July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Google just released a new version of Gmail for Android — a few days ahead of expectations.

Now you can reply, archive, or delete your email right from notifications without opening the app, as long as you’re running the latest major version of Android, Jelly Bean. And you’ll get the new Gmail tabbed user interface, with up to five versions of your in-box organized by all mail, social network mail, promotional mail, order information and updates mail, and priority mail from friends or colleagues that you email often.

(If you don’t see the new tabs, go to desktop Gmail, click the gear icon at top right, and select Configure inbox.)

Older Android users — Ice Cream Sandwich and up — will also get faster online and offline search, and even Android 2.2 users will get performance updates.

But everyone gets new labels right in the inbox, contact images, and the ability to manage multiple accounts:

There is talk that Google is staging the new Gmail roll-out for its hundreds of millions of users, so you may not see the update on Google Play right away.

However, I was able to see it on Google Play without any trouble. Your mileage may vary, and if it does and you simply cannot wait to spice up your sad, sad life with the brand-new Gmail, you can download one of the Android app APKs and manually install the new update immediately.

The slide-out navigation is a handy way to access mailboxes and labels, but some early feedback on the move of the action bar with delete and archive buttons, among others, from the bottom to the top is that it is now harder to access those features.

I haven’t used it long enough yet to make a call, but based on mobile user interface best practice guidelines, the top of your phone’s screen is the hardest to reach. Which means that Gmail may now be a two-handed app.

Google’s most recent major update for Gmail on iPhone was in December.

Image credit: Google

July 9-10, 2013
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Two weeks ago Apple announced that it hit 50 billion apps served. That’s the last major milestone the first big player in the mobile app market will hit first.

What goes up, I suppose, must come down.

As sure as gravity, Google Play will surpass Apple’s app downloads in September of this year. It’s simply a matter of mathematics.

Apple is adding two billion downloads a month, according to Asymco’s Horace Dediu. That’s a lot of apps. And individually, iOS users download more apps than Android users, too: 83 per device compared to 53. But the flock of global Android users are downloading 2.5 billion apps a month from Google Play, Google recently announced.

And with a rapidly growing installed base of over 900 million Android users, that gap is going to continue to grow.

Do the math. Or, rather, let me do it for you:

Source: John Koetsier

Google Play vs Apple iOS app downloads

In reality, of course, neither platform is increasing at a static rate of acceleration. Both are growing monthly app download numbers each and every month. But Google Play is growing faster on a larger installed base, and so will almost certainly surpass iOS in total app downloads in September.

And that, of course, is not even counting the 200+ app stores for Android in addition to Google Play — many of which in China and Korea are extremely popular and well-used.

Which means that Android might already have surpassed iOS in app downloads … even if Google hasn’t.

The real question, however, is whether it matters.

Android has the majority of the market share — about 70 percent globally – while Apple has the majority of the profit share, perhaps as much as two-thirds of all profits generated from mobile. Until Android can prove that someone beside Samsung can make money on Android, it all remains rather academic.

There are lots of apps in both app stores, and lots of downloads on both major mobile platforms. And one more platform in third place trying to displace them both.

July 9-10, 2013
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In the good old days, Apple’s app store had a few thousand apps, and you could probably browse all of them to find what you wanted.

That lasted about 30 seconds.

Today, the iOS app store has probably 775,000 apps. It’ll hit a million in June or so, right behind Google Play. And while Apple is celebrating 50 billion apps sold, the increasingly huge skeleton in the closet is Apple provides just 23 categories to sort those million apps, plus another 20 subcategories solely in the games section.

Source: John Koetsier

App store categories – iOS

Worse, the front page of the app store is a Pareto principle on steroids, with apps in just four mega-categories: New, What’s Hot, Paid, and Free.

Tap the All button in any of them, and you’ll get about six screens full of apps to scroll through — a measly pittance compared to the wealth waiting in those hidden hundreds of thousands of apps. And with Apple on the warpath over the past few months, deleting app-discovery apps from the app store in the wake of its own purchase of Chomp — an app-discovery engine — and forcing app discovery onto the web or into other small niches, it’s tough to find anything beyond the big hitlist of the top apps from the big publishers.

“The Apple App Store, with a mere 23 categories, is nearly impossible to navigate,” Edwin Cooper, the CEO of app discovery site OttoCat, said in a statement.

That’s is probably why Google Play’s top 10 lists are more diverse than Apple’s, with more indies hitting the big time.

Enter OttoCat to the rescue.

OttoCat does exactly what the named suggests: Break Apple’s million apps into easily navigated nested categories. They’re automatically generated via a scraped list of iOS apps from Apple’s public web-accessible app previews. And they’re much more helpful, exploding the very generic “Utilities” into subcategories such as “Calculators,” “Security,” “Remote Control” and “Servers.” And then even more subcategories, further breaking down “Remote Control” into “Windows,” “Media Center,” “Appliances,” “Wi-Fi Network.”

In other words, making those 775,000 apps actually browsable for the first time. And shining the light of day on apps below the top 250 or so.

“The most visible apps are the most popular apps, and so they stay most popular.  Users have no means of seeing past a few top apps into the main area of the store, where most of the merchandise is,” Cooper says. “OttoCat [gives] users an easy way to finally access the 99.5 percent of the App Store which had become frustratingly inaccessible.”

Cooper knows a little about the problem of managing huge amounts of data and making it searchable. Before founding OttoCat, he founded InQuira, a knowledge management platform for Fortune 500 clients — including Apple — that Oracle acquired in 2011.

What I really liked about the site is that OttoCat gives you a sense of how you’re narrowing down the list as you go.

For instance, I clicked on Books, which informed me that there were 35,577 apps in the category. Selecting Children’s Books reduced the number to 11,780, while Bedtime brought it down to 521. Choosing children’s books that are narrated reduced it further to 117, and selecting those that have interactivity then brought it down to just 35.

775,000 to 35, in just five steps. And now I’m at a manageable number to actually chose the book I’m interested in.

Navigating the app store this way is important for indie app developers and titles that are never going to hit the bigtime, but might be just the perfect app for any given iOS user. And it’s good for app consumers, who might want a bit more choice than they currently have.

Interestingly, it’s also similar to the way Google Play organizes apps, with categories like Books > Children’s Books  > Bedtime and Dreams. In fact, it’s more detailed than Google Play, with more factors to help you narrow down the various lists.

“In the App Store, the popular apps stay popular, because that’s all that users can get to,” OttoCat says.

OttoCat, which has the tagline “discover the app store,” is working to change that.

photo credit: Brian Wilkins via photopin cc

Disclosure: I’m an independent app developer myself, I suppose. At least, on a very part-time basis. I took a bedtime story that I told my daughter and made an app of it.

July 9-10, 2013
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App recommendation engines are getting booted from Apple’s app store because they suck, according to a new player in the app-finding business. But Hooked Media has come up with an entirely new take on app recommendation that has two unique qualities.

One, it doesn’t suck. And two, it can’t be rejected by Apple.

“Obviously, app discovery is a problem on iOS and Android,” Hooked Media CEO Prita Uppal told me, thinking of the hundreds of thousands of apps on both platforms. “The key problem from Apple’s perspective was that no one was solving the problem … they were just looking at opportunities to make money.”

