Developer Nation Blog

Freemium beats Premium, says App Annie

Post author By Stijn Schuermans
Post date November 20, 2012
No Comments on Freemium beats Premium, says App Annie

App Annie Intelligence, which tracks more than 700,000 apps, reports that freemium apps – free apps that have in-app purchases – are experiencing impressive revenue growth worldwide, far outpacing premium apps in both iOS and Google Play stores. Over the last 24 months, worldwide revenues for freemium apps on iOS have more than quadrupled. In 2012, worldwide revenues on Google Play have grown 3.5X. Now, apps generate 69 percent of the worldwide iOS app revenue and 75 percent of global Android app revenues. Meanwhile, premium revenues for both app stores remained relatively flat in these time periods.

This confirms earlier reports of this trend by Distimo, IHS iSuppli and others.

Tags Business models, In-app purchase, Revenue

Business Platforms

Flurry’s AppSpot reports average eCPM of $5.80 across interstitial, video and banner ad formats

Post author By Stijn Schuermans
Post date November 20, 2012
No Comments on Flurry’s AppSpot reports average eCPM of $5.80 across interstitial, video and banner ad formats

From TechCrunch:

App measurement and ad company Flurry has revealed significant traction for its iOS and Android app advertising and targeting platform, AppSpot. The platform was made publicly available in October 2012 and has attracted more than 1,000 app publishers to sign up in just over three weeks, according to the company. Flurry described revenue performance of the first 500 applications already live as “very strong”, with an average eCPM of $5.80 across interstitial, video and banner ad formats.

Tags Advertising Revenue

Business Platforms Tips

Methods for Monetizing a Mobile User Base (or Are Mobile Apps the New Internet?)

Post author By Mark Wilcox
Post date November 20, 2012
No Comments on Methods for Monetizing a Mobile User Base (or Are Mobile Apps the New Internet?)

Mobile apps are a huge and rapidly growing business. Mobile developers have access to a greater number of users and more simple ways of monetizing their creations than any software developers before them. However, selling digital content and services directly, or advertising to users of those services are only two of many, many ways of generating revenue through mobile apps. Which methods are likely to dominate in the future?

Tags Business models, Revenue

Business Tips

Do Push Notifications Increase Engagement?

Post author By Mark Wilcox
Post date November 20, 2012
No Comments on Do Push Notifications Increase Engagement?

Push notifications are a popular tool for this purpose. With the vast majority of app revenue growth coming from in-app purchases rather than paid downloads, it’s more important than ever to keep users engaged with your apps. Updating users about new content or activity and driving them back to the app. At the same time the technology is controversial since unwelcome or excessive push notifications annoy users, who will either disable them or worse yet uninstall the app responsible. So is it worth the risk? Do push notifications work?

Tags Engagement, Promotion, Retention

Business Tips

The App Localization Opportunity

Post author By Mark Wilcox
Post date November 20, 2012
No Comments on The App Localization Opportunity

As we showed in our Developer Economics 2012 survey, there is a massive gap between the number of developers creating applications for local languages (other than English) and the demand for local language content. For many app types, app localization is only a relatively small incremental investment on top of the original app build costs and yet has the potential to generate significant new downloads and revenue. How should developers decide if it’s going to be worthwhile?

Tags Localization, Time-to-Market

Business Tips

50+ mobile revenue models

Post author By Stijn Schuermans
Post date November 20, 2012
No Comments on 50+ mobile revenue models

This hackpad (a collaborative list composed by 150 people) has an impressive list of web and mobile revenue models, ranging from the classic ad-driven models and pay-per-download to intermediaries and commerce models.
For Your Inspiration.

Tags Advertising Revenue, Business models, In-app purchase, Revenue

Business Platforms Tips

Backend-as-a-Service – Should You Use One?

Post author By Mark Wilcox
Post date November 7, 2012
No Comments on Backend-as-a-Service – Should You Use One?

Many of the most engaging and popular apps connect to cloud services which either regularly deliver new content, enable users to interact with one another or both. Unlike a standalone application, such apps can incur ongoing hosting costs throughout their active usage life. Ideally your revenue model should mirror the cost structure. Using a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) reduces execution risk and time to market as well as removing server maintenance and scaling headaches, however, it typically increases the ongoing service costs making the revenue model fit even more important. Obviously the technical requirements of the app constrain the selection of service and for basic backend features Cloudspring has a good overview article. The variation in pricing of backend services is even greater than the diversity of their technical capabilities but this post will provide some generally applicable advice.

Tags Backend as a Service, Budget, Business models, Costs, Time-to-Market

APIs Platforms

Facebook’s Mobile App Install Ads – will they work for developers?

Post author By Mark Wilcox
Post date November 6, 2012
No Comments on Facebook’s Mobile App Install Ads – will they work for developers?

Back in August, Facebook announced a beta for a new ad unit to help drive mobile app installs on iOS and Android. That product was made available to all developers recently and the early user reports are very positive. Is this early success likely to translate into a long term win-win for both Facebook and the mobile developer community?

Tags app growth, Facebook, Promotion

Business Platforms Tips

The Developer Platform “Lean Factor” and Why It Matters

Post author By Mark Wilcox
Post date November 6, 2012
No Comments on The Developer Platform “Lean Factor” and Why It Matters

There’s a lot of buzz about Lean Startups in the software community in general and amongst mobile developers in particular. How lean a startup can be is strongly influenced by the tools and processes available on their chosen platform. Which platforms enable the leanest product development processes? How and why does lean framework matter?

Tags Analytics, Lean, Methodology, Platform selection, Quality, Time-to-Market

Tips

What do people search for when looking for new apps to install?

Post author By Stefan Constantinescu
Post date October 19, 2012
No Comments on What do people search for when looking for new apps to install?

Bryson Meunier from Search Engine Land compiled a list of the 100 most searched for keywords in both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, for new apps. The data was gathered in June using Google’s keyword tool, so it isn’t exactly perfect, but it’s good enough to have a discussion about what works and what doesn’t. Surprisingly, only 22 keyboards appear on both lists, which suggests that Google and Apple uses different algorithms to display apps. It also implies that Android users and iOS users look for different things. Take the search query “games” for example: it’s the 5th most popular term for Apple’s App Store, but on the Google Play Store it’s 15th. The top result in both stores is, unsurprisingly, Facebook.

Tags ASO, Platform selection