Recently, Andrew Garkawyi, our COO, has attended a big event of the mobile industry – AppWorld in San Francisco. Here are the highlights of the event and some interesting points Andrew noticed on rising sectors of the mobile market.
San Francisco is a known center of the IT industry in the US. However, this time it attracted lots of people from Europe. Famous AppsWorld Conference came to San Francisco to talk about latest mobile trends.
If you expected to see lots of mobile startups with their apps – wrong place. There was everything about apps but no apps themselves 🙂 All expo area represented whole mobile industry and its trends:
- tools and platforms for apps discovery and promotion: ad networks, discovery frameworks
- corporate solution platforms
- tech startups/tools for simplifying application development
Amount of ad and discovery platforms clearly reflected current state of the mobile market. There are millions apps in App Store and Google Play, but you still want yours to be #1. Unfortunately, there is no single recipe for that: some are still trying ad networks, others are looking into app’s page optimizations or different discovery platforms.
You should still remember big switch of Facebook and Linkedin from their HTML5 apps towards much nicer native solutions. But this trend seems not to have impacted the enterprise market yet, which is looking fast and not expensive way to fill in mobile niche. And it looks like in nearest time people in those big corporations will keep struggling from slow and ugly UI. This is mainly because corporations need to solve quickly their problems without much thinking about external look and that is what most mobile solutions proposed at AppsWorld – “have a web site – you can quickly have a mobile site”. Quite often these were HTML5 frameworks or universal tools allowing compiling for multiple platforms from the same codebase.
For those mobile developers who are struggling with backend systems, Backend as a Service obviously might be a great solution. They are still rather young but evolving very fast: Parse (parse.com), StackMob (stackmob.com), Kinvey (kinvey.com)
AppAnnie (appannie.com) shared very optimistic statistics about the state of the mobile market and especially positive news about Android. There is revenue there and it is growing. iOS still leads almost all over the worlds by revenue but Korean market (what a surprise!) is totally opposite and Android is blossoming there. The biggest countries by revenue are still USA, Japan, UK and Korea (for Android). The most profitable category is Games but 2nd and 3rd places are different for iOS and Android. AppStore #2 and #3 are Productivity and Entertainment in contrast to Communication and Tools in Google Play.
Most developers are still choosing ads as their main monetization model, which is, by the way, the least profitable. Much better options to get profit are freemium model (in-app purchases) and subscriptions.