Foursquare has already done the hard work of finding matching restaurants, so the trickiest part of building this MVP is finding a way to generate structured data from natural language. The great thing about tools like wit, LUIS, and api.ai is that they make this part so easy that you can build an MVP like the above in an afternoon. In our experience, 3rd party tools are an excellent way to build quick prototypes. You could just as quickly build a bot to find videos with the YouTube API, or products from Product Hunt.

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.”

So after you’ve built an app, the first task is to position it so that your potential users start downloading it. User acquisition is all about getting app downloads. After downloads start climbing — even a slow increase is okay as long as it is steady — then it is important to start focusing on retention: getting users to start integrating your app into their habits so they reach for your app regularly.

Have a look at this infographic about the Developer Economics: Developer Tools Benchmarking survey, check the numbers and you will be able to find out how it has come to be the most global developer survey.

What do you think about when you hear the word “software developer”? Most people probably imagine a duffy engineer, turning his boss’s requirements into code. A software builder, so to speak.

Despite losing in the platform wars, Microsoft’s developer ecosystem is still strong and they’re not showing much sign of wanting to give up their tools. The latest Developer Economics survey showed that 38% of mobile developers were using C# for some of their work and 16% use it as their main language. Those developers are not all focused on Microsoft platforms by a long way. So what are they doing?

According to our latest developer research, 20% of mobile app developers primarily target enterprises. This decision produces a significant boost to their revenues, with 43% making more than $10K per month versus 19% of those who target consumers above the same revenue level. Similarly at the $100K+ per month revenue level we have 18% of developers who target enterprises versus just 7% of those who target consumers. Aside from selling to businesses, government or non-profit organisations rather than consumers, what are these developers doing differently?

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?

In our latest report, App Economy Forecasts 2015 – 2017, we estimate the number of mobile developers in 2014 at 5.5 million. Demand for mobile development skills has never been higher and yet revenue from app store sales cannot possibly pay their salaries.

The rise of freemium games has been ferociously quick and it continues to accelerate at an incredible pace. It’s estimated that adults now spend, on average, 5 hours and 46 minutes online and on their mobile devices. Time spent online has now surpassed time spend watching TV.