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.

It is exciting to be a developer these days. You’re the talk of the town and everyone looks for ways to make you happy, competing to create new tools or new services just for you. Developing a great app in such a mesh of services shouldn’t be an issue. Still, this often proves to be […]

The rise of freemium games has been ferociously quick and it continues to accelerate at an incredible pace. It’s estimated that adults now spend, on average, 5 hours and 46 minutes online and on their mobile devices. Time spent online has now surpassed time spend watching TV.

If you want to target multiple mobile platforms without having to maintain a separate code base for each one of them, mobile hybrid apps is one way to go. What mobile hybrid apps won’t do, though, is relieve you of the need to manage and use multiple tools, e.g. building your app for a specific mobile platform requires installing the platform’s native SDK on your machine.

A major theme in our State of the Developer Nation reports is an increasingly gloomy picture of typical developer revenues. The vast majority of developers make very little money from their apps. However, there are a lot of developers out there and a decent fraction of them make a good living, some are building thriving businesses on the app stores and a few at the top are even creating multi-billion dollar companies. So, what’s different about the developers that are succeeding financially versus those that are living in app poverty?

In a world that is increasingly dominated by mobile applications and cloud services, APIs are becoming crucial to developers and service providers alike. But what are developers actually getting? And is this what service providers think they provide?

North America plays a very central part in the app economy. Not only is it home to the companies that create all of the leading mobile platforms, it is also the largest creator of app revenues.