Why is it that smartphones are suddenly increasing in social networking apps usage? Well, the growth of Twitter could be a huge part of this – in about a year, the service went from 140 million tweets per day to 340 million. That Apple integrated Twitter into iOS 5 couldn’t have hurt. Pinterest has become the third most-used social network on the internet behind Facebook and Twitter, yet doesn’t have an official mobile app. If they ever got on that, the number could go up. Perhaps even Google+ is contributing to the increase, if only slightly as it’s the eighth-ranked social network in the US.

As well, while Flurry posits that perhaps the gaming market has become saturated, and games are now competing for a set of users, the thing that needs to be remembered is that the overall number of users of smartphones is increasing. Dumbphone users who are transitioning to low-cost smartphones may not be as interested in games. As well, because these numbers are for smartphones only, there’s the potential that increased tablet usage could be cutting in to the desire to play smartphone games, even as overall usage of them increases.

So, with this release of information from Flurry, there’s only more questions that come up. What is the future of app usage? Is game usage truly on the decline? Time will tell if this is a down slope for gaming, or just a blip on the radar.

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Developers can use this new function in various ways. The can send targeted ads to users based on behavior, discount purchases that users may be interested in, or make location-based suggestions.

While Apsalar competes with other analytics technologies like Flurry, they believe they offer more advanced analytics than their competitors currently offer. For example, they have something called cohort segmentation where developers can see how long users used an app or used it on a regular basis based on the time at which users first downloaded the app.

And even though Apple is starting blanket rejections of apps accessing the UDID of user’s devices, their solution will work anyway because they’ve created their own ID scheme for their technology.

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If all that sounds like a lot of marketing mumbo jumbo then the heart of the issue is this, Flurry AppSpot is trying to make it easier for developers and marketers to connect with their potential audience and spend their advertising dollars in smarter ways. There’s no reason for most companies to take a shotgun approach to advertising and spray their products and services everywhere, that’s just a recipe for wasted money. Instead AppSpot provides powerful, specific data to make sure every ad dollar is spent in the smartest manner possible.

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According to the numbers 68 percent of all games played on iOS and Android in the Q1 2012 were created by independent developers. This is a nice bump of the previous high of 60 percent in 2010 and a major jump over last year’s 56 percent. It’s tough to pin down why users are flocking to indie games instead of fare from bigger companies like Gameloft and Zynga, but it may be that the App Store is the great equalizer, with great games finding ways to succeed regardless of who made them or how much they cost to create. We’ll be watching this trend closely over the coming months and years to see if indie games continue to be the darlings of iOS.

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In the chart above, Flurry shows the fact that developers are making more money on iOS than on Android, even as the numbers of Android OS enabled smartphones continues to increase, commanding as much as 53% of the market, according to an NPD Group study released yesterday as well. Here’s how Flurry puts it:

“Anecdotally, developers consistently tell us that they make more money on iOS, about three to four times as much. To be sure, we pulled a sample of in-app purchase data from a set of top apps with versions on both iOS and Android, comprising of several million daily active users (DAUs). Running the numbers, we find that, on average, for every $1.00 generated on iOS, the same app will generate $0.24 on Android.”

Which brings us to the next point. Flurry notes a definite discrepancy in the number of new projects by developers for iOS vs those for Android. The graphic below shows that developer support, as measured by the projects committed to on each platform, has declined from over a third to under a quarter of all new projects. Flurry attributes this to expanded availability of iOS devices on networks like Verizon and Sprint, as well as successful flagship product launches in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. They also note that Android does not have this kind of product focus, with a ton of different competing handhelds in the market.

Does this mean that Android is losing? Far from it, says the Guardian, quoting a post by Great Little War Game developer, Paul Johnson, in which he discusses the lucrative nature of developing on both platforms, especially with the recent $.10 sale on Google’s Android Market. Said Johnson,

“We’re on track to have taken around $125,000 by the end of this first sales quarter and that’s not too shabby a return in my book,” writes Johnson. “If you have an iOS game that’s pretty decent and you’re wondering about porting to Android, just do it.”

