Back in August, Facebook announced a beta for a new ad unit to help drive mobile app installs on iOS and Android. That product was made available to all developers recently and the early user reports are very positive. Is this early success likely to translate into a long term win-win for both Facebook and […]

There’s a lot of buzz about Lean Startups in the software community in general and amongst mobile developers in particular. How lean a startup can be is strongly influenced by the tools and processes available on their chosen platform. Which platforms enable the leanest product development processes? How and why does lean framework matter? Why […]

Bryson Meunier from Search Engine Land compiled a list of the 100 most searched for keywords in both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, for new apps. The data was gathered in June using Google’s keyword tool, so it isn’t exactly perfect, but it’s good enough to have a discussion about what works and […]

It goes without saying that people like to try things before buying them. Take magazines for example. No-one expects you to buy a year subscription to The Economist just so you can read it. You can check out a couple of their articles for free on their website, you might even buy an issue from […]

Microsoft is set to unveil its next generation mobile operating system, Windows Phone 8, on October 29th in San Francisco. There’s a slight problem though. Most developers don’t have access to the Windows Phone SDK. Microsoft is providing key partners with a beta of their SDK so they can have apps in the Windows Phone […]

Apple pushed out iOS6 to its customers earlier this month. According to Pocket, a popular service that lets you “bookmark” articles you might want to read at some point in the future, over 60% of their users have already updated to iOS 6. Chitika, an analytics company, reported similar adoption rates. Within 48 hours of […]

SwiftKey, makers of a third party keyboard for Android, joined up with two technology publications to survey over 17,000 smartphones users about the number of paid applications they have on their devices. Back in 2011, 12% of Android owners said they had zero paid apps on their phone. Only 10% had 20 or more paid […]

In a previous article, we discussed revenue and costs for app developers overall. Here, we add some more detail for each platform individually. iOS iOS a healthy developer economy. The iOS economy is the one that works best for its developers: it has the lowest percentage of developers below the “app poverty line” (42%) while […]

The bar for successful apps is high: if you want your app to stick out among a million others, it needs to be well designed, user friendly and working flawlessly, all of this comes with significant development costs. In this article, we give an indication of the types of costs you need to take into […]

Developers have a range of options to choose from when it comes to generating revenue. This choice is, to some extent, dependent on business model, scale and target market. Which revenue models are most popular, and which are most profitable? Key insights and recommendations: Selling your app B2B (commissioned apps or pre-loaded on a handset) […]