JT Klepp's Public Library

To give you an idea of their growth, when we covered the launch of their PPD service in April 2011, the company was reporting more than 200 million mobile subscribers. In addition to this 250% growth in terms of network reach, the company also claims to have driven more than 15 million sponsored app installs over the past 12 months, with an average of more than 25 million total app downloads per month, and more than 400 million app downloads since its debut.

appia app stores

As markets mature, rational economic behavior emerges.  Even the most passionate, idealistic software start-ups focus increasingly on markets where revenue generation is highest. In this report, Flurry compares the ability for app developers to generate revenue per user across the major app stores.  We examine a basket of top-ranked apps that have similar presence across iOS, Amazon and Android.

amazon google app store Flurry

Flurry reported that Amazon ARPU is 89% of iTunes ARPU. However, we found that Amazon ARPU is almost twice that of iTunes ARPU, and if you compare Kindle vs iPad, Kindle ARPU outperforms iPad ARPU by 43%. And now that Amazon allows developers to sell IAP packages above $20, we expect Amazon ARPU to increase even more.

app store amazon android

Animoca, a Hong Kong mobile app developer that has seen more than 70 million downloads, says it does quality assurance testing with about 400 Android devices. Again, that’s testing with four hundred different phones and tablets for every app they ship!

android fragmentation cross platform tools

In a report last September, Yankee Group dubbed Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook the “Four Horsemen” of what it called the mobile content revolution. The mobile-focused research firm has since updated its findings, estimating that more than half the collective $200 billion in revenue of the four tech giants came from mobile sources.

facebook google apple android amazon mobile content revenue mobile advertising

Comparing the average time that smartphone users spent across app categories between the first quarter of 2011 and 2012, Flurry found that gaming dropped by 4% -- down to 24 minutes per day -- while social networking increased by 60% -- up to 24 minutes per day. 

social network mobile games

A new forecast from Strategy Analytics projects mobile ad spending worldwide will grow 85% in 2012 from $6.3 billion to $11.6 billion. In the U.S., the technology research firm predicts mobile advertising will grow even faster, more than doubling (up 128%) to just under $4.2 billion.

mobile advertising

Microsoft's share has been in a freefall: comScore had it at 18% at the end of 2009, and 36% in late 2007, the year Apple introduced the iPhone. (See chart above.) Since then, Apple and Google have gobbled up the lion's share of the smartphone market, with more than 80% of U.S. smartphones in comScore's latest stats.

microsoft windows mobile

In-app spending by advertisers in the United States and western Europe, where there is a high concentration of smartphones owned by affluent consumers, is set to overtake spending on display ads on mobile websites this year, research firm Strategy Analytics says.

advertising

The service will enable Android device and Kindle Fire users to pick up expansion packs, virtual gaming currency or manage subscriptions from within individual applications, with the same one-click purchase experience available in Amazon's online store.

in-app purchases amazon appstore

The firm found that among developers who create apps specifically for distribution via app stores, just more than one-fourth (26%) are full-time mobile app professionals who derive most of their income from their apps. The largest group (41%) is made up of moonlighters who have professional, full-time jobs as software developers and create their apps in their spare time. Another 22 percent are serious "hobbyists" who do not develop software in their regular jobs but do have technical backgrounds and the skills to create mobile apps in their free time. The rest (11%) are students and recent graduates who are also developing apps in their spare time.

mobile apps mobile app revenue

Looking ahead, he says that with "some of the lowest barriers to entry in the history of software development and distribution, apps are getting built and downloaded at breakneck speeds."

amazon app store

Whether apps and the Web can exist together or not, mobile computing devices are clearly overshadowing their stationary counterparts. “Mobile tools such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and laptop computers are now a primary source of Internet connectivity,” according to Janna Quitney Anderson, the report’s co-author and an associate professor of communications and director of the Imagining the Internet Centre at Elon University North Carolina.

web apps

The thing to keep in mind here” says Crone, “is that NFC was developed more than 20 years ago. It was first deployed 10 years ago. 10 years ago, we didn’t have ubiquitous access to data plans. We didn’t have more smartphones in circulation than feature phones and we had to depend on an ‘offline’ connection for processing payments. But now, there are 124 million households that have more than one device connected to the internet. Typically, that’s a smartphone, but very quickly it’s becoming a tablet.”

mobile payments nfc paypal google

It is even going so far as to finance the development of Windows Phone versions of well-known apps — something that app makers estimate would otherwise cost them anywhere from $60,000 to $600,000, depending on the complexity of the app. The tactic underscores the strong positions of Google and Apple, neither of which have to pay developers to make apps.

microsoft windows mobile windows marketplace app app stores

venture capital

In contrast, Google has said that its app store, the Android Market, has generated little revenue. Mr. Farago said that was because making payments in the Android Market was more difficult.

mobile gaming in-app purchases