong with my life was working for corporate america and it took me it took me like three weeks and a whole bunch of success to realize that and decide, oh, wow, there's a big opportunity here in what inevitably came if ivr that exists today yeah, i teamed up with a guy called brian meidell they joining co-founder came in and we started sort of getting serious about the company a few years after the original founding tony morelan 09 28 and it was brian actually, who had told peter, hey, for once, put artistic stuff aside and let's focus on you know, how to be successful here chris benjaminsen 09 36 yeah and like he's a fantastic executor right, you know, and that's, like, due to building big teams and sort of running productions a lot of repetition stuff i don't like right, yes really good at that tony morelan 09 48 that's great so how many employees are at frvr? chris benjaminsen 09 52 yeah, so i think we are 130 now so as of today, but yeah, like we find ourselves in a situation right now, where we are onboarding around 11 new people a month, so you're growing? yeah, every time you ask that question, the number would have changed? tony morelan 10 08 no, are these people are you focused in one headquarters? are you guys you know, all around the globe? chris benjaminsen 10 13 we have most of our people in in lisbon in portugal and that's predominantly where we are focusing on hiring okay, you know, post covid, the world has changed and, you know, we absolutely accept that some people want to be wherever it is they want to be so we also we also have offices in denmark, we have offices in united kingdom and we have a small office in malta as well, and a small office in spain so we have we have sort of different opportunities for people who wants to work in an office got it and then the majority of people are now in in disband portugal and that's also where we are mostly doing a tony morelan 10 50 hiring you yourself, though you are in the uk is that correct? yeah, i'm chris benjaminsen 10 53 in london, right? you know, i get to i get to be a special snowflake and decide where i want to live so i live in tony morelan 11 01 wonderful now under the frvr brand how many game studios do you guys have that you're working with? chris benjaminsen 11 07 we are publisher right? you know, so? we i think presently we work with around 20 okay, yeah other studios, right? so it's a non-insignificant amount but we have high aspirations, we want to get to a place where we can work with hundreds, if not 1000s of developers sure to do fantastic things tony morelan 11 28 so how many monthly players? do you get playing frvr games on all channels? chris benjaminsen 11 34 i get to it various, right like, like a lot of our success comes from viral traffic right okay so active users can range from i got a really bad month, 50 million to get month where we were we peek into, like, like 100 plus million mark wow, tony morelan 11 50 monthly active users that's crazy yeah, it's chris benjaminsen 11 53 a lot of people so far, i think like, like it's a number we track we think we've had around 1 6 billion absolute unique for the lifetime of the company tony morelan 12 03 wow and that is just in you know, you said the 2016 was the start of frvr chris benjaminsen 12 09 have you? i failed to remember it might have been 15 right but yeah, like plus minus a year sure tony morelan 12 16 so now let's talk about samsung and galaxy store with frvr, what are some of the popular titles that you guys offer on galaxy store? chris benjaminsen 12 24 so particularly on the galaxy store, like we have, i think we have like 12 games live, their most notice would be it's called tigger, frvr which, which is built by peter and team and then we have sort of our higher end games like a basketball and a hex and however, we do work with samsung in other ways, as well, they have this instance type product as well, where we are also present and we have i don't know; i think we've done like seven or eight different integration with samsung along the year so we are sort of everywhere on a samsung phone, including the galaxy appstore tony morelan 12 57 okay, so not just the galaxy app store but there's other different platforms that samsung offers frvr is involved in chris benjaminsen 13 04 yeah, so we work with, we work with samsung about building an experience in our first integration with what's in the product called bixby minus one home screen so when you swipe left on your on your phone, like we will be wearing, we had a cart where there was sort of quick links to our games, okay, we build an instant games type product together with samsung, we work quite a lot of that together and we have our games live there we also have integrations with the with the browser and like we exploring, basically, a big part of what frvr is, rather than trying to drag the user to where we want them to be, say, a mobile app store, we try to take the model and turn it inside out and bring people great games wherever they have already decided to want to be because it's very costly to drag a user somewhere else, right tony morelan 13 50 i see so if they're already there, you want to make your game available to them chris benjaminsen 13 54 yeah, yeah it's like, you know, if you're, if you're starbucks, right, people won't care if you can only get it in the airport, you actually have to be on a street corner close to where people sort of walk around, otherwise nobody is ever going to drink their coffee tony morelan 14 05 yeah, that's true that's true so how did this relationship with samsung for start? chris benjaminsen 14 10 we met samsung at a at a conference and they were like, can you give us games in like, four months? i think was