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.

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

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.

Our 7th Developer Economics survey broke all records again, reaching more than 10,000 app developers from 137 different countries. The full report with the survey findings has just been published and is available for free download! The view of the app economy that they collectively provide is one of consolidation. Developers are focusing their attention […]

The number of app developers using business models that don’t rely on app store payments is increasing. In some cases this is sophisticated app developers adapting to the market.

Car makers have started a major offensive to get more apps in their vehicles and open up to outside developers. Their efforts have sparked an interest in the developer community. “A year ago there was very little interest from mobile developers because the automotive market was perceived as being too insignificant”

So you want to start a business developing apps? Or maybe you have an app business but want some advice on how to grow or improve it? Simply building an app and publishing it on app store as a paid download is extremely likely to result in disappointment.

The most popular revenue models appear to be those that are easiest to implement. The developers using them tend to have lower revenues. This may be due to greater competition or it might just be a result of less sophisticated app businesses producing less valuable apps. There are some interesting differences between platforms but subscriptions appear to be a relatively untapped gold mine everywhere, although maybe not for everyone.

In the great app store gold rush of the last 5 years a lot of vendors of virtual picks and shovels have set up shop, hoping to cash in on the boom regardless of which individual developers succeed in a fiercely competitive market. Having surveyed developers on their tool choices and revenues, we can see […]