Mobile gaming is a major growth industry. Revenues and profits are soaring and the most successful companies are attracting valuations in the billions of dollars. However the market dynamics are such that very few can succeed and those that do have incentives which are a long way from maximising fun for players. Where are all the revenues coming from? Is the market fundamentally broken? If so, why aren’t the platform owners trying to fix it?

Location-based services are an important, integral part of the smartphone experience. The desire to offer users ‘the best’ mapping experience was graphically illustrated in 2012 when Apple launched its own map offering. Enabling developers to take advantage of and extend a platform’s location data is a vital part of the ‘location’ value proposition.

I ‘m part of a hardware research group at Telefónica Digital called “Physical Internet Lab”. Three years ago we started a small group under the Emerging Technologies area of the company focusing on the Internet of Things. The commitment of the group was (and is), in ambitious terms, “to democratize the Internet of Things” opening it to as many makers, developers and users as possible.

We wanted to work at the crossroads of the Internet, the Things and the People. But our development skills were almost 100% software related. In the process we built a team skilled on all three sides. And we figured out how to do agile hardware.

Why did Flappy Bird become a flappy Icarus, crashing after flying too close to the sun, and not a new Rovio? In truth, Nguyen and Rovio represent very different groups of developers. Their motivations are not at all alike, and so neither is their behavior.

Mobile apps have enabled some developers to reach unprecedented scale in an incredibly short time. The companies that do this best have hundreds of millions of users and are typically valued at billions of dollars. The winners in this battle for mass market attention and appeal are either backed with millions of dollars in venture […]

Welcome to the brand new Developer Economics report! Now in its fourth year and 6th edition, the latest Developer Economics survey reached over 7,000+ developers across 127 countries, setting new standards in developer research. Get your free copy here and read about the movers and shakers in the app economy. Dive deep into our rich […]

With over one million apps in the Apple and Google stores, you‘d think that app development has become business as usual. As we enter 2014, the making of apps is a sought-after commodity. But [tweetable]the marketing of apps remains part art, part science[/tweetable]. App marketing and advertising took off early in the history of the […]

According to Distimo’s latest report, apps with “freemium” business models, i.e. free apps monetized by in-app purchases (IAP), have dominated revenue charts in 2013. This spurred me to take a deeper look at the “economics of free” and explore new opportunities for innovation in these business models. The Economics of Free Let’s begin by taking […]

Revenues from Android apps saw tremendous growth in 2013. If you look at the headline global figures then revenues from Android apps on Google Play are rapidly closing on those from iOS apps on the App Store. It looks extremely likely that 2014 is the year that Android will overtake iOS in total app revenues. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll find the distribution of revenues, both geographically and across apps is rather different. If you’re planning your platform strategy for this year then a dive into the details might prove invaluable.

Over the last decade, application testing has continually proved itself to be an important concern. When done well, testing can drastically reduce the number of bugs that make it into your release code (and thus actually affect your users). In addition, good testing approaches will help your team catch bugs earlier in the development lifecycle […]