the was the original question and we got the games to them in two days so wow so the answer was yes yeah tony morelan 14 24 that's a great way to start the relationship oh, yeah so why would you say it's important to offer your game on galaxy store? chris benjaminsen 14 31 like, again, you know, that those users there who love the galaxy store, and we want to have our games available to those users in that space and galaxy store is actually well performing? right you know, it's a samsung product and samsung phones are very high-end devices generally it's very, not only is it it's great to meet a consumer where they are they are also very high value users when people are playing from the front of samsung galaxy app store tony morelan 14 54 yeah, in what ways would you say galaxy store has helped you promote frvr games chris benjaminsen 14 59 for is the organic installs a fairly competent product? and it has all the features you would expect as a game developer, right? you know, so, so great access to in app purchases, great access to notifications, great access to distribution, right but we've also, we also really enjoyed working together with the samsung galaxy team and we have, like, among other things, we have an frvr category in the galaxy store that sort of exclusive to us it's only our games oh, no, no and we work together on seasonal featuring and to give feedbacks to us, you know, saying, hey, we think it would be fantastic if we could do some something around easter, for instance and then we go and work on that together and sort of find a, a process that works well together for both of us tony morelan 15 42 that's great and i'm sure that banner promotions are part of that is that chris benjaminsen 15 45 yeah, banner promotion, and i can promotions and like there's a lot of tools that samsung has in the toolbox to help out right? yeah and then we also push on the galaxy team to do more like we, we've sent a lot of feedback on the on the back-end tools and things like that and fantastically, it has impact, like we get better product right so for us, that's a fantastic partnership tony morelan 16 09 yeah and that's one of the things that actually pulled me into working for samsung was how open they were to feedback in wanting to improve their platform fantastic you know, you'd mentioned gold digger, frvr those are the guys they won our 2021 best of galaxy store award for best instant play game awesome game awesome guys, we were so happy to give that award tell me what it did mean for frvr to have one of your games win a best of galaxy store award? chris benjaminsen 16 37 it's a privilege, right? you know, and the credit goes to the game developer, they made that game? yeah right you know, we supported them along the way and, and of course, came with a lot of feedback and help them with technical issues and things like that but at the end of the day, you know, we have to be honest about the fact that the great games are made by the great developers, right, and also, as a platform publisher, provide the tools to make that a possibility but games are fundamentally a creative endeavor and you need massively traded people to make to make those games sure i'm, i'm a game developer myself as well, right you know, and i'm almost more proud of some of the games i've built and, you know, the very successful company that and if rbis, right, you know, because, you know, so it's sort of like an expression of something where you sat down and said, here's the thing i want to create, and now i've gotten it out right and i think to be as impede completely deserves getting that, that recognition from galaxy tony morelan 17 35 yeah success for a game definitely revolves around revenue tell me as far as frvr, what has been your strategy for generating revenue? chris benjaminsen 17 46 like so so from a, from a technical side, right, you know, we try to we try to make all avenues of generating revenue available in our platform, right so that means interstitial-based advertisement, it means reward the best advertisement? it means in app purchases, it means subscriptions it actually does not mean, banner advertisement, we don't do that because i don't like it no, really but you know, yeah, other than that, like, like, we sort of have all the technical capabilities, and then what we find and what we try to optimize for, it's not revenue, we try to optimize for engagement okay and there's a multitude of reasons for that, like so so like, one is the fact that i can't remember the specific number, but it's more than 90% of all value that is captured in the game is made by people who play the game more than once yeah, right you really want to have these long engagements with people, right and another fairly simple reason is it's a lot easier to take a game that has huge engagement, and turn it into a good business than it is to take a game with a with a strong monetization model and turn it into a great game right? so fundamentally, everything we focus on all our kpis, all our visions, and missions are around building experiences that people want to engage with for a long time and then revenue is something that happens as a result, they're off, rather than being sort of a driving factor and because we are good at distribution it because we, we are not sort of participating in the race to the bottom that is cost positive user acquisition on app stores, we can take the privilege that it is to be less aggressively monetizing than some of our competitors tony morelan 19 22 yeah, yeah so let's talk about some of the specifics here, when it comes to, you know, different ways to generate revenue you know, there's developers out there that may just be getting started in this space