When viewed as just another form of advertising, with a cost-per-action model, in theory Cross-Promotion Networks should work out fairly well for developers. User acquisition costs are predictable for advertisers and those displaying ads have reasonably good targeting built-in before any extra targeting logic used by the cross-promotion network – everyone viewing the ad has a smartphone and downloads apps on it! How does the theory work out in practice?

How do app developer revenues vary by country, or platform? Does the number of platforms make a difference to app revenues? Which models bring in the most revenues? We revisit Andreas Pappas’ November analysis of app monetisation with more insights from our Developer Economics 2013 survey across 3,400+ developers.

Of the tools and services for developers we asked about in our last survey, one category stands out by miles as having the wealthiest developers: voice services. Of course there’s a lot of variety in the voice services sector and the revenue is not at all evenly distributed.

Voice communication is one of the core functionalities of every mobile phone. However, telephony is up for a big shake-up, as Internet telephony companies like Skype and voice application platforms like the ones below are challenging century-old assumptions about how people speak with each other remotely. Voice Application Platforms allow you to make creative solutions that integrate voice communication deeply in your app: as voice messaging, click-to-call, person-to-multiperson, voice search and more. But despite catering to many use cases, their use is relatively low among developers. An opportunity to stick out of the pack?

Building a great app is not enough – to get lots of users, those users have to be aware that you exist. As app stores focus on top apps, which amount to less than 1% of all available apps, discovery has become a major problem for app makers. One solution is to band together in […]

In December Amazon launched a new A/B testing service for Android apps on the Amazon Appstore. Integrating A/B testing, particularly for in-app purchase related events, in the store portal is a welcome addition. Slightly disappointing considering this comes from a store provider is that the A/B testing service does not support testing different copy or icons on the storefront itself, purely in-app A/B tests, for which there are already third-party alternatives.

Sebastian Brannstrom, Lead Engineer for Lyft at Zimride, talked to us about their app and the business that the technology enables. Sebastian has been working in mobile software since 2006, initially on Symbian and then transitioning to iOS, Android & Web by way of a side project, created in collaboration with designer and product manager […]

App store analytics providers have been telling us that almost all of the growth in app revenues in the last year has been through in-app purchases. However is that just because the model has become more popular? Or because revenue has been concentrating at the top of the market, where the strategy is very popular (particularly in free-to-play games)? Probably…

One of the most common mistakes developers make when planning the business case for a new app is dramatically overestimating the number of users they will be able to attract, particularly for their first app. The typical argument goes something like this: “My app will be compatible with 400 million devices, if I can reach just 1% of those, that’s 4 million users”. The trap here is…

The security features of an app are often ignored in the rush to get a new product to market. We naturally tend to focus more on what an app should do, rather than what it shouldn’t. Making sure that an app doesn’t have security flaws is a difficult and potentially expensive process. There are…