That’s why Hooked Media chose to avoid simply relying on manual curation or social discovery, which is what most app recommendation engines use. Instead, Uppal says, Hooked Media generates app recommendations for its users based on 46 independent factors, including time of day, day of the week, what apps you’ve installed, which you’re deleting, the sequence in which you use them, your demographic factors, and yes, some social factors as well.

The result?

A 30 percent uptick in installs based on Hooked Media recommendations — and 33 percent more play time on games downloaded in response to a recommendation.

And most of that is without the typical app-recommendation app that shows you the free games, highlighted apps, and deals of the day. Because instead of just being an app, Hooked Media provides an in-app app recommendation service that helps mobile developers monetize and get distribution.

In other words, a large part of Hooked Media’s app recommendations happen in other apps: In that moment when you’ve just finished a level or played a game, the app flashes up suggestions of other apps to download. These aren’t just paid ads, they’re personalized recommendations.

“We’ve built a partnership on both platforms,” Uppal says. “We’re helping companies that are already doing this do it better, smarter, and more personal … and increasing conversion rates over 20 percent.”

In other words, because the app suggestions are more targeted, users who see them are more likely to download and use them — and app developers are more likely to be able to monetize their app via other developers’ marketing incentives.

“The minute you add that predictive rating for users, it totally transforms it from being an ad unit to something that’s personal to me, which totally changes that experience,” said Uppal.

It also changes the definition of an app recommendation engine from an app to a cross-platform service that developers can embed in their own apps via an API. That makes it virtually impossible for Apple to take action against Hooked Media, because it’s in thousands of apps — not just an easily isolated one.

Hooked Media, which has been making online game recommendation engines for years, spent a dedicated two and a half years building the technology behind the recommendations for mobile apps. That’s partly due to the many, many factors in Hooked’s complex algorithm, and partly due to the need to provide customized recommendations based on huge numbers of criteria in literally milliseconds.

The service won 25 million users in beta on Android, and an app recommendation app that it built — partially as a proof of concept — was promoted by Google twice. That’s a far cry from Apple, which has been busy kicking app suggestion apps out of the store.

Source: Hooked Media

Personalized app recommendations

And while there’s good opportunity on iOS, which Hooked Media is happy to serve via its API, Android is where there’s a “bigger opportunity,” according to Uppal.

That’s not really due to the fact that Android has more users and now has or shortly will have more apps. Rather, it’s due to the fact that the “app store” functionality is fractured on Android, with more than 200 Android app stores in existence, according to Hooked Media.

“The app discovery problem becomes even more challenging on Android — users don’t even know where to go,” Uppal said. “In the U.S., Google Play is definitely dominant, but outside the U.S., Google Play is very small.”

In Korea, Uppal told me, Google Play is only used by a fraction of Android smartphone owners. (That seems a little extreme, given the fact that Korea ranks number two in the country list for downloads on Google Play.) And, she pointed out, Verizon is soon coming out with its own store. Hooked Media, however, will seamlessly find the right app store to download the right app, dynamically.

The core point?

Hooked Media has built a platform, app store, and app agnostic app recommendation engine. It’s one that can’t be banned by Apple. And it’s one that benefits developers who are seeking monetization as well as those who are seeking distribution.

photo credit: Daniel Y. Go via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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In Douglas Adams’ book The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, a vast computer named Deep Thought spends several eons constructing an answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

A full 7.5 million years later, it arrives at the answer: 42.

Google appears to be referencing that bit of geek cult humor in a new device, the H2G2-42, that it is currently submitting to the FCC for regulatory testing. H2G2 is a Wikipedia-ish guide to “life, the universe, and everything” inspired by Adams’ books.

There’s little data available about the device, but Google does say it is a “media player,” and a “fixed base station” with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, which would make it almost certainly a replacement for Google’s failed Nexus Q. The Q was Google’s ”first social streaming media player” that met with almost universally negative reviews, underwhelmed users, and is no longer for sale.

Source: FCC

Google device H2G2-42 is in FCC testing

One change that seems likely: It appears that the H2G2-42 will allow users to plug in external monitors via provided USB ports:

Source: FCC

Google’s H2G2-42 may be connectable to external monitors

As The Verge notes, Google’s new streaming music app broke compatibility with the Nexus Q. The Google Play Music All Access product is impressive, enabling personalized “radio stations” and inexpensive streaming music. Google calls it “radio without rules,” and it seems reasonable that Google would want a shiny new device to go with this major new music push.

Photos are not yet available and more details will have to wait until 45 days after certification. And it’s unlikely that a music streaming device will be the ultimate answer to the ultimate question.

But meanwhile, enjoy:

Image credits: Google, FCC

Google made a lot of big moves to impress Android game developers at the I/O developer conference in San Francisco yesterday. One of its most interesting new products is an Xbox Live-like network that provides cross-platform multiplayer, achievements, and cloud saves  for mobile titles called Google Play game services.

This suite of tools launched immediately after Google officially revealed it during its keynote presentation. In fact, some developers already updated their games with full support for Google Play game services.

We’ve gone ahead and collected 10 games available now on Google Play that use the new features. Check ‘em out below:

Super Stickman Golf 2: Free

Noodlecake Studios’ 2D arcade golf title gets expanded multiplayer support on Android with the implementation of Google Play game services. The developer added a new multiplayer mode along with achievements, leaderboards, and cloud saves.

Riptide GP: $1.99

Google worked closely with developer Vector Unit to get it on board early for these new Google Play features. The company added leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saves to its popular water-based racing title.

Shine Runner: 99 cents

This is another Vector Unit app. The arcadey smuggling game features the same support for leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saving.

Beach Buggy Blitz: Free

One more Vector Unit app has Play game services support. The company once again added leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saving.

Osmos HD: $2.99

Hemisphere Games’ beloved tablet title, Osmos HD, gets multiplayer powered by Google Play. The studio added local and online multiplayer with friends or with random match-making. It is also introducing 19 new achievements.

Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour: $6.99

Developer Gameloft completely reworked its multiplayer service to work with Google’s new tools. Now players can sign in with Google+ and use that for matchmaking and cloud saves in the first-person shooter.

Townsmen: Free

Studio HandyGames implemented Google Play game services into its medieval city-building title yesterday. Players can now sign in with Google+ to access online leaderboards and 61 in-game achievements.

Farm Invasion USA: Free

HandyGames also added the new features to its 2D alien-crushing title. Gamers can now check leaderboards and achievements for this app as well.

Rocket Island: Free

HandyGames also has some new features for its steampunk hex-based puzzle game. The studio added leaderboards and achievements to the game.

Campus Life: Free

Developer Pocket Gems is using Google Play game services to add leaderboards to its Campus Life sorority simulation title.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Apple’s countdown (err, up) to 50 billion apps ended today with one lucky winner, as yet unannounced, bagging $10,000 in iTunes money for apps, media, and more.

It’s a good thing Apple hit the number today, because if they waited even another week, the Cupertino company might have been second-best to Google’s Android. At Google’s developer-focused I/O conference today, Google’s Hugo Barra announced that Google Play has just passed 48 billion app installs — and had a massive 2.5 billion just last month.

