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.

Although building a separate native app per platform is currently proving to be the most successful approach for mass market consumer apps, there are still a lot of situations where it makes more sense to go cross-platform.

Native advertising is the latest buzzword in the world of mobile advertising. But native ads are not new as a concept – they have been around in the print and digital world for quite some time. Keyword based search ads on a search results page, or an advertorial in a newspaper supplement are examples of such ads. What is a native ad?

In our latest Developer Economics survey we were really surprised to see a dramatic fall in the level of adoption of User Analytics tools. A year ago they were the most popular category of third party tool with…

If Apple wants to create a new, large product category out of smart watches, it must empower developers to discover new uses.

According to our survey, a surprisingly high 29% of games developers are primarily building their apps without a third party engine*. They have either written their own engines, or are building everything from scratch. Large games studios very often build their own engines and tools, or customise open source solutions to suit their own internal processes and workflow.

Embeddable databases try to find their place in a world where mobile applications are smarter, and can take over more tasks in order to become either more independent, in a stand-alone scenario, or more active, in a distributed one. Apart from the five embeddable databases presented here, there are several more. SQL, document-oriented, key-value, object-oriented, graph… Choose the one that best suits the structure of your data (or the lack of it) and the needs of your application and use it.

The app stores created an opportunity for any developer to build their own products and reach a global audience with them. For some developers this offered the promise of an independent app business, giving them creative control of their work and hopefully a comfortable income. Recently there have been lots of posts (great summary list inside) from current and former independent app developers about the state of the market and how much harder it is to earn a living from your own apps.