App Advice from Flurry, Mobclix, Getjar

Yesterday I attended a panel discussion about marketing mobile apps, which included some interesting data from Flurry and Mobclix. ONe thing all the panelists agreed upon is that there is no one strategy that works for all apps; companies are trying different things, and no one has a magic formula that always works. SOmething that was clear to them, though was that the first month was a very good indicator (usually) of how an app would perform over time. If you didn't become a hit then, your chance of becoming a hit was much less later on. Not impossible, just much less likely. So your marketing should be planned for maximum effect in that time frame, or else it may not have as much impact.

Also interesting were the numbers on Android. The iPhone is still the big dog, but Android seems to be growing well also... both are eating share from Windows and Blackberry. Nokia who? Microsoft is anticipating sales of 11 million units of Windows 7 Mobile by the end of 2011... there must be something in the water in Redmond. Android's problem is the multiple versions, which make it difficult to support with one app. One thing I found most interesting is that most developers seem to be developing for one platform only; there's only a 5% overlap between iPhone and Android apps. Really? Seems like a missed play to me.

Finally, since 87% of app downloads are of free apps, that seems like a powerful marketing tool. You are left with the difficulty of monetizing your app, which needs to be considered from the beginning of the design process to really be effective. Advertising may work well, but for games the freemium model seems to be really popular.