Just as Apple has done before for major app store download thresholds, it’s giving away the $10,000 gift card to a lucky iOS user who downloaded the 50 billionth app. In addition, 50 lucky people who where the next to download an app have won a $50 gift card — even if they don’t know it yet.

Don’t go rushing to try to be one of those 50, of course … there are about 1,000 app installs on iOS each and ever second.

This is probably the last major app install number that Apple will trumpet to the skies, as Android will be making the big news from now on. At the same Google I/O conference, Android chief Sundar Pichai said that Android has now reached 900 million device activations — far more than Apple.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Where’s Steve Ballmer doing the monkey dance when you need him? OK, wrong company. But instead of doing a creepy developer dance, Google’s showing its developer appreciation with five major new features to make more money.

Cold hard cash — now, that’s love!

Google Play product manager Ellie Powers — no relation to Austin — shared the new features of Google Play Developer Console at Google I/O in San Francisco today.

1. Optimization tips: Google automatically generates optimization tips based on what your app does and what users are doing with your app. For example, if your app is selling well in Russia but it’s not localized in Russian, Google will suggest you localize your app.

2. App translation service: Getting translations can be tough, so Google has introduced a new app translation service right in the Developer Console. Simply pick the app, select the language, and pick a translation vendor. Your translations will arrive in about a week.
   

   Source: John Koetsier

   Ellie Powers

3. Usage metrics with referral tracking: “We want to give you all your metrics in the same place,” Powers said, so Google will now show you all your user metrics right in the Developer Console as well as in Google Analytics. This will roll out later this summer. And if you’re using campaigns to promote your app, referral tracking helps you understand which ads are most effective — and integrates with Google Analytics, showing you your google Play referral flow.

4. Revenue graphs: A new tab in the developer console supplies a summary of your app’s revenue, globally or per-country.

5. Beta testing and staged rollouts: If you want to test new features, Google Play now supports beta testing and staged rollouts. Developers can start with a small group of alpha testers, and then roll it out to a larger group of beta testers — using Google Groups, of course. Feedback from these groups only goes to the developers.

Image credit: Google

Android finally has its answer to iOS’s Game Center.

At the Google I/O conference today in San Francisco, the company announced Google Play game services, a new set of  features that expands what developers can do with their games.

The most notable feature of Google Play game services is that it’s cross-platform, which means it also works on both iOS and the web. Apple (and maybe even console makers such as Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony) should take note.

Another major feature is support for cloud saves. You can save progress on one device — say, a tablet — and pick up where you left on completely different one.

Google Play game services also supports matchmaking and multiplayer games. But Google’s demo of this functionality failed, so we couldn’t get the best idea of how it looks in action.

This also touts achievements and leaderboards, which are mandatory features for any gaming service these days. Players can see how they rank compared to both friends and the rest of the world. (This, as you might expect, links to back Google+.)

We’ll have more as Google announces it.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Google Play is doing pretty darn well, according to an update at today’s Google I/O developer conference today.

Currently, the Google Play has processed over 48 billion app installs from all the various devices using Android. In the last month alone, the company said it’s seen around 2.5 billion app installs, which is pretty impressive.

As for revenue, Google said it’s paying out more to developers than ever before. Also, revenue per user is 2.5 times what it was a year ago across the globe.

Check out VentureBeat’s liveblog of the Google I/O 2013 conference.

Developing.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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The big news at Google’s developer conference I/O might be the music streaming service we’ve all been hearing about for the last year. Google reportedly wrapped up the necessary music partnerships to get it off the ground, according to The Verge.

The new licensing deals include Sony Music Group and Universal Music Group that will enable Google to use their music on YouTube and Google Play. Google also reportedly struck a deal with Warner Music Group earlier in the year. This opens Google to some of the most major players in the music industry — an hurdle any music streaming service has to jump before it can be successful.

The service will likely resemble Spotify, according to The Verge. That is, it will serve up music the user chooses on a subscription basis, as opposed to an online streaming radio model. We are not sure what Google will charge for the service, but the New York Times reports that it will not offer the music free at any level. Spotify, by comparison, costs $10 per month for a premium version.

It will have its own internal competition, however, in YouTube, which many people already use to listen to music throughout the day. A mobile version of the streaming service, of course, would make the product much more alluring.

Apple is also said to be working on its own streaming product that will likely take Pandora’s model over Spotify.

We have reached out to Google and will update this post upon hearing back.

Man laughing with headphones via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Apple has built a massive and fast-growing $16 billion annual revenue stream in digital content alone, Apple analyst Horace Dediu says.

The company announced that quarterly iTunes revenues topped $4 billion — including $2.4 billion in content alone — in its latest earnings report. Based on historical numbers alone, that’s a $16 billion annual run rate, thanks to Apple’s 500 million iTunes users. But since it also has grown at a fairly steady 29 percent per quarter for the past six years, it’s also an underestimate of the annual value of the iTunes ecosystem.

And it gets better as users have more Apple devices.

“Apple users spend about $1/day for each Apple device in use,” Dediu says.

Source: Horace Dediu

iTunes digital media revenue by product segment.

All of which means that Apple is still king of the mobile ecosystem, at least as far as monetization is concerned. Users have currently downloaded 49.9 billion apps, and Apple is currently running a contest which will see the downloader of the 50th billion app win $10,000 in iTunes cash. While Google Play is growing faster than Apple’s app store, Apple still leads in downloads, and it holds a 2.6-times revenue advantage.

It’s also an interesting metric for Amazon to evaluate itself by.

Amazon sells Kindle devices at or near cost in part because it hopes to make extra revenue on digital content — perhaps $3 per user per month – via its own app store and its digital media offerings, such as TV shows and movies. Its newly launched virtual currency Amazon Coins should help with that mission, and with 11 million to 12.5 million Kindles sold through Christmas 2012, and perhaps 15 million sold to date, that would translate into just over half a billion dollars in revenue.

And at Apple-like numbers of $40/user/year, it would be $600 million dollars.

All of which could help explain why Amazon is hitting digital media hard and buying technology to make all of its Kindles full-color, with responsive screens.

And why Apple, Amazon, and Google are increasingly hard-core competitors in their three-way battle to own your devices … and your wallet.

Image credit: 401(K) 2013/Flickr

Nothing’s more seductive to a hip business owner than the next “big thing” in marketing (remember QR codes?) and lately, everyone’s been abuzz over app store Optimization (ASO). However, it’s pretty clear that ASO is more than just a pretty face. With over 700,000 apps in both Google Play and the Apple App Store, luck and hope are no longer enough to get your app found. While studies find that word of mouth and being “featured” are still the top ways apps get discovered, 63 percent of Android and iOS users have found apps by “organic search” within the app store.

The tricky part of ASO, like with any good marketing campaign, is that getting results requires playing both artist and scientist.

Here are the five little-known arts of app store optimization.

Know your app stores

App Store Optimization is not one size fits all. While iTunes and Google Play are dominating the apps scene, others are strong outside the US, like AppChina. Most notably, Amazon’s appstore for Android devices and Kindle is growing quickly.