Bottom line? Seems like most developers are looking to iOS for their winter holiday income, while adding Android to the picture just makes good business sense. If developers can only commit resources to one or the other? Looks like iOS is the clear winner, at least for now.

Source: Guardian UK

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Flurry Analytics, which tracks more than twelve billion app sessions across 80 000+ applications per month, says that over 40% of the data they receive is from time spent on games. And it’s Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android that are leading the way in this category. “From 2009 to 2010, iOS and Android game sales increased from 5% to 8% market share within the U.S. video game market. Specifically, we estimate that iOS and Android game revenue increased from $500 million in 2009 to more than $800 million in 2010 … the significant majority of revenue was generated by iPhone games.”

This is good news for developers across both platforms. Although the industry revenue is remaining relatively flat, the intra-industry revenue distribution of the video games industry is changing hands. Dedicated portable gaming devices like the DS and PSP hold 16% of video game software revenue, down from 24% of the year previous (2009). Console gaming devices like the Xbox 360 and PS3 took on only a 5% gain, leaving 3% to the mobile market. [However, Flurry did not account for Android in 2009, so it is not feasible to accurately determine who gained the most of that 3%.]

Looking at the portable games industry in more depth, it is clear that iOS and Android are advancing on the front-lines, while the DS and PSP are retreating. Nintendo is down to earning 57% of total portable games revenue, from 70% the year previous (2009). The PSP, which took 11%, is down to single figures: 9% in 2010. Although Flurry did not account for Android in 2009, it should be noted that iOS held 19% of industry revenue in 2009, and now iOS and Android collectively hold 34%. That’s a big gain.

How even is the growth distribution between iOS and Android? That’s debatable, and we don’t have the figures to work that out yet. However, I refer you to an article I wrote at the end of last year, noting equal ad impressions between the two conglomerates, suggesting the distribution could be relatively even.

Developers, take note. In and amongst the small growth of the video games industry is a great battle, with revenue changing hands drastically. This means more competition, more innovation and more consumers.

[Flurry]

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Take a look at the full press release below.

FLURRY LAUNCHES CHANNEL PARTNER PROGRAM amid unprecendeted growth in mobile application analytics market

Top Mobile Development Companies Add Flurry Analytics to Solutions for Key Clients

San Francisco – June 26, 2009 – Flurry, the leading cross-platform mobile application analytics provider, today announced the establishment of a channel partner program. The company’s partners are focused on driving implementation of Flurry’s award-winning analytics services within the rapidly growing mobile applications market. Inaugural companies joining Flurry’s Partner Program include Atimi, Five Mobile, and MobileCDN.

Flurry’s Partner Program provides contracted software development firms the unparalleled ability to communicate performance and usage insights to their clients. With Flurry analytics data, development companies can monitor, identify and assess future development opportunities to grow a client’s mobile application business. Flurry offers channel partner revenue share possibilities, technical support and joint marketing.

“Our channel program is a win-win for mobile development companies and the clients for whom they build mobile applications,” said Sean Galligan, Flurry vice president of business development. “Gaining insight into exactly how consumers use their iPhone, Android and BlackBerry applications provides established brands with a competitive advantage on new platforms, while providing contracted developers the ability to adjust, improve and report performance for their clients.”

With over 9,000 developers already signed up for its free analytics service since launching in January of this year, and over 40 million reporting agents, Flurry Analytics is fast becoming the standard in mobile application analytics. Each week Flurry tracks detailed application usage on over eight million consumers’ handsets across iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and JavaME. As major media, video game and web services companies rush to establish a presence in the exploding smart phone application market, the need to turn to third party developer support as well as measure their performance has never been greater.

