According to a new report by analytics firm, Flurry, more Android phablets were activated than any other sized Google-powered smartphones. In fact, if the companies app-tracking tools are accurate, half of all Android activations over the holidays were large-screened mobiles…
After announcing its first dev con last December, Yahoo today kicked off its mobile developer conference in San Francisco where it unveiled five new products for mobile app makers. As suspected, Yahoo revealed the latest tools from Flurry, the mobile ad and analytics firm it acquired last July.
This includes Flurry Analytics Explorer, a new dashboard for the Flurry Analytics system which it says enables developers to discover more insights with than before, and Flurry Pulse, which lets app builders “share app signals with partners using their existing Flurry SDK implementations and the click of a button.”
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Yahoo announced today that it will be hosting its first ever developer conference, The Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference, early next year in February. Yahoo confirmed it plans to use the event to unveil a new suite of developer tools for mobile apps that will “help developers better understand their users and improve, grow and monetize their apps.”
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Flurry today released its stats for worldwide app downloads during the 2012 holiday season. It recently released some stats for Christmas Day, including a huge 332 percent increase over previous years to 17.4 million new iOS and Android activations and 328 million app downloads. Today it shared some stats for the entire week starting on Christmas and ending New Year’s Day, noting it recorded the highest number of activations and app downloads for any week in history. As highlighted in the images, Flurry estimated 50 million devices activations and an increase of 65 percent to 1.76 billion app downloads:
The final week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, grew by 65% over the early-December baseline, historically breaking through the largest single week record previously set during the same week of 2011. While several weeks since late November delivered billion+ week download levels, the holiday week delivered a record-shattering 1.7 billion downloads… Looking forward to 2013, Flurry expects the trend of one-billion-download weeks to become the norm, and that the industry will surpass the two-billion download week during Q4.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qGCRL28HEi4]
Japan-based DeNA announced that its “Rage of Bahamut” app became the No. 1 grossing game on both Android and iOS yesterday, while earning roughly the same revenue per day from each mobile platform.
The game’s success pokes holes in recent findings from Flurry, which claimed revenue generated per active user is four times greater on iOS than Android. The analytics firm noted that for every $1 earned on iOS, a developer could expect to earn about 24-cents on Android.
“Contrary to what we read, we’ve been very happy with Android monetization. There is not a big discrepancy between the two now,” said DeNa Director Neil Young to TechCrunch.
Rage of Bahamut is a free trading card game that lets users battle either through a live single or multiplayer action mode against a “database of battle hungry foes.” It is on the Google Play Store and boasts a 4-star rating on nearly 11,000 reviews as of press time.
TechCrunch further elaborated:
The game had the top slot on both platforms yesterday, but Kabam’s Kingdoms of Camelot took back the #1 iOS slot in the U.S. this morning. […]Young says Rage of Bahamut is seeing some impressive revenue numbers per day per user. In casual games, you usually see an average revenue per daily active user of a couple cents to 10 cents per day on mobile. The better games can get to 15 to 25 cents per day per daily active user. But Young says Rage of Bahamut has been able to do 4 or 5 times that. He didn’t say how much revenue overall the title is earning, but we’ve seen dual platform hits like Draw Something earn anywhere between $5 and 10 million per month through in-app purchases and advertising.
Those numbers are welcomed news for developers with growing concerns about mobile platforms lacking solid business models that encourage monetization.
Analytics firm Flurry has dissected developer ratios for Apple and Google’s mobile platforms as their respective annual conferences are on the horizon, and research findings show the two companies boast a joint market cap of about $750 billion.
The study compared developer support for iOS versus Android by examining data collected from more than 70,000 companies across more than 185,000 mobile apps. The bar graph below illustrates developers’ loyalty to Apple: For every 10 apps that developers build, only three are for the Android operating system.
“While Google made some gains in Q1 2012, edging up to over 30% for the first time in a year, we believe this is largely due to seasonality, as Apple traditionally experiences a spike in developer support leading up to the holiday season. Apple’s business has more observable seasonality,” explained Flurry in a blog post.
Flurry further cited iOS as the more attractive platform to developers due to its stronghold on the tablet market share. The pie chart below represents a sample size exceeding 5 billion total user sessions. It reveals the Galaxy Tab and Amazon Kindle Fire sit at “very distant second and third places in terms of consumer usage.”
Another comparison on revenue generated by top apps for both Android and iOS uncovered the difference in revenue generated per active user is four times greater on iOS than Android. Flurry noted that for every $1 earned on iOS, a developer could expect to earn about 24-cents on Android.
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is June 11 to June 15 in San Francisco, while Google’s I/O conference is June 27 to June 29 in the same California tech-hub city.
China now holds the No. 1 spot for Android and iOS activations.
Mobile analytics firm Flurry released new data that depicted the Chinese market skyrocketing from No. 11 in 2011 to No. 1 for smartphone activation, thereby bumping the United States to No. 2.
The statistics are staggering: China accounted for 8 percent of Android and iOS activations in January 2011, while the United States held a big slice of the pie with 28 percent. The tables have turned, however, as China passed the U.S. and now boasts 24 percent of activations by March 2012 (end-of-the month projections included). Meanwhile, the United States slipped to 21 percent.
More information is available below.
Not entirely surprising, but worth a note: A new survey indicated Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire tablet turned into a formidable competitor to the best-selling Android tablet series Samsung’s Galaxy Tab rather than Apple’s iPad. While the Fire did take some of the shine away from the iPad, Apple’s executives (and some analysts) are not terribly worried about the Fire’s long-term impact on Apple’s tablet sales. Mobile analytics firm Flurry, tapping device-specific ad impressions in its network, found that of all Android tablets sold in January 2012, the Kindle Fire and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab grabbed 36 percent market share each.
In fact, nitpicky types could argue that the Fire (35.7-percent) marginally edged out Samsung’s devices (35.6-percent). Another way to look at this data: These two tablet brands together accounted for nearly three-quarters of all Android tablets last month. This is in stark contrast to last November when Flurry recorded a 3 percent market share for the Fire versus a whopping 63 percent for Samsung’s Tabs…