If you have limited resources, focus on the giants, and take advantage of their key differences:

iTunes: The keyword field allows you to associate your app with certain terms. Make sure not to stuff or repeat too many variations of the same word which might trigger spammy signals.

(Many thanks to Jigl for this image)

Google Play: This apps tore has the benefit of the largest search engine algorithm in the world, which means efforts reap quick results. Optimizing the app name (see below) is especially important here.

Amazon: Unlike the other app stores, Amazon invites you to apply to get featured on their “storefront,” which means lots of views with little effort. The application can be found here.

Your app name is everything!

If you’re going to do only one thing, optimize your app name. Much like a page title for SEO, the app name serves as a relevancy signal to the app store “algorithms”, and it’s a strong one.

First, make sure your app name is actually in the title. Remember you want to have a strong presence as a brand, so people need to know your name, not just what your app does!

Next, describe your app properly. Moovit, a transit tracker includes ‘transit’ in its name and ranks third for the term.

Which means you need to…

Conduct some kick -ass keyword research

Though ASO tools are still pretty limited in comparison to the vast resources  available to SEOs, you can conduct your own tests. Ask yourself these questions:

• Which words describe your app?
• Brainstorm and then evaluate, do they support your brand narrative? Which of these words are most relevant?
• Get an objective feel for relevancy by searching for your keywords in the app store and seeing who is ranking for these terms.
• Which words are your competitors using?
• Be inspired but don’t be a copycat. Being unique will help you get traffic your competitors aren’t getting.
• Are there any related terms (and estimated volume) in Google Adwords?

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool won’t give you exact search volume within the appstore, but you can get an idea of term popularity by looking at stats for Google.com searches.

Choose your category, change your category

Choosing a category may not be very easy when your app has several utilities since it may fall into more than one.

Analyze your competitive landscape and make an informed decision regarding whether you want to take your competitors head on by being in the same list or if you want to maximize potential by going after a less crowded category.

Which brings me to my final point.

Don’t be afraid

Don’t be afraid to experiment. While iTunes only lets you change your page every time you release and upload an update to the app file, Google Play and Amazon allow you to continually edit your titles, descriptions, and categories. Take advantage of this and track your changes and their effects. Find your sweet spot and invite your customers to find you.

Denisse Dubrovsky has worked in the mobile space in both the nonprofit and for profit sectors for several years. Her experience ranges from research and support for a national government app development contest to helping great brands increase their audience and conversions within the app store through creative and forward thinking ASO. Denisse is currently an SEO Associate at Kahena Digital and specializes in ASO. You can follow her on Twitter @Deni_ssita.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Barnes & Noble has thrown in the towel and abandoned its Amazon-style Android strategy, finally agreeing to add Google’s app store, Google Play, to the Nook tablet.

“We are offering our customers even more great entertainment on our award-winning tablets,” Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said in a statement. “Now with access to more than 700,000 apps and the best reading experience available, NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are must-see products for entertainment lovers.”

Similar to Amazon, Barnes & Noble has extensively customized Android, stripping out numerous Google features such as Google Play, default installs of Google apps, and more, isolating the Nook experience in a Barnes & Noble ecosystem.

The only problem?

Barnes & Noble only ever managed to get something like 10,000 apps on Nook, resulting in an unsustainable poverty of apps compared to platforms such as iOS, Google Play, or even Amazon’s proprietary app store, which currently sports about 75,000 apps, and has a thriving app ecosystem. Popular games like Temple Run — one of the top 50 apps of all time on iOS — never touched the Nook platform.

B&N chief executive Lynch is essentially admitted as much, highlighting the fact that now Nook will have Google Play’s full complement of more than 700,000 apps. But the addition does not come without some cost.

First, to install Google Play, device makers also have to agree to install several Google-created apps, such as YouTube, Chrome, Google Search, Google Maps, and Gmail. Those apps will now be automatically installed on existing and new Nooks via an automatic over-the-air download, which means that Nook users will find some new apps on their devices without their request or action.

More critically, B&N has been selling Nooks — much as Amazon — on the razor and blades philosophy: Sell the razor cheap, and make it up on digital blades, or content such as books, music, apps, and movies. With this new Google-centric tactic, that strategy is now at risk.

Just how much remains to be seen, but the fact is that the old strategy was not working anyways, simply due to the fact that B&N did not have the scale to attract enough developer interest, and therefore enough apps.

In addition, as Time notes, Microsoft is a part owner of the Nook business, having invested $300 million into B&N in 2012. Technology and business do make for some odd bedfellows.

Image credit: Ricardo Bilton/Venturebeat

Sidekick Cycle is a smartphone game that hopes to do good — not by scoring big on Metacritic but by putting bikes in the hands of African children.

Half of all proceeds from Global Gaming Initiative’s (GGI) debut title, due out on iOS and Android platforms this summer, will go directly to international charity World Bicycle Relief. In real terms this means for every 387 downloads of the 99 cent game, a bike will be “unlocked” and put into the hands of someone who needs it.

“World Bicycle Relief is a best in class charity with a proven track record,” GGI’s chief executive Elizabeth Sarquis told GamesBeat via email. “They deliver bicycles to kids in Africa. With transportation, that child can get an education. With an education, we can change lives. It costs World Bicycle Relief $134 for that bike, and to date they have delivered more than 125,000.”

Global Gaming Initiative CEO Elizabeth Sarquis

For Sarquis, a relative newcomer to the world of gaming, the goal is to connect people to worthwhile causes through their smartphones. Providing a clear and tangible goal is key to this, and Sidekick Cycle will support engagement by keeping its players updated on the number of bikes funded.

Sarquis is both realistic and hopeful in her expectations for Sidekick Cycle. “At 387 downloads, our model delivers a single bike,” she says. “To us, that will be a victory. But realistically, for us to sell a few hundred thousand games doesn’t seem unreachable. If we reach 1 million, that would enable us to deliver more than 3,000 bicycles.”

Sidekick Cycle is the first of what GGI hopes will be a range of games supporting worthwhile causes. As with all noble gaming efforts, though, this project’s success depends on the game itself. “I’m very pleased with the quality of the game our developer, Berlin-based It Matters, has delivered,” says Sarquis. “Week over week, the game improves, and I’m confident that mobile gamers will embrace it.”

Sidekick Cycle is releasing on iOS in early June with an Android version following a few weeks later.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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On a worldwide basis, King’s Candy Crush Saga leads the way on the Apple iOS app store in downloads, and Imangi’s Temple Run 2 is tops in the Google Play store. But when it comes to revenue, GungHo Online Entertainment’s Puzzle & Dragons has conquered all, according to March data from market research firm App Annie.

The results show the competitive market for mobile games is becoming a battle among the same players each month for the top rankings, with no clearly dominant company.

King’s match-3 puzzle game has steadily grown in downloads on iOS since its release in September 2012. Now it is No. 1 in the most-downloaded game on iOS, and it is No. 3 on Google Play. Candy Crush Saga was No. 4 in revenue on Google Play and No. 3 in revenue on iOS. The top five grossing iOS publishers in March were unchanged from February, with Supercell (maker of Clash of Clans) and GungHo Online at the top of the charts.

GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons, meanwhile, is No. 1 on both iOS and Google Play for the month of March in terms of most revenue. That tells you that the game, which is particularly popular in the Japanese mobile game market, has been designed for maximum monetization. (I happen to know a chief executive who admitted spending $300 in the game.) Puzzle & Dragons has generated more than 10 million downloads to date in Japan alone.

Electronic Arts had the No. 1 spot on iOS in top downloads, but it did so with a total of 984 apps on the market. On Google Play, EA was No. 3, with 107 games on the market. On iOS, EA was No. 3 in monthly game revenue and it was No. 6 in monthly game revenue on Google Play. EA’s top downloadable game on iOS was Real Racing 3 at No. 2. And EA’s top grossing apps were The Simpsons: Tapped Out at No. 5 on iOS and Real Racing 3 at No. 7 on iOS. On Google Play, EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out was No. 6 in monthly revenue.

Rovio, saw its place move up four spots due to the strong downloads on iOS for its Angry Birds game and The Croods. Glu Games also jumped seven spots on iOS to No. 6. Rovio was the top publisher in downloads on Google Play in March.

One of the rare new players on the charts was Fingersoft, the Finnish startup that published Hill Climb Racing. Fingersoft hit No. 4 in top downloads on Google Play thanks to its release of Benji Bananas, an “endless swinging” game.

NHN has begun to climb the charts thanks to the strong performance of games published on its Line mobile messaging network in Japan. On Google Play, Asian game publishers have posted three games on the Kakao Talk mobile messaging network in South Korea.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
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Google is reminding developers who’s in charge in the Android relationship — and it’s not the developers.

In an effort to take control over self-updating apps, Google is now making it clear that developers can’t update Google Play apps by any other means than Google Play. The move is an indirect dig at Facebook, which was found to be doing that very thing with its own app last month.

“An app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace, or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play’s update mechanism,” says the new text added to the “Dangerous Products” section of Google Play’s developer program policy

Right now, the only apps that may update without Google Play are apps that weren’t downloaded from Google Play in the first place. (These are called “side-loaded” apps.)

For Google, the core of the problem is security: If developers can circumvent Google Play for app updates, how difficult would it be for bad guys update their apps with new, potentially dangerous features and permissions that Google isn’t aware of?

“Google play is a trusted source for Android application downloads, and we are committed to providing a secure and consistent experience,” Google says.

July 9-10, 2013
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Facebook’s betting a lot on its Home Android skin — but it looks like users aren’t biting just yet.

Yesterday, more than a week after Facebook Home launched in the U.S., the app finally reached the 500,000 installation mark on Google Play, reports Benedict Evans.

In addition to the slow growth, users are also tearing apart Facebook Home in their reviews. The app now has a two-star average rating on Google Play after more than 11,000 reviews, mostly thanks to more than 5,800 one-star reviews.

In comparison, the core Facebook app has between 100 million and 500 million installations and a four-star rating on Google Play. Instagram’s app reached 1 million downloads in less than 24 hours (and 5 million downloads in just six days).

The slow adoption could be related to the limited amount of handsets that Facebook Home supports (even though it includes incredibly popular handsets like Samsung’s Galaxy S III), as well as Facebook’s slow rollout strategy. Home opened up to U.S. Android owners on April 12, but international users didn’t receive it until April 16.

Facebook could be stress-testing Home’s impact on its servers with the slow rollout as well, so there’s a good chance it’s not sweating the slow adoption.

Judging from the negative reviews I’ve seen, it seems plenty of users were enticed by Facebook’s Home attractive design but were just overwhelmed with the social network tapping into every aspect of their phone. I have a feeling this will be the general reaction to Facebook Home — it’s certainly pretty, but Facebook may be reaching too far by prioritizing social features over basic functionality like making calls and using other smartphone apps.

Via The Next Web

Gaming on Android devices isn’t quite on the same level as iOS. The Apple products still tend to get more games, and Apple provides deeper support with its Game Center software that manages friends and multiplayer gaming.

Google is finally catching up in that last respect, according to code buried in the MyGlass Android app that ties the company’s new Google Glass wearable computers to Android phones and tablets. The code, first discovered by Android Police, supports real-time/turn-based multiplayer, invitations, in-game chat, lobbies, leaderboards, and achievements.

That’s the type of functionality that a console like the Xbox 360 provides with its Xbox Live service. Gamers love to play against friends, but right now every Android developer is stuck building their own multiplayer network or licensing some software from a third-party vendor such as Gree. A standardized gaming environment could go a long way toward improving the lives — and games — of Android players.

Google hasn’t made any official announcements about this new service. It apparently goofed up and shipped the entire suite of Google Play service in the MyGlass app. That includes support for Google Wallet, panoramic pictures, and app search — Glass doesn’t support any of those common Android functions. Similarly, Glass doesn’t play games, so it’s weird that the MyGlass APK (which is the executable file type for the Android OS) includes a “games” folder.

Inside that folder, Android Police found code that can handle synchronous and asynchronous multiplayer, in-game chat, and all of the other features gamers desire in a connected network.

Google has never mentioned anything about a universal games service like this before, but its big Google IO event is coming up in about a month. The fact that the code is complete enough to get accidentally packed in with MyGlass suggests we’ll hear more about it at that San Francisco gathering on May 15.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
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Google Play is quickly catching up to Apple’s App Store, both in download numbers and in revenue.

In November 2012, Apple’s iOS App Store took in four times the revenue of Google Play. In the first quarter of 2013, iOS app revenue still led, but by a lower multiple: 2.6 times as much. And Google Play, once just a fraction of the iOS App Store’s size, now accounts for almost the same number of downloads.

Those are just a few of the insights from app analytics company App Annie’s latest market index, which also reveal the best locations and categories in which app developers can maximize revenue.

Source: App Annie

Google Play downloads catching up to iOS app store downloads

Apple’s App Store is still growing, and growing fast, with quarterly revenues up 25 percent. The difference is simply that Google Play is growing incredibly fast.

“While the iOS App Store and Google Play both had solid gains in app downloads last quarter, Google Play had a higher percentage growth rate as well as a greater gain in absolute downloads,” the report says. “From Q4 2012 to Q1 2013, iOS App Store quarterly revenue grew by roughly one ­quarter. Meanwhile, Google Play app revenue grew by roughly 90 percent.”

iOS App Store

Interestingly, in the iOS App Store, China was the leading contributor to Apple’s 25 percent growth rate in downloads; it hit the number two spot in downloads by country and the number four spot in terms of revenue by country:

Taken together, the UK, Japan, U.S., and China account for about half of all iOS downloads, App Annie says. And the U.S. and Japan account for half of all iOS revenue.

Games drive about 40 percent of iOS App Store downloads, holding down the top spot, and 70 percent of revenue. Gainers in downloads include the photo and video category, which just broke into the top three this quarter, and gainers in revenue included the education category, which jumped a spot this quarter.

Google Play

The picture is considerably different for Google Play, where Russia, India, South Korea, and the U.S. drove 50 percent of all downloads. Russia has been rising steadily in the ranks, according to App Annie, as Android makes inroads there.

