It's tough making difficult choices about something you love. We've adored Appysnap since it launched. It's been so much fun to engage with people around the world, to create a buzz not only online, but in bars, on the street, in shops, and wherever else our missions happened to send people. It's been ludicrous, nonsensical and outlandishly creative. Appysnap has enjoyed the most loyal and attentive players a game could ever hope for.

That thousands of people have enjoyed what we've created makes this all the more difficult; we've taken the decision to call time on Appysnap. Missions will end next month and the app will be unavailable after that point.

We've always been transparent about our development, so we'll explain why we've made the decision. The userbase has grown far slower than we expected; we've thousands of registered users, not tens of thousands or multiples thereof. There's plenty more we could try to address the issue but we don't feel we can risk another six months development if all we do is double the number of users. Development takes time, and time is money - there have only been two of us working on this on a daily basis. If we're ploughing time into Appysnap, we're not earning a living. There's only so long you can do that for, only so long you can spend money on servers, design, promotions and prizes while reducing your own ability to pay the bills - and we've been working on Appysnap for 15 months.

Appysnap hasn't been a failure, far from it. It's been amazing. The engagement we've created with people has been outstanding; seeing the extraordinary effort players go to, it has genuinely made our day, many days over. Engagement among users has been stupidly good. Every month for the past three months, over 40% of all registered users have used Appysnap, and nearly 20% have used the app every day. Whether it's iPhone or Android, we're a solid four star app in the reviews.

If you've played the game, suggested missions, posed for a snap or just offered us support, thank you. Appysnap will continue until Monday 16th January.

If you've any questions or queries about the service, let us know at hello@appysnap.com.

Paul & Jon

Yessir, there's a new version of Appysnap available soon. This is a quick update while we work on more substantial features.

Included in Appysnap 1.22:

• increased upload speeds

• new settings page - receive email notifications for new missions and caps awarded

• various bug fixes to Twitter sharing and leaderboard crashes

The update is approved and will be available shortly - we're just checking the email notifications are plumbed in correctly, then it'll be all yours to download.

Paul

We're thrilled to have joined forces with ShareMyPlaylists.com (SMP) on a week of music-themed missions.

In case you don't know SMP, it's the community for Spotify users to share their playlists and discover new playlists to listen to. If you've never tried SMP before, take a look.

We've loads of ShareMyPlaylists prizes to give away, including t-shirts, hoodies, baseball jackets and Spotifiy gift certificates too. There's also an exclusive SMP cap to be won!

Keep a look out for a new music-themed mission every day.

The Appysnap team have picked their ten favourite snaps from our recent 'Autumn Days' mission.

We'll award a Kindle to the snap with the most votes from Facebook users - to vote, simply leave a comment below the snap you like!

Voting closes at 5pm GMT on Sunday 20th November - to have a look at the finalists, head on over to Appysnap's Facebook page!

We announced the winner of October's MacBook Air prize draw on Twitter and Facebook last week, but in case you missed it...

The winning snap, picked at random (with a little help from our Twitter followers) was from a mission at the begining of the month called 'Cheese & Wine'.

It was taken by Christina Marques from Santa Clara in Californa - congratulations Christina! Paul

We played plenty of ghoulish missions in the week leading up to Halloween, but one we didn't set - and one that plenty of players suggested - was a zombie-related mission.

That's because we had a Zombie! cap created especially for Halloween - every time we spotted a stray zombie in a player's snap, they won an exclusive cap.

If you won one, well done!

We'll announce the winner of October's prize draw for the MacBook Air tomorrow; in the meantime we've plenty of other winners to announce from recent missions.

Two players won the leaderboard for October, Lisa Mitchell in Manchester in the UK and Wendy Wheatley in East Peoria, Illinois. We love them because not only do they attempt every mission, but they're but thoroughly creative with their snaps - to the point that Lisa also topped the Most Popular leaderboard at the end of the month. Well done to both!

