As long as there are algorithms impacting revenues there will be people trying to game them. In the world of mobile apps there are two sorts of algorithm that can be routes to success, chart rankings and search rankings. Chart rankings are very simple and typically just use some time-weighted download volume. Search rankings are much more complex, involving keywords, reviews and other social or similarity-based data as well as downloads. Developers can use a range of tactics to improve their ranking in these algorithms, some of them much more legitimate than others.

2012 was another big growth year for mobile apps. Apple continued to launch new products, sell them in ever greater volumes and distribute more revenue to developers. Meanwhile Google overhauled their market and developer revenues climbed sharply. Android developers also saw the Amazon Appstore expand and become a serious second revenue source. Developers who created quality apps and marketed them well were richly rewarded. However, for many developers the major challenge of getting their apps discovered by users only got worse. How is 2013 likely to compare? Will app revenues continue to grow at similar rates and will those revenues keep concentrating in the hands of fewer publishers?

74% of developers use two or more platforms concurrently. At the same time, developer platform choices are now narrowing. On average mobile developers use 2.6 mobile platforms in our latest research, compared to 2.7 in 2012 and 3.2 in our 2011
research. The Android-iOS duopoly in smartphone sales is gradually creating a concentration of developers around these two platforms: 80% of respondents in our sample develop for Android, iOS or both, making them the baseline in any platform mix. Developers that do not develop for one of these two platforms generate, on average, half the revenue of those developers that do, leaving little doubt as to the concentration of power within these two major ecosystems.

Cross-platform tools (CPTs) address real challenges for developers. Cross-platform tools allow developers to create applications for multiple platforms – usually mobile, but increasingly tablets or TV screens – from almost the same codebase or from within the same design tool. CPTs reduce the cost of platform fragmentation and allow developers to target new platforms at […]

We asked developers to pick the top platform, among all platforms they have used or are planning to use, on a number of different aspects of mobile development such as discovery, learning curve and monetisation. We then compared how iOS and Android fare against each other, based on the opinions of developers using both platforms. Find out which platform came out on top.

Ahead of the release of our latest Developer Economics survey, we look back the biggest challenges developers reported in our 2012 survey. Here we discuss six of them, with some basic tips on what to do about them. The challenges are split between marketing and post-launch app and user management. The three biggest marketing challenges were: keeping users engaged, targeting the right users and identifying the right revenue model. The three biggest post-launch challenges were: Tracking bugs and errors, getting users to review your app and updating applications in the field.

Elliot Schmukler from LinkedIn spoke at a recent Growth Hacker conference about the strategies they’d used to grow the site since he joined in 2008. His advice was very helpfully summarised by Sandi MacPherson, Founder at Quibb and is general enough to be applied to mobile apps. Read our take on his main points.

With some types of mobile app, getting a user to download it is just the beginning of the problem. If the application is going to be personalised to a user’s preferences, or allow them to interact with others via some online service, then they’ll need to provide some data before they can start using it. Typically the more information a user provides about themselves, the better job an app or service can do of tailoring the experience to them. Unfortunately, the more steps a user has to go through before they can start using an app, the less likely they are to complete the signup process. Getting this wrong can catastrophically alter the economics of user acquisition.

Andreas Pappas takes another look at the results of VisionMobile’s Developer Economics 2012 survey and comes up with interesting new insights on app monetisation: how does app revenue vary by app-category and by country? Is there a correlation between time spent developing an app and they money it makes?

A recent report from Canalys highlighted the extreme concentration of income distribution across the iOS and Android stores in the US. The top 25 publishers make 50% of the revenues. 24 out of 25 of those are games publishers (the 1 exception is the Pandora music streaming service). During the first 20 days of November these 25 publishers made $60m from paid downloads and in-app purchases in the US alone. Is there still room left for smaller publishers? How can smaller companies succeed?