And Asia owns Google Play in terms of revenue, with Japan moving ahead of the U.S. last quarter, and South Korea joining it this quarter. Those countries, with the U.S., represent a staggering 70 percent of all Google Play revenue, which is why Google Play’s top publishers by revenue read like a who’s-who of Japan and Korea.

Also interesting: In Japan, the games category accounts for over 90 percent of Google Play revenues. And in Korea, games is responsible for a massive 95 percent of income.

In Google Play, games are about 40 percent of all downloads and account for 80 percent of all revenue. In other words, “Google Play” is very well named indeed.

With all that data taken into account, the perfectly optimized app for iOS revenue is a game targeted at the U.S. and UK, with Japan if possible. And the perfectly optimized app for Google Play revenue is also a game, but targeted at Japan and South Korea, with the U.S. and UK thrown in if possible.

Which gives app developers something to think about.

photo credit: Jesus Belzunce via photopin cc

Rightware is introducing a benchmarking tool, Basemark X, that will be able to tell consumers which smartphone or tablet is really the most powerful at running demanding apps such as games.

The new tool, which has been submitted as an app to the Apple iTunes App Store, is a professional performance evaluation tool built with Unity 4, a real-world gaming engine. That means it tests how real apps perform on different smartphone platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8 devices. That means that, for the first time, consumers will be able to understand which new phone can run games and other apps the fastest. It will be particularly useful for gamers who want to identify the fastest hardware in the fast-changing mobile environment.

The tool is a new business for Espoo, Finland-based Rightware, which licenses a fast-moving, graphics-intensive user-interface for web and mobile devices. Rightware generates licensing revenue from that software, dubbed Kanzi. Tero Sarkkinen, chief executive of Rightware, showed me the app running on an Android smartphone last week at our Mobile Summit event. The app ran various graphics routines and came up with a score for the smartphone at the end.

Sarkkinen was formerly CEO of Futuremark, which became the leading benchmark software provider in the PC gaming market. The goal is to give objective performance information for the devices that can run the highest-quality content.

Basemark X can measure how well a device can run advanced game-like content, including particle effects, advanced lighting effects and post processing. The benchmark comes with an integrated online results comparison service, dubbed Power Board, which already has a whole database of detailed performance data for over 1,000 devices. Power Board shows a user’s actual performance as compared to other devices.

“When it comes to gaming, creating and delivering optimal user experiences on any device is critical to the global adoption of the game,” said Sarkkinen in a statement. “Basemark X brings the collective knowledge and experience of the Rightware Benchmark Development Program and our long history of delivering the most popular benchmarking tools. Now anyone can measure, score and compare gaming performance of any platform and device. Combined with Power Board we are enabling the consumers to make informed buying decisions when choosing their next smartphone or tablet.”

The Basemark X is pending review with Apple, and is available for free for consumers on Google Play. A Windows Phone 8 version will be available in the future. The company will also have a professional version available for paid licensing.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
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The first thing you’ll notice about the latest version of Google Play is how bright it is.

You may have already forgotten, but the previous version of Play was dark — too dark, and also somewhat ugly and cluttered. With the latest version of Play, Google is brightening things up to make a more attractive, visual experience.

Google Play has come a long way.

Alongside the hue change, Play has a new focus on images. Movie covers are larger (as you can see in the shot above), but they still look pretty good on the small screens of smartphones and the larger ones of devices like the Nexus S.

The Play redesign, which rolls out starting today, comes a few months after Apple redesigned the App Store in iOS 6. Like Apple, Google knows that the first step to tearing people from their money is making the shopping experience as pleasant as possible — which is why design is so important.

App stores are the new store fronts.

That’s an 11 percent increase in downloads from the end of 2012, according to Canalys’s latest App Interrogator Report, and a 9 percent jump in revenues. Which makes sense, given that we spend 80 percent of our time on mobile phones in apps. And while North America is seeing fairly healthy growth, with an 8 percent increase in downloads and an 6 percent increase in revenue, it’s not the most happening place for mobile.

“Some of the strongest growth was seen in emerging markets, such as South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia, helped not least by the growing base of smart device users in those countries,” the company said in a statement.

Asia, of course, is a mobile powerhouse, with China purchasing more new smartphones than the U.S., but Indonesia has a fast-growing population of 250 million and is seeing increasing smartphone penetration.

So what about non-Google and non-Apple apps markets?

‘The Apple-Google duopoly creates certain challenges for app publishers, carriers, investors, and device vendors, so there is intense interest in the possible emergence of a third ecosystem,’ said Adam Daum, Canalys’s chief analyst in a very tactfully worded statement.

BlackBerry has now hit 100,000 apps for its latest operating system, and Windows Phone has made good progress as well, Canalys says. But both are still challenged by a relative lack of market penetration that will drive the kind of developer interesting that has resulted in “there’s an app for that” being true on both Android and iOS.

“Apple’s App Store and Google Play remain the heavyweights in the app store world. In comparison, BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain distant challengers today, though they still should not be ignored,” said Tim Shepherd, Canalys Senior Analyst.

photo credit: Rick McCharles via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Whenever you install an app on your Android phone from Google Play, the app developer gets your name, email address, and neighborhood. Microsoft thinks that’s an egregious breach of consumer privacy, and it published a new video today on Scroogled that hits Google hard.

“Most app makers are trustworthy,” the ad says. “However, in the wrong hands, who knows what they’ll do with your info?”

The question is a valid one, and Microsoft is quick to mention that downloading and installing apps on Windows Phone does not result in personal information being shared. Apple’s app store handles purchases and downloads the same way, with purchasers’ names, email addresses, and detailed locations remaining private.

The difference appears to be that Google views its Play store as a marketplace rather than a store, in which you are purchasing from the developer, not specifically from Google. In other words, it’s eBay, not Amazon. I’ve asked Google for additional comment.

There’s no question that Microsoft’s attack is a little over the top, paired with a big scary question: “If you can’t trust Google’s app store, how can you trust them for anything?”

But there’s also no question that this is a privacy concern Google should address.

I’ve downloaded many apps from Google Play, and I’ve never once seen or noticed any notification that my personal information would be passed along to the app developers (which could entirely be due to my own lack of attention, or general click-through warnings behavior).

Consumer Watchdog has complained to the FTC about Google’s practice, saying:

“To no one’s surprise … Google has violated the Buzz Order yet again – and this time in a most substantive and egregious manner, by giving personal and closely held information from tens (if not hundreds) of millions of Android users to independent and unrestrained application developers, in contravention of Google’s own stated privacy policy … This represents the fifth significant misuse of confidential user data by Google in the last three years (previously, the “Wi-Spy” scandal, the Google Buzz fiasco, Google’s improper combining and use of personal data, and the Safari Hacking episode).”

I’ll update with Google’s response as I receive it.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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WhatsApp is fifth in the app store for monthly revenue. Fifth on Google Play for downloads, and seventh on Google Play for revenue. And it’s the second-most-downloaded app on Google Play.

Impressive? Sure. But a billion dollars impressive? Hard to say.

That’s the question as rumors continue to swirl of a potential Google acquisition in the billion-dollar range. According to Digital Trends, the acquisition talk has been ongoing for a month, and WhatsApp execs want more. Perhaps, I’m thinking they should recall what happened last time Google offered a company billions of dollars.

