In the first part of our JavaScript MV* framework comparison we introduced AngularJS, Ember, Backbone.js and the newcomer React, we showed some code examples and discussed their strengths and weaknesses. In this second part we are going to have a look at their market share, community support and estimated growth to help you make the […]

King and Halfbrick Studios are some of the most successful mobile game developers. Their best-selling games, i.e. Candy Crash Saga (King) and Fruit Ninja (Halfbrick), rate in the 100M – 500M download tier on Google Play and rank among the Top 100 on iTunes. Did you ever wonder which tools they use and how they compare? Do they use the same SDKs available to the rest of us mortal developers and what can we learn from their tooling choices?

Our 8th Developer Economics survey has once again achieved an industry leading scale,
including responses from more than 8,000 app developers and 143 countries. Their collective insight shows us an app economy that’s beginning to mature. Platform mindshare and priorities are fairly stable and developers are increasingly turning to cross-platform technologies to deal with the multi-platform reality. Tool adoption is gradually increasing and a shift in focus towards enterprise app development is underway.

For the last two and a half years I’ve been building and selling apps directly on the iOS App Store, however only in 2014 I committed to some substantial effort on this. I’d like to share some numbers about my experience last year and draw some insights about what things went well and which ones didn’t.

Hopefully this analysis will be useful to others and will give me some insight about where to focus in 2015 to grow my app revenue.

There are quite a number of important metrics that you need to be tracking and improving upon in order to make your app a true success. Always be looking at the wider picture, and evaluating how each metric has an effect on one another.

If your team is small, or you are an indie developer working alone, then I’d recommend starting by iterating your product with the focus on increasing engagement, retention, and your average user LTV. You don’t need to have millions of users on board in order to build a truly great mobile app. Test heavily, and make data driven decisions in order to position yourself in a place where you can start to invest in acquisition with the confidence in your product’s quality and monetisation.

Finding a comprehensive comparison between any kind of JavaScript Frameworks, Libraries or Extensions is not hard these days. Especially when it comes to Javascript MV* Frameworks, which are used to develop single-page applications (SPAs), and their notorious representatives, i.e. AngularJS, Ember, Backbone.js and newcomer React. A simple Google Search offers a plethora of technical comparisons to choose from. What they don’t usually mention, though, is the overall features those frameworks provide and how they compete for different use cases.

2014 was quite an eventful year in our industry. Apple finally gave in to the big screen but also teased us with the small screen of the upcoming Apple Watch, and even surprised developers with Swift. Google wasn’t quiet either, revealing their vision for the future of UI with Material design and tackling wearables head-on. […]

In our case study we started with a set of 236,245 free to download Android apps from the Google Play store mined in 2011. Overall we found that the apps connected to 72 different ad networks through the respective libraries. In all there were three key findings in our study: Finding 1: Developers integrated more […]

How do you design the UI for a new app or feature? Good old fashioned pencil and paper? Photoshop or Sketch? Perhaps a wireframing tool like Balsamiq? Maybe you build clickable mockups or fully interactive prototypes? However you go about it, getting some feedback on a design before it’s fully coded is great way to save time and effort. When building apps for clients they’re usually a lot happier if they can see and touch what they’ll be getting before it’s built.

In our latest report, App Economy Forecasts 2015 – 2017, we estimate the number of mobile developers in 2014 at 5.5 million. Demand for mobile development skills has never been higher and yet revenue from app store sales cannot possibly pay their salaries.