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

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.

There’s been much talk about App Store Optimizations (ASO) and tools are emerging to get that extra attention in app store search rankings. The good folks at XYO have been studying app search behavior since 2010. Recently, they talked to all the major ASO companies and got their feedback for their presentation on the topic. In this guest post, they’re happy to share the comments of ASO players and their own insights on the state of ASO.

The world is getting ‘App’ified – and India is entering the fray at full force! With India rapidly growing as a major app destination, it is important to understand the underlying drivers of this rapidly growing ecosystem. Is there an “apportunity” for your app in India?

The “write once, run anywhere” concept may be pure fantasy for most apps but sharing code across platforms is desirable and in some cases essential to making projects economically viable. With the application frameworks for all the biggest platforms being in different languages, the market for Cross-Platform Tools (CPTs) to enable code reuse is understandably the largest one (in terms of number of competing solutions) we track. The time required to evaluate all of them is far beyond what most developers can afford to spend on such research. So, which tools are the best?

How do app developer revenues vary by country, or platform? Does the number of platforms make a difference to app revenues? Which models bring in the most revenues? We revisit Andreas Pappas’ November analysis of app monetisation with more insights from our Developer Economics 2013 survey across 3,400+ developers.

Of the tools and services for developers we asked about in our last survey, one category stands out by miles as having the wealthiest developers: voice services. Of course there’s a lot of variety in the voice services sector and the revenue is not at all evenly distributed.

Building a great app is not enough – to get lots of users, those users have to be aware that you exist. As app stores focus on top apps, which amount to less than 1% of all available apps, discovery has become a major problem for app makers. One solution is to band together in […]

[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.