Groupon, anyone?

WhatsApp is a cross-platform mobile messaging app: It sends messages to anyone on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone via an iMessage-like network. The messages use your data plan, not text, and require that both sender and receiver have WhatsApp, which, of course, makes the service inherently viral. Perhaps 300 million WhatsApp users send hundreds of billions of messages daily.

Industry insiders I’ve spoken to don’t put a ton of credence in the acquisition rumors. My question is: WhatsApp is hot — there’s no doubt about it — but is being one of the top revenue-producing apps on the app store or Google Play worth a billion dollars?

Google already has many messaging apps and services currently, such as Talk, Messenger, and Hangouts. Too many, in fact, which don’t integrate or connect. Based on some leaks and screenshots, Google appears to be working on a unification of its communications platforms, called Babel. Adding yet another SMS-style communications app to its stable wouldn’t appear to simplify the situation.

In addition, Google has shown an impressive capability to create great apps and distribute to enormous audiences.

In February, ComScore’s Digital Future report said that Google has five of the top six apps in America on any platform. Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube took positions two through six on a combined Google Play/iOS app store downloads list. And Google’s YouTube and Google Maps have been swapping top spot on the iOS-only download charts for months.

Which means that when and if Google decides to create and release a unified messaging platform for both iOS, Android, web, and Windows Phone, it could very well do so on its own and become very successful.

The thing that WhatsApp does have going for it, of course, is those hundreds of millions of users. That’s what Arjun Sethi, the founder of WhatsApp competitor MessageMe told VentureBeat today:

“At the end of the day, they’re valuable because they have a massive userbase.”

Others, like Hille Fuld, the senior evangelist for app monetization platform InnerActive, agree that a high valuation is warranted:

@johnkoetsier I’d say so, yes. Technology: check. Users: check. Retention: check. It’s a great success story.

— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) April 8, 2013

The massive userbase worked, famously, for Instagram, which didn’t even have a revenue model when it was acquired by Facebook for what turned out to be a little under a billion dollars in post-IPO money. Instagram had about 30 million members at the time, which has now grown to over 100 million.

I just wonder if it’s billion-dollars valuable, when Google has shown the capability to grow its only solutions in-house.

When asked, a Google representative said only that “we don’t comment on rumors and speculations.”

Image credit: ShutterStock/Billion dollars

Last week, I moderated a panel on mobile monetization at the Game Developers Conference. There should have been no one in the room since we were competing against other sessions that featured rock star game developer Hideo Kojima (the maker of the Metal Gear Solid games) and a deep dive into Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 4 console. But our room was packed. That tells you that mobile gaming is hot and that the toughest problem for the vast majority of developers is getting discovered and monetizing free-to-play games.

With free-to-play, lots of users won’t pay at all. But since free-to-play has no upper limit, the users who pay can generate so much revenue that they make up for all of those who don’t. With more than a billion users on mobile, it seems like it should be easy to make a ton of money by collecting pennies. But the struggles of big publishers — many of whom appear to be running in place even as they grow users — suggests that this is a very hard nut to crack. David Yuan of Technology Crossover Ventures says this makes mobile “fun and frustrating” at the same time.

“We don’t have the bottlenecks we used to have in the old distribution system. The shelf space is infinite,” said Trip Hawkins, the former chief executive of mobile game publisher Digital Chocolate (and the founder of Electronic Arts), on our panel. “But it is really hard to monetize. At Digital Chocolate, we had over 200 million downloads and over a billion play sessions on Facebook. We were really good at making games that were fun, making things that won awards, that had good retention, that had viral spread. And we struggled with monetization. I think this is the biggest Achilles’ heel issue in the industry.”

The mobile game industry is rapidly separating into haves and have-nots. And those companies are dividing along the lines of those that monetize and those that don’t. Monetization, as Jan Beckers of the HitFox Group says, is survival. A handful have monetized well out of hundreds of thousands of titles, Hawkins said.

For those games that can monetize, the bonanza is here. Those companies can afford to spend money to acquire more users — a marketing task that is necessary because it is so hard for players to discover games naturally.

“There really ought to be an institute for studying virtual economies,” Hawkins said. “If I can beat your game with strategy, I don’t need to buy anything in it. It’s about thinking about your game like you’re the merchandising manager at Bloomingdale’s. Once you have made a game that has good lifetime value, then you can afford to buy marketing.”

And those successful companies are starting to throw the biggest parties at GDC (Backflip, Kixeye, King, Storm8, etc.) while traditional game firms (LucasArts, Atari, and THQ) are going out of business.

Puzzle & Dragons from GungHo Online Entertainment is generating $2.5 million a day, mostly in Japan, from a game it built with six people. King’s Candy Crush Saga is dominating the Apple iTunes App Store in the U.S. in terms of top-grossing titles. Supercell, which is reportedly raising more than $100 million at a $800 million valuation, is generating $1.5 million a day in revenue for Clash of Clans. Casino games like Playtika’s Slotomania are high on the top-grossing lists as are Kabam’s midcore strategy games. You won’t find an Electronic Arts title on the top ranks of the Google Play store until No. 10, with The Simpsons: Tapped Out. That title generated $23 million in revenue last quarter, but Puzzle & Dragons is beating those results in just 10 days.

Some of these titles are staying at the top for months. That’s far longer than the normal churn rate for people to play and get tired of typical users. Those that are doing so are generating real social communities, where players fight against other real players and come into contact again and again. The players feel compelled to spend money to keep up or distinguish themselves within the player community.

The consequence of going to the top of the mobile rankings and staying there for a long time is clear for companies like Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds. Rovio said this week that it had revenues of $195 million in 2012, up 101 percent from $97 million in 2011. Operating profits were up 50 percent to $98.5 million. Sam Hamadeh, the chief executive of Privco, a company that analyzes private companies, said that performance was very impressive and that it could be strong enough to enable Rovio to pull off an initial public offering in early 2014 at a $4.2 billion valuation. That would give its venture capital backers a 2,100 percent return over three years. With Zynga and EA struggling, the results are all the more impressive, Hamadeh said.

Hamadeh said that Rovio has been able to monetize by thinking not just about monetization not just in terms of what it can do with mobile games, but what it can do with the growing value of Angry Birds as an entertainment franchise. It is generating 45 percent of its revenue from licensing of plush toys and other merchandise.

“It’s almost as if now the games are loss leaders, and it’s taking on the model of, say, Lucasfilm — until recently private — where the movies were breakeven — here, the games for Rovio — and all the profits came from consumer products merchandise and licensing — toys, action figures, books, TV cartoons,” Hamadeh said. “That’s a radically different business model for an online/social gaming company, and the numbers say it all.”

“Not every other online gaming company necessarily has the game characters to emulate Rovio,” Hamadeh added. “But they’ve clearly shown other offline ways to profit from an increasingly competitive online gaming/app environment.”

Today, based on the past 12 months of revenue of about $310 million, Hamadeh figures Rovio is worth $2.42 billion, using a model for valuation at 7.8 times revenue. Using the model of 21 times 12 months operating income of $165 million, Rovio’s value is even higher at $3.4 billion. By thinking of itself as a multimedia entertainment brand, Rovio has added over $1 billion to its value, Hamadeh said.