and so i want to help explain what some of those are so ip is in app purchase, kind of explain, like what is in app purchase chris benjaminsen 19 39 so new in app purchases, if you can somehow convince a user to pay for something in the game, right, you know, and, and how they pay it's actually quite different across the world so northern europe or usa, right? america has a distributor for a credit card, okay but if you're talking about a consumer in india, it's typically through a gift card or something like that why? they've gone into install and sort of funded a wallet, right but the fact of the matter is, what essentially ends up happening is you have you have an experience in your game that the user feels is worth the value of paying for and again, you know, like, like, like talking about engagement in games, right? why would a user be willing to, to sort of exchange money for something in a game? and that's typically related to the user's expectation of also playing this game two weeks from now? right? yes, they're investing yeah, you're investing in your future experience in this game? right? you know, so so it's another place where this this long-term engagement becomes very important, right? but a lot of times what people are buying are like, simple things, like more lives, or an item, or whatever it is that sort of, and in some of our games that are multiplayer, we even have people playing for things that are purely sort of cosmetic, buying a different hat, because then other people can see the hat that hat, but the hat, the hat has no function, right? sure tony morelan 20 57 so it's just being able to create their own identity, you know, within that game, chris benjaminsen 21 02 it's no different than people buying clothes in the real world, you know? tony morelan 21 05 sure, sure so how do you look at your player demographics for getting the best returns on iap? chris benjaminsen 21 10 i? well, first of all, that's a per game thing right? you know, we have, we have games that appeal to 50 plus women and we have games that appeal to like, like, a young male audience right so that's, that's very individualized per game fundamentally, though, there are some there are some core mechanics that always worked really well, if you can proposition a user to, to exchange money for time yeah so something where they can progress faster if they if they put money in is typically a very strong mechanic, regardless of who the consumer is and then, like we do the thing that successful game developers, do, we spend a lot of time looking at data and looking at, you know, what are the flows that leads to a conversion? so somebody's actually putting money into the system? how do we how do we balance those metrics such that we sort of get the most statistical value of, and we use, we use tools such as ad split testing, okay, where you run, run two versions of the game at the same time, and then you measure which one performs better? and then you make that diversion that everybody plays? tony morelan 22 16 yeah, yeah, no, that's great i've heard that that is a pretty important aspect, not just in the gaming industry, but just with, you know, ads and marketing to do a b testing chris benjaminsen 22 26 yeah, we even do something it's called multi variant testing, right and we should not go into the details, but it becomes very complex very quickly tony morelan 22 33 sure, sure so what other mobile game monetization models do you consider like, you know, premium paid apps or paid user acquisitions, you had mentioned that chris benjaminsen 22 43 we did experiment a little bit with premium paid apps, but it's a very, it's a very tough market and, and it's not, it's not something where we found a lot of a lot of success, like we generally see more successful, and we can just sort of allow anyone to play the games, and not without having that limitation, right and we do both interstitial based advertisement, which is unprompted and then rewarded video type advertisement, where the user gets a reward for watching an advertisement but when a user sort of opts to watch an ad, right, you know, so you could imagine that, so this tony morelan 23 14 is during gameplay, there would be a moment where then a video would play, and they would watch that chris benjaminsen 23 18 yeah so a simple example could be you know, that you have just died yeah and you can revive by watching an advertisement and not paying a coin okay right so giving the user the choice between, say, watching an advertisement and spending a bit of time versus spending a bit of their money, right, you know, so and it's a very high value format because the user has elected to watch an advertisement so you know, the users there, yes, you know, they're engaged and they're just sitting there waiting, right? so advertisements are typically willing to pay a high price for that type of advertising tony morelan 23 54 and you'd mentioned interstitial ads so explain what that is for someone who's new to game development? chris benjaminsen 24 00 yeah so it's a bit like to have to get on television so something is happening on your screen, and then suddenly does an advertisement and something else is happening, right? you know, so it's an ad that is that is shown to the user, like interstitial technically means an advertisement that runs before something starts, right but it's used interchangeably in the games industry to mean like an ad before something starts on ad in the middle of something on that after something happened okay, we try to be cautious of using those type of advertisements sort of out of order like we don't want to interrupt a user while they're playing yeah so we will typically only put those in so