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Business

The changing landscape of app discovery

[The explosive growth of app ecosystems is creating serious bottlenecks in app discovery that only popular apps can overcome. Having 700,000 apps is great for platform vendors, but not so great for developers, whose apps are lost in the heap. Andreas Pappas takes a look at the app discovery problem and considers whether social discovery is a better solution than the alternatives available today. This post also appeared on the VisionMobile blog. Follow Andreas on Twitter: @pappasandreas]

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Business Platforms Tips

App Promotion: make or break your app

With well over one million total apps available on Apple and Google app stores combined, plus hundreds of thousands on the other platforms, the competition to get on consumers’ handsets is fierce. As hundreds of apps are added each and every day, app discovery remains a largely unsolved challenge which is only getting worse. With a rapidly changing landscape of app store ranking algorithms, mobile advertising products, cross-promotion networks and specialist marketing services it’s very difficult to decide how to begin app promotion which is cost-effectively. The one very clear piece of advice we can give is what you shouldn’t do – nothing.

Categories
Business

The Faces of Fragmentation: Musings on Versions and Installed Base

How do various forms of fragmentation of the potential audience impact the development economics? The answers will vary significantly depending on the specifics of each app but some general issues are worthy of consideration by everyone.As we pointed out recently, Android is now way ahead of iOS in terms of share of new device sales and installed base but also rapidly catching up on total revenues. The important questions for developers interested in that trend are what fractions of those markets can easily be targeted and how much will it cost to target more?