While novel readers were busy paging through murder mysteries and historical fiction this past spring, developers were checking out data and analytics, Jakarta, cloud-native articles, Kubernetes and open source.

Building strategies for user acquisition and retention are the two major tasks for dev teams after they have built an app, and analytics helps understand exactly what is happening and how to keep building traction. From there, new possibilities can emerge that will help you grow your user community even stronger and help you identify novel ideas that may offer you a winning edge.

Ragot said new dev teams can even just focus on one metric: “If there is one KPI, according to my experience, that tells you everything, it is “Retention at Day X”. D1 retention is how many people come back to your app in the same day after they install it. I am always looking at D1, D3, D7, D14 and D30. If you put all of your effort into measuring this, you have good analytics that is a mix of retention and acquisition.”

Increasing user acquisition for your app starts with app store optimization. 30% of downloads occur after someone has searched by keywords in Google Play. So getting noticed within the app marketplace can already drive up user downloads before looking at any other type of promotion.

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?

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…

Given the staggering odds against the success of any app in the marketplace, it is surprising that so much effort is devoted to the creation of apps, many of which never see the light of day.

Usage Analytics tools help developers understand their users and the way they interact with their apps. Measuring app usage in this way and using the data to help target improvements to the app can significantly improve revenues. We asked developers to rate their primary analytics tool across a range of criteria. The results tell us which are developers’ first choice tools and how they compare.

There are a wide variety of products that can be considered Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) offerings. At the time of writing we list 43 of them on our sector summary page. We have previously discussed whether or not they’re a good idea and how much development effort you could save by using one. In our most recent survey we asked developers about their use of some of the most popular options. By comparing developers’ use of BaaS with their average revenues and active user bases, we can determine how well these products are working for them.

Creating a successful app business takes a lot more than a good idea and the skills to develop an app and upload it to a store. As we’ve discussed before, developers who promote their apps are almost 3 times as likely to break-even as those who don’t. This is the simplest difference with a massive effect on success. It seems obvious…