We've had a stack of other winners recently too:

- congratulations to Jennifer Taylor in Apple Valley, CA whose entry won 'Like My Ink'

- there were three winners for our 'Evil Twin' mission: Rusty Harding in New York City, Rebecca Robbins in Sheffield, UK and Jill Newquist in San Francisco Bay area CA

- Jason Foote in Hesperia CA, Nicole in Port Saint Lucie, FL and Tami White in Seattle, Washington were picked at random after entering 'Rock Stars'

- finally, Nathan in Bournemouth, UK won our 'Twins' mission

Well done to everyone!

Paul

When you try something new, it doesn't always work. A photo game that awards points manually, one that hands out prizes as a result - we didn't have a model to borrow for how that process worked. So we made it up.

It's not quite right, to be honest. The combination of a rolling leaderboard plus points awarded adhoc means the final day of the month - when we award a prize for the best score - is something of a lottery; nobody is sure what their final score will be, or why. Players can be in top place until the last day, then tumble without warning. While the ranking system is entirely automated, it doesn't seem very fair. So we're going to have a think about the best way for points to work. We're not sure what it is yet - a few players have made suggestions and as always, we'll bear all feedback in mind.

We're also going to look at the ranking system for our Most Popular leaderboard - we're aware that some players are deliberately working in groups to game the chart. It's not fair to those who are putting extra effort into creative entries, to have others try and buck the system.

So we've got some work to do. We want to get this right for you, the player, so bear with us while we nip and tuck and tweak, and let us know what you think in the meantime.

Paul

We launched Appysnap for Android handsets a week ago and have seen a fantastic number of Android downloads, sign-ups and most importantly, mission entries.

Appysnap for Android 1.02 will very shortly be hitting the Android Market, our third release in two weeks. Rather than sitting on the code for months on end, we try to ship early and often. As we can't test on every single Android phone with a camera, we rely on our user base to report any issues. And that's exactly what you've done, you fantastic bunch!

Most of the issues reported were around taking photos. With Android, phone makers can, and do customise the software for their handsets. Unfortunately one such area of customisation is to do with taking photos. HTC phones, for instance, have a much more fully featured camera than some other phones. Some phones prompt you to save a photo, whereas others don't. Some phones export a huge high-definition image, others produce a postage stamp. It's all a bit inconsistent!

Our aim is naturally to include as many Android users as possible in the game, so thanks to your feedback the following improvements have been made.

Auto rotate
Some phones do not actually rotate an image taken in portrait mode. This resulted in some snaps appearing sideways. Uh oh. Appysnap will now try to deduce the orientation used to take the photo and will rotate it before it is uploaded.

Image processing memory use
Some phone cameras save export extremely large images which use a lot of memory to crop and scale, so the image processing within Appysnap has been rewritten to better process large images in a much more memory-efficient way.

Image Preview
This allows you to see the cropped and scaled image before it is sent to Appysnap. If there was a problem with the rotation of the image, or you think you can get a better snap, simply press the 'Take again' button. If you like the image, you can send it. This feature is off by default, but you can enable it via the settings menu.

Retry image upload
If you take an amazing photo but lose your connection mid-way through the upload, you will now be given the chance to retry your upload.

Cache to SD card
Appysnap stores snaps you have viewed on your phone so it doesn't need to download them every time you want to have a look. It can now store this cache of snaps to the SD card in your phone, rather than on the phone itself, freeing up vital phone memory. You can enable this via the settings menu.

Stability
Numerous stability issues have been addressed, particularly when wi-fi or 3G is unavailable.

As ever, please don't hesitate to let us know if you encounter any problems or have feedback on the Android client.

Alex

We can't throw a Christmas party in every country where Appysnap is played, but if you can reach Newcastle upon Tyne on Wednesday 7th December, we'd love to see you!

We'll have a few guests of our own plus everyone involved in creating Appysnap, but the majority of places at this party are for the people who have supported us over the past four months - the players.

If you have a look at the ticket page, you'll see there are different tickets depending on how many caps you've won. If you don't have enough caps just yet, keep playing! If you do have enough caps, please register as soon as you can - space is very limited.

If you live further afield and won't be able to make it, don't worry - there will be more meet-ups coming soon, with our next due to be held in Dublin in the coming months.