like, for whatever reason, your game session has ended, and you have just elected to press play again and that's where we would put in those type of advertisements you do have games out there, which are you can imagine you're playing a solitaire game and then put an ad pops up in the middle of it right and you have to sit down wait till you can continue your game and we try to stay away from that tony morelan 24 55 i see i see what about subscriptions have you guys read any subscription models on your games? so, yeah, we've chris benjaminsen 25 00 run a, we run a few experiments here and it's a relatively new area of monetization for us but we have run experiments where our games have been sort of presented as a games club so rather than having advertisement or having, you know, purchases in the game, you can just play them completely for free if you had a subscription through a third party, right and some of our debug games to the kind of stuff we're building now definitely lends itself well towards being able to support subscriptions subscriptions to free to play games these days, mostly expresses themselves as season passes so you like buy a season pass subscription, and then you get like, extra rewards while you play for a period of time and then that time period is up and then you know, you can buy the next season pass as well, or continue your subscription or whatever it is, right you know, that's, that's the model of like, a, like a fortnight or those type of games tony morelan 25 52 got it so we've talked about in app purchase, aap, you know, there's another category to monetization called ia, which is in app advertising and i think, under that falls, the, you know, the rewarded videos, these interstitial ads have also heard of something called offer walls can you explain what is an offer wall? chris benjaminsen 26 11 yeah, we actually don't think we have any games library or footballs anywhere but it's, it's basically, you know, you can get a reward in your game for doing another action right? so again, it's user opt in the use of one something and find alpha wallets typically, like extra coins, or whatever in the game and to get a get sort of a list of different options for things they could be doing right now to have some level of value and that can go all the way from, you know, signing up to a website, all the way up to you know, committing yourself to four years of sirius xm radio in the us, oh, really, you know, or whatever right? you know, and as there's different types of reward levels of that, right so but they can be significant, right so like that it's, it's sort of a way for other companies to interact with that consumer and get them to do something that has value to them and date and pay you for that service so it's a bit sort of a direct affiliate program or something like okay, okay yeah okay tony morelan 27 11 interesting so, you know, a lot of what we talked about now have been in game, you know, advertising for monetization so what about paid user acquisition? so actually going out there and advertising for your game? so you guys are active in that area? chris benjaminsen 27 23 not particularly, it's something we are exploring, and it is something that i believe it's going to be very important for the future of frp yeah but historically, it's not something that we done to a huge extent however, it is an area where we actually partner with the samsung galaxy appstore team, where we were looking at what is the best path for somebody who is publishing on the samsung galaxy app store to find sort of pockets of uses that can be that can be purchased right? tony morelan 27 51 okay okay so of all these different ways that we've talked about when it comes to monetization, what would you say is the most effective way in why? chris benjaminsen 28 00 and so there's many answers to that what has been the most successful for frvr suffice advertisement, that has mostly down to the kind of games that we have been building historically and the kind of games we've been building historically has mostly been the result of the capabilities for the platforms, our games has been available on, which, by and large, have not supported in app purchases however, if you were to look at where is the most potential value, it's most definitely in the in-app purchase space, right? like the potential value that you can derive from a single user is larger in app purchases than any other way you can monetize that user, even with subscriptions, right? make some simple math, you know, rewarded video is considered valuable, right but if you have a player, sort of watching 1000 ads a month, that might sort of in the united states be worth $20, or thereabouts, where $20 is not an uncommon average transactions for a central user to spending in app purchases, right and people typically buy more than once sort of the opportunity to create a great business around in app purchases is much higher, and opportunity to create a great business purely from advertisement tony morelan 29 08 got it? what would you say would be some advice that you can give for a developer looking to integrate iap? chris benjaminsen 29 15 like, like, it goes back to what we talked about earlier right? you know, build deep experiences, right? sure for like engagements, yeah, long engagements, and then then allow people to buy something that they, you know, feel like they're going to get value from a long period of time right and i think an important thing there is you must be trustworthy as a developer yeah right you know, like, like, like, the player must trust you to not to screw them over so if you have all kinds of other stuff into games, where they feel cheated, they're not going to give you