Creating a successful app business takes a lot more than a good idea and the skills to develop an app and upload it to a store. As we’ve discussed before, developers who promote their apps are almost 3 times as likely to break-even as those who don’t. This is the simplest difference with a massive effect on success. It seems obvious…

[Geroge Karavias, co-founder of Anlock, shares his experiences in marketing kids’ educational apps and proposes a survivor kit to keep in mind when navigating the treacherous waters of this category.] You might have started thinking that putting together an educational app may not be such a bad idea, I mean how hard can it be? Of the App Store’s top 200 paid list of iPad educational apps, 70% are kids’ educational apps. Out of these, roughly 80% are by independent developers…

In December Amazon launched a new A/B testing service for Android apps on the Amazon Appstore. Integrating A/B testing, particularly for in-app purchase related events, in the store portal is a welcome addition. Slightly disappointing considering this comes from a store provider is that the A/B testing service does not support testing different copy or icons on the storefront itself, purely in-app A/B tests, for which there are already third-party alternatives.

Last year was quite a bad one for HTML5 in terms of developer mindshare. At the end of 2011, developer sentiment seemed to favour a shift away from native and towards HTML5 for a large range of application categories. As the year went on, there were more horror stories than…

Sebastian Brannstrom, Lead Engineer for Lyft at Zimride, talked to us about their app and the business that the technology enables. Sebastian has been working in mobile software since 2006, initially on Symbian and then transitioning to iOS, Android & Web by way of a side project, created in collaboration with designer and product manager […]

App store analytics providers have been telling us that almost all of the growth in app revenues in the last year has been through in-app purchases. However is that just because the model has become more popular? Or because revenue has been concentrating at the top of the market, where the strategy is very popular (particularly in free-to-play games)? Probably…

While not all developers are in it for the money, most would like their apps to provide an income and the majority of those struggle to earn revenues that will sustain further development. We defined $500 per app per month as a reasonable global “poverty line”, in some countries this is very low while in […]

One of the most common mistakes developers make when planning the business case for a new app is dramatically overestimating the number of users they will be able to attract, particularly for their first app. The typical argument goes something like this: “My app will be compatible with 400 million devices, if I can reach just 1% of those, that’s 4 million users”. The trap here is…

In our latest developer survey we asked developers about the different screens they target. The results show smartphones are the most popular target, whilst tablets are catching up fast. PCs are most commonly targeted by web developers while TVs are still a niche app market for all developers.

In our January 2013 Developer Economics Report, we revealed that multi-platform developers are better off. Our survey data also reveals, rather unsurprisingly, that users of cross-platform tools (CPTs) target more platforms than those building separate apps for each platform. Of those interested in making money, users of CPTs target 4.33 platforms (3.1 mobile platforms) on average vs 3.46 platforms (2.57 mobile) for those building separate apps. We also know that…