A new SDK economy has sprung up to support the needs of the 500,000+ mobile developers and the app economy. Guest author Panos Papadopoulos, CEO of Bugsense, reviews the growth and rapid consolidation of the SDK economy and the impending rise the Mega SDK vendors.

Making money from your app is really difficult. Pricing is intuitively an important part of the potential of any app. Price too high, and you price yourself out of the market, but price too low, and you’re leaving preciously needed money on the table. Michael Jurewitz comes to the rescue! In a five part blog post series, the Apple veteran explains the ins and outs of app pricing, tackling crucial issues like differentiation, pricing power, price elasticity and a practical plan to optimise prices based on your app’s data.

While the link between app quality and app success is quite clear to most developers, it’s always good to throw in some actual data. Our research shows that developers that use performance or user analytics tools to improve their apps generate about 3x as much revenue on average.

Data from Apsalar’s Big Data Lab reveals the game categories with the highest propensity for in-app purchases. As it turns out, strategy games are more than 18x more effective at driving IAP than arcade games! In-app purchases are also strongly correlated with engagement (as measured by average daily session length). Yet another proof point that user engagement is a key ingredient in any app monetization strategy.

4 out of 5 developers admit that their app doesn’t make enough money to be considered a standalone business. 2 out of 3 doesn’t break even. And yet there is hope.

We’ve just completed the largest developer survey to date and the results are starting to come in. Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis discusses some early insights, focusing on platform mindshare and the role of HTML5.

John Cooper, founder of Pyxis Ventures, shares his personal experiences with promoting apps.

Localization is key to local app adoption and revenue growth. A new guest post from Dimitris Glezos, founder and CEO of Transifex, explores the various translation solutions and workflows available today. Then he introduces the concept of Continuous Localization, a modern way of doing localization.

Using a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) can reduce development cost and time-to-market. It’s a simple way of getting a highly scalable backend solution without significant upfront investment. In a world where an app that hits the store top charts might gain more than a million new users before you complete your next iteration of development this is worthy of serious consideration.

Testing any mobile app presents a wide range of challenges. The often repeated but rarely followed software best practice of test early, test often is harder to adhere to than usual due to the fragmentation of the target environment and the relative maturity of tools. The increased acceptance of apps by mainstream consumers and intense competition have raised the bars for user experience and quality. There is more to test than ever, yet often very limited budget for doing so. Fortunately every challenge presents an opportunity and a vast array of tools vendors are racing to fill the gaps.