“Flurry Analytics has become a standard part of our proposal to household media brands approaching Atimi to build winning iPhone applications,” said Scott Michaels, vice president at Atimi Software Inc. “Flurry Analytics enables Atimi to gather much needed, highly relevant feedback to make rapid improvements to applications and increase success for our clients. Furthermore, our clients can leverage Flurry usage statistics alongside other campaigns for comparison, providing valuable insight to support their most critical decisions.”

To learn more about the Flurry Channel Partner program, please email Flurry at partners@flurry.com. For companies looking for mobile application development support please visit any of our partners listed below.

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Demo Conversions

The most interesting item in their newsletter this month is the reverse correlation between demo/lite/free version downloads and the conversion of the customer to paid versions. Common sense would lead us to believe that the higher the downloads for a free version the higher the conversions would be or that it would at least be fairly even. This may not be the case.

With information in this report, the conversion rate the apps whose demo version has fewer than 100,000 downloads is around 20%. While applications whose demo version has had over 1 million downloads is only a paltry 4%.

If we take those two extremes, an app with 100k and one with 1MM downloads, and assign a paid version price that’s the same to each, the app with 1MM downloads still has a higher revenue. Two times the revenue, actually. But only 2 times the revenue for 10 times the number of demo versions downloaded. This works out to be, for a $1.99 app, $0.28 in conversion revenue per download for an example app with 100k demo downloads but only $0.06 for that same priced example app with 1MM downloads. (Figures take into account the 70/30 split)

There can be a lot of factors figuring into this strange statistic. Could be the more popular a free app, the more free loaders download it. Could be that niche applications have a smaller demo download number and a stronger conversion percentage.

Weekend Sales Quantified

This newsletter was also able to quantify the weekend sales phenomenon. It’s been known for a while that app sales on the weekend are generally higher than weekdays. According to statistics gathered by Flurry, consumers are more than 30% more likely to download an app during the weekend compared to weekdays. Weekend sales for paid game applications can see as high as a 48% increase while paid apps can see a weekend increase of up to 36%.

So with knowing this, it might be best to launch an application either during the weekend or just before. Ideally culminating any advertising and PR to all hit through the weekend might end up paying off best. Of course actually getting PR to hit during a weekend might not be all that easy.

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The first interesting thing pointed out in the report is that the iPod Touch has quickly risen to be the second most popular application platform behind the iPhone. The iPod Touch with we generally think of as a music device has users launching apps almost as frequently as the iPhone. Proving that the iPod Touch as a gaming platform ad campaign by Apple is starting to pay off.

Next up is network usage by iPhones. It’s no surprise that iPhone users seek out wifi networks as often as possible. The amazing thing is that they are doing so 53% of the time they are using the network within applications. Even odder is that of that time they are using unsecured open wifi networks 16% of the time.

Focusing on iPhone games, they note that in their test group, the average lifetime of a game is just 3 months with the peak usage coming in at around 7 weeks. This is interesting to note that some games such as classic card games and games that include social interactions have a longer life. More indications why this year will be the year that community gaming systems become huge on the iPhone OS.

Flurry suggests that game developers plan, for maximum usage and income, to release a new game or upgrade of an existing game every 8 weeks to ride the wave of this usage pattern. Good advice, even if it’s hard for a small developer to meet that timeline.

The statistic that they released that got a few people talking, and arguing with, was the upgrade statistic. With this test group, they observed that only a little over 7% of users upgraded their applications within the first 2 weeks of an upgrade being available. And only 18% total had upgraded after the first 2 months. This, of course is very dependent on the application.

Thanks to Flurry for providing this data.

About Flurry Analytics:

Flurry offers cutting-edge analytics, deployment and monetization tools for mobile application developers. Its services platform is offered free to application developers allowing them to better save money, increase revenues and improve their products. Flurry’s platform is built by developers for developers, based on its pioneering experience as one the first developers to build, deploy and market direct-to-consumer applications. Flurry is venture-backed and is based in San Francisco.
http://www.flurry.com

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