If Apple wants to create a new, large product category out of smart watches, it must empower developers to discover new uses.

According to our survey, a surprisingly high 29% of games developers are primarily building their apps without a third party engine*. They have either written their own engines, or are building everything from scratch. Large games studios very often build their own engines and tools, or customise open source solutions to suit their own internal processes and workflow.

Embeddable databases try to find their place in a world where mobile applications are smarter, and can take over more tasks in order to become either more independent, in a stand-alone scenario, or more active, in a distributed one. Apart from the five embeddable databases presented here, there are several more. SQL, document-oriented, key-value, object-oriented, graph… Choose the one that best suits the structure of your data (or the lack of it) and the needs of your application and use it.

The app stores created an opportunity for any developer to build their own products and reach a global audience with them. For some developers this offered the promise of an independent app business, giving them creative control of their work and hopefully a comfortable income. Recently there have been lots of posts (great summary list inside) from current and former independent app developers about the state of the market and how much harder it is to earn a living from your own apps.

We have just published a research note with an update to last year’s an European App Economy report. The good news is that Europe’s app economy still accounts for 19% of global revenues and is growing strongly at a 12% annual rate. The bad news is that the rest of the world, particularly Asia, is growing much faster.

Scrum, Kanban, XP, pair programming, Agile, we have all heard these terms. The question is can you use the agile way while working on your own? Here’s a simple way to start and three tools to help you change the way you do things.

Given the staggering odds against the success of any app in the marketplace, it is surprising that so much effort is devoted to the creation of apps, many of which never see the light of day.

Our 7th Developer Economics survey broke all records again, reaching more than 10,000 app developers from 137 different countries. The full report with the survey findings has just been published and is available for free download! The view of the app economy that they collectively provide is one of consolidation. Developers are focusing their attention […]

HTML5 and the latest standard web technologies have finally driven the developer community towards a cross-platform app and game deployment scenario. Still, there are some challenges that have to be solved in order to smooth the experience of getting a final product to the increasing number of markets, from fragmented platforms to performance issues or ways to access specific features of each target in a cross-platform way. This article provides an overview of the most common challenges and some tips and technologies available today in order to overcome them.

There has been considerable debate about the metrics used to define performance in the smartphone industry. Because of the regionally fragmented nature of distribution, some view global market share figures with cynicism.