their money or if you cheat them, they're only going to do it once right? yeah you know, so you actually have to provide something that brings real value to the user otherwise, they're, they're not going to engage with that thing right like they're not, they're not stupid they are very clever tony morelan 29 57 yeah so let's talk about a how you guys go about acquiring games for frvr? what do you look for? chris benjaminsen 30 03 like we look for, for great teams and i think it's important here that we are publisher, right? so we work with developers who take a fair amount of that total risk of building a game sometimes you find the games, right but predominantly, we work with great teams that is passionate about the game that they're working on and that's, that's mostly what we look for okay and then we help though, those developers to go and, and build fantastic games, right but due to the nature of our platform, at least how its structured right? now, you must basically build the game from scratch on top of stuff so so we're not a publisher that can sort of accept a game that somebody's already built, and say, yeah, we'll publish that it's more sort of a cool collaborative co development process, where we work together with developers to create fantastic things that work on top of our platform tony morelan 30 51 you know, i heard somewhere that between 50 to 1000 games are added to the app store's every day so i know it's a huge competition when it comes to games what's your strategy for discoverability? chris benjaminsen 31 03 i like as we talked about, go to the user where they are, rather than trying to drag them to the app store where it's very competitive, right and, like we use, we use all the tricks including branding, like we now have significant volume of people just searching for our games every day, both in app stores and on google, right and i truly did that basic strategy of saying let's bring our games to where the users are, has been very, very successful for us, and allowed us to sort of get in front of all of these consumers without diving deep into cost positive user acquisition and things like that and dental labs though, say they're hyper competitive, it gets very, very hard to get your game there, right and people talk about all of these things like influencer, marketing, and whatever and they don't call it user acquisition, but that's just what it is right? you know, it's just a different way of doing it right you know, it's all of these hacks to try to get in front of the user tony morelan 31 54 so are you using tools like creating promotional trailer videos and posting them on youtube? chris benjaminsen 32 00 we do we do that for some of our debug games, like a game like wells frvr yeah there's like there's a content team that creates content for social media that being you know; youtube and facebook and i think we even have posts on tik tok okay, tony morelan 32 14 so you guys have a ton of experience now, when it when it comes to publishing games? i'm sure you faced a few challenges can you share some stories and how you overcame those challenges? chris benjaminsen 32 24 a lot of our challenges is around scale right? you know, so we have 70 games on 39 platforms right wow and that didn't that in itself is a big number, right? to sort of, sort of manage this, like, that's more than 2000 combinations, almost 3000 combinations, right? we also have all of those games in 20 languages so when you when you sort of factor in those combinations, that's 50,000 combinations, right? and if you want localize screenshots, yeah, that's no way you could do that with humans, right and a lot of ways we try to solve with technology, right? that's what the what the frvr platform does, okay, encapsulate just the complexity of trying to do all of these things into sort of a unified platform and that goes for what is a good experience on the samsung galaxy appstore, like the samsung galaxy appstore has specific capabilities and specific api's and specific sort of things that work particularly well on a platform and if every developer had to consider that for all the platforms we were on, they would be spending none of their time making great games so we encapsulate that complexity into our platform and that's sort of the recipe that makes frvr work that's sort of removing humans from the equation, basically, tony morelan 33 42 that's interesting i mean, i can totally see how you guys are able to scale your reach with having so many games, but you've got quite a team behind so it's not all automated, you still do need to have those employees to support that chris benjaminsen 33 56 yeah, but like, 95% of those people work on the platform, right? to build the to build the infrastructure, right and frvr is also a company that's been growing quite a lot, i think, okay, two years ago, we were we were fewer than 20 people right? so a lot of the people who actually worked at frvr now people who joined us in the last year tony morelan 34 15 so what are some of the trends that you've seen in the in the gaming industry chris benjaminsen 34 19 or hotels that there's a lot of them right you know, there's a like i think the status trend i see is when you have say and among us or a fall guys or a flappy birds come out and be successful, like, like older people who try to get success by just following that recipe right? not realizing that the reasons those game were successful originally were sort of a bit of luck and timing and typically some external factors, like among us grew with discord and discord grew it among us yeah, right and that was sort of sort of the game to play on that platform, right and all the other games in that in that category by and