TeleSUR’s Many Apps Are Rarely Downloaded and Poorly Rated
As a concept it’s understandable why mobiles apps would be appealing to a newly minted media company. It provides status, stature, clout, cachet.
It seems intuitively sensible too, considering that Latin America and North America both have high smartphone adoption rates.
But such a perspective, however, is fundamentally flawed.
For one it shows ignorance of people’s reading habits for reading the news. It shows that no one took the time to do the proper research one should to determine whether or not these apps are cost-effective means of spreading TeleSUR and TeleSUR English content.
Things Look Good First At First, But Not On Closer Examination
It’s an unfortunate truth that many people will often rate a product or service positively or poorly in relation to their particular worldview. My research into Amazon book reviews about Venezeula shows the Right doing it, and here, in these Android comments we see the “Left” doing it.
TeleSUR Android Download Data and Fake Reviews
I didn’t make any comparisons between TeleSUR’s apps and RT’s, BBC’s, or Al Jazeera as really, it just makes TeleSUR look bad. TeleSUR and TeleSUR English’s download from Android are in the thousands while there’s are all in the hundreds of thousands and millions.
Plus, I have doubts that the numbers of downloads for them are likely inflated. I certainly could be wrong, but when looking at people commenting towards their ratings of TeleSUR’s apps I noticed something strange.
I’ve copied below screenshots of the rather unusual names and online traces of two of the many seemingly fake reviews.
While it may seem that this could be that these people, and several other names that write out reviews, are really just -so- happen to make comment in praise of TeleSUR and then also have random comments on random websites and broken business websites. Or maybe they’re digital ghosts designed to falsely bolster the appearance that TeleSUR’s app are actually worth downloading. I don’t know – none of the people that I found to have Facebook profiles have responded to me yet. That said, it is interesting to note in the above the Russian connection.
TeleSUR App Development Costs
Many considerations go into the cost of an app. A barebones app ranges from $75,000 to $125,000. The median cost is $270,000 Though some can go much higher.
Having downloaded, tested and been completely underwhelmed by TeleSUR’s apps, I would imagine that they cost around $100,000.
I say underwhelmed as these are totally unnecessary were they to spend money on optimizing their mobile website rather than making these. As can be seen by the number of downloads and users, there is a high cost to user ratio. And the initial costs don’t even count all of the money wasted on making apps.
TeleSUR English: Continual Costs Lest Initial Investment be Lost
Apps are kind of like pets, once you have them you need to take care of them until end of life.
These costs are not fixed and vary due to the complexity of the app’s features, if any, as well as the changes made with each iOS or Android update, as well as if the developers are the same as the one which first created it or if new coders are used.
The above cost of maintenance for apps data comes from this article by Clutch, which surveyed 102 app development companies to determine the cost of building and maintaining a mobile app.
TeleSUR English’s Security Settings
The Android permission system is qualitatively different from the iOS one. The latter is reviewed by Apple teams and they approve or disprove apps from being transmitted via the app store according to appropriate criteria. For Android, no such gatekeeper exists and the users decide themselves.
What does TeleSUR’s particular requests mean?
Well according to Android’s guide for Developers, it means that an application can read/write to the entire contents of your phone’s sdcard.
99.9% of the time this is so the application can do things like save data to the sdcard. For example this could be images from wallpaper app, or if the app is used to backup your sms messages for you, or even a podcast app needs to save the mp3 file to the sdcard.
If the app is just to provide news, why does it need to have access to every file on the system? Why should I give TeleSUR access to private pictures, personal messages, contact information and other data on my device just to get headlines that I could just as easily obtain from their website?
It’s not my claim that they are currently or once were using the app as a means of gathering extensive information about those that used it – but it’s worth bringing up why they felt they make such a request of those wishing to use it.
If you don’t trust an application to install it on your PC, you wouldn’t install it. You should use the same thoughts with your Phone, but keep in mind that you may have even more personal information on the Phone then you would on your PC.
TeleSUR English’s Tragic Flipbook Following
When it comes to favoring news outlets loyalty to particular outlets, just like brands, is dead. Why go through a whole website if you really just want to know about a particular story in a particular place?
Flipbook recognized this early on and now has over 100 million monthly users. One of which is myself. Intersting to note is that those, 100,000,000 only 112 follow TeleSUR English.
For those that are into math, that means that’s .00000112% of Flipbook’s users.
The number of people that follow their magazine channels?
Well, I imagine that 35 is the same number of people that have on staff in Quito producing and distributing their digital media…
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My question now is such: Who were those people that were in the room making the decision to make the apps? And are they still working there? Cause if so, they shouldn’t be.
Some of these sock puppet profiles even list Instagram accounts which, perhaps unsurprisingly, don’t have any posts.
