A smooth and engaging onboarding experience helps users understand your app’s value and sets the stage for long-term engagement and retention. So, how can we make this experience great?

More than half of mobile developers are living in “app poverty”: making less than $500 a month from their apps. We’ve produced an infographic which looks at insights such as this from The Evolving State of Mobile Commerce, a report published by VisionMobile in collaboration with Braintree.

JavaScript is not the world’s most elegant programming language. So much so that one of the world’s top experts on the language wrote a book about “The Good Parts”. Even so, JavaScript has rapidly become one of the most popular languages in the world and it is steadily gaining ground on mobile. Will it eventually dominate there too?

Augmented Reality (AR) is about overlaying pieces of a virtual world over the real world (in contrast to Virtual Reality (VR) that is about replacing the real world with a virtual one). On mobile devices, this simply means enhancing what you can see through the device’s camera with multimedia content (e.g. you can point your camera at a movie poster and watch its trailer, or you can point it at a star in the sky and learn its name). So, basically AR comes down to the following three fundamental questions: where to display what and how.

The game of ecosystems is in full bloom, with each player attempting to draw as many developers as possible around their platform. As we finally see some signs of consolidation, VisionMobile Senior Analyst Andreas Pappas, talks about the rules of engagement and identifies the winners and losers in this game of ecosystems in 2012.