large failed because it was just like it and not again but that right and, and a thing i think a lot of people have forgotten is that the game industry is cyclical, right? so you get a new channel it comes out it's very cheap and easy to get users on it initially and then that's the value of that platform goes up, it just becomes more and more expensive, right and people have sort of forgotten that's how the games industry used to work because mobile came along yeah and stuck around for a very long time to do to sort of these stores that were tied to specific devices right which, which is something you didn't really have on a on a pc, where there was more open competition on who could sort of have an app store tony morelan 35 40 yeah, yeah, for sure so tell me what is in the future for frvr chris benjaminsen 35 45 a lot more high-quality games? like that's basically our focus right now we are very fortunate, we just closed out a round funding wonderful yeah, thank you and like, the entire theme of that funding is we need, we need games of a completely different quality, right? so we are we are looking for fantastic studios who can come in and build games with sort of that depth that can support in app purchases that's the thing that we really want to focus on we want to want to have games that can have people play for years, not just once, right? tony morelan 36 18 yeah so as far vr is seeing this growth, what are you guys doing related to diversity and inclusion? chris benjaminsen 36 26 and we do a lot of things, right, like diversity and inclusion is something that we try to sort of have both across our games and across our company culture, right? so it can be everything from i personally created the hex frvr game so yeah, i got a nice email from somebody said, i love this game, but it can they call us i can see the different things, right so making sure that you're aware of the different kinds of colorblind people can be sure, sure and it also it also means a lot for hiring, like, like, what's the best candidate for the job is not necessarily the person that fits the checklist, the best that you see that you put on your yeah, other requirements yeah, in like diverse teams perform better so diversity is a is a virtue in the hiring process and it can be advantageous to hire the more diverse candidate if you have an opportunity to hire too, and like, but it means a lot like you have to be mindful of it everywhere those like natural biases, right now, a simple example of that is that the more bullet points you put on a on a job post about specific requirements, the less likely it is that females would, will apply for a job interesting, like a male candidate would sort of look at a long bullet point and see two things that good and go, yeah, i could totally do this, right? where if fema will see a long list and sort of say, i can only do two of these things i shouldn't apply for this right so you have to be mindful of those things all the way tony morelan 37 52 interesting yeah, i think giving someone the opportunity to really talk about their personality, and their value is probably the best way to go about finding that that good candidate chris benjaminsen 38 02 yeah and it's a big part of our it's a big part of our sort of, sort of, sort of hiring flow is the values right? you know, we also a, a company in portugal, that doesn't behave like a portuguese company, this particular company, company structure in particular is very hierarchical, right you know, some people might call it a bit old fashioned that's not the company we are, that's not the company we want to be so we want people that resonates with sort of a more flat structure, modern ways of working tony morelan 38 34 wonderful so if someone is interested, either in working for frvr, or their a game studio that want to bring their games to you, what's the best way for them to reach out to frvr? chris benjaminsen 38 45 like, like, send me an email first, right? you know, and, you know, i'll redirect you to the right person, my email is chris@frvr com so it's fairly straightforward, right? like, always happy to chat with people who do fantastic things tony morelan 38 57 yeah, that's great and we'll include links in the show notes too much about what we talked about today and into frvr websites so chris, i got to say, it was great to have you on the podcast i love learning all about frvr and what you guys are doing but let me ask when you're not working for frp or what is it that you'd like to do for fun? chris benjaminsen 39 15 i find most of my spare time is taken up by you know, walking the dog, or, you know, cooking food if it's some like i'm probably not good at cooking food in the winter but you know, like i like to grill outdoors and whatever right you know, and i actually try to keep a fairly strict work life balance wonderful so you know i am one of the people who like go into the office but mostly yes a way to not work while i'm at home tony morelan 39 40 that's great well hey, we're just about to hit the springtime of the year and soon will come summer so i'm sure you're going to enjoy lots of outdoor grilling when the when the season comes chris benjaminsen 39 49 hopefully, you never know where they're somewhere in london right? you know, that might be like two days where it's impossible that's tony morelan 39 56 awesome hey, chris, really appreciate you coming on the podcast today chris benjaminsen 39 59 no, thank do so much for having me closing 40 01 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding it all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 40 17 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu
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