Could a company like Rovio, which has a real risk of being a one-hit wonder, really be worth that much money? Rovio launched four major games during 2012, but it is interesting to note that Rovio’s games aren’t all that high in the rankings right now (Angry Birds Star Wars is No. 7 on AppAnnie’s list of the top paid apps in the U.S.). So it is really unclear if Rovio will be able to grow as quickly in 2013 as it did last year. The risk, of course, is if the value of the brand declines over time and the number of app downloads decreases.

It’s all about sustaining an audience that has a natural tendency to peter out after a few weeks. One chief executive at our Mobile Summit joked that the best strategy a game company can pursue, if it has a hit game, is to shut down and not try to do another one. That’s because the hardest thing is to keep a string of hits going. If you fall off that list of the top-grossing games, the consequences are tough. Japan’s DeNA and Gree charged into the mobile gaming market in the U.S. last year. But while they have successful titles, they are not dominating the charts this year.

The good thing is that the winners in mobile monetization can produce billion-dollar games. The bad news is that it feels like a lottery. For the rest of the companies in mobile, there is hope if they can just hang in there. The market is going to grow dramatically in the next few years, said Tim Merel, the managing director at game investment bank Digi-Capital.

And the sources of monetization are multiplying. NativeX has high hopes for its native ads, which are part created by an advertiser and part-created by a developer, so that the ad content is relevant to the gamer. Rob Weber, the co-founder of NativeX, says that mobile monetization is only happening at about 2 cents per hour of entertainment, compared to 22 cents for television. So there is a lot of room for mobile to grow.

Another quick way to monetize games is to launch games on Asia’s mobile messaging networks like Kakao or Line, which have games that are generating $1 million a day in Korea and Japan and are dominating the ranks of the top-grossing games on the Google Play store on a worldwide basis. But you’ll also be paying them a hefty platform fee on top of the one you’d pay to Apple or Google. Those networks haven’t taken off in the U.S., where mobile messaging remains a fragmented market. If something does take off, mobile monetization will get a lot easier.

And if it becomes more predictable and less like a lottery, we’ll see multiple billion-dollar games.

[Top image credit: GDC]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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When it comes to discovering apps on the two major app stores from Google and Apple, Google is a pretty clear winner. That’s the conclusion of a study by SearchMan.com, a search-tracking tool startup for mobile apps.

In a variety of ways, the Google Play store offers more search results when it comes to finding apps. According to Nielsen, search is the biggest driver of app discovery, which is a very difficult problem for game and app makers in stores with hundreds of thousands of active apps. With Google Play, a simple search for the word “poker” reveals seven or eight apps on a single page for the user (see picture at top). By contrast, Apple only shows a single result on the screen.

On top of that, it’s easier to see lower-ranked search results on Google Play. The Google Play store search result pages can scroll down endlessly, allowing a user to see the top 25 apps for a given search with the flick of a finger in one second. With iOS 6, searches take more work and time. To see 25 results, you have to swipe sideways 25 times.

On top of that, the number of actual search results returned by Google Play exceeds those of iOS even though there are more apps in total for iOS. No surprise there. It means that Google is better at search than Apple.

On top of that, Google appears to expand its results by simultaneously adding search results from synonyms to what the user is searching for. That’s how it expands and gets more results. Google Play also allows for misspellings, returning results on what the user likely intended when they incorrectly type a word into a search query. That kind of mistake is common on smartphone keypad screens.

If you spell a word “hotwls” instead of “hotels,” you get zero results on the iPhone. On Google Play, you get 15,630 results. Developers appear to be investing more time and energy into their iOS apps than their Google Play apps based on the huge number of updates per day on iOS compared to Google Play. So that means there is actually less competition on Google Play, and some app makers may be better off investing in apps there.

Google Play has historically trailed behind Apple when it comes to monetization since Apple has many more credit-card registrations thanks to the strength of content on iTunes. But in markets such as Japan, Google has begun improving its monetization because of reverse-billing deals with carriers.

“We are getting anecdotal feedback,” said Niren Hiro, the chief executive of SearchMan. “Our customers who build and market apps for the Japanese mobile markets tell us that they make more money with carrier billing than credit cards, possibly because users have fewer security concerns.”

Hiro said that SEO and app store optimization is easier for developers on Google Play. Keyword changes are not subject to review whereas in iOS, keyword changes in an app’s name and iTunes keywords (limited to 100 characters) require a binary update and a review. With Google Play, the review isn’t necessary.

With Google Play, developers don’t have to create tags for their apps. They just create an app name and a description, which is infused with keywords. With iOS, developers must carefully select iTunes keywords (tags) to help the iOS search engine. Those tags must fit inside 100 characters and cannot be changed unless a new app is submitted for review. It’s not clear how much weight Apple gives to those tags.

“At this time, it feels like  vying for discoverability in the Google Play store search is a good investment,” SearchMan concluded. “Our goal is to help developers track and improve search rankings to grow their businesses. Our vast data does enable us to decode some of the unknown patterns, but there’s much more to figure out in terms of search engine biases — revenue bias, social signals, ratings added, reviews entered, download velocity, etc. It would benefit the app ecosystem greatly if all the platforms were open about their search ranking algorithms.”

Here’s a link to SearchMan’s slides.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The growth of ESPN Mobile shows how fast the mobile landscape is gathering momentum. The sports broadcast network has more than 45 million monthly unique users, and 14.5 million of those use mobile content exclusively.

Michael Bayle, senior vice president and general manager of ESPN Mobile, spoke in an on-stage interview with AllThingsD’s Ina Fried at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit in Sausalito, Calif. today. Bayle said that mobile usage is growing rapidly as mobile devices take over our lives. He said that 8 million people filled out their March Madness brackets, compared to 6 million last year. This year, 30 percent of those people used mobile to fill out the bracket, compared to 10 percent last year.

Mobile is a separate product that people can download as an app, but it can also be bundled into ESPN’s various subscription packages.

People are viewing millions of minutes of live sports video these days, and the Watch ESPN app has been downloaded 20 million times. But mobile comes with its own challenges. Much of the experience of sports is watching something live. Live mobile programming is growing, but the company doesn’t insert preroll ads into that experience, because it interrupts the viewing experience.

Bayle said about 50 percent of users are on iOS, 45 percent are on Android, and the last 5 percent are split across Windows Phone and BlackBerry. The latter two are growing and are particularly relevant in international markets.

“You can never count out the innovation that comes from Microsoft, and we are there on BlackBerry 10 on HTML5,” he said.

But Bayle said native apps are still likely to win out over slower HTML5 apps.

He said the average person uses 11 mobile apps, and sports account for 1.5 of those. Once someone starts using a sports app, their engagement with that app skyrockets.

Bayle also said that 18 percent of people who use the Scorecenter app also watch ESPN. About 30 percent of those who use the mobile web ESPN app also use the Scorecenter app.

As far as headaches go, Bayle said he would appreciate more transparency from Apple on the success or failure of mobile marketing campaigns. Google Play, by contrast, is more transparent, he said.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This past month, Google Maps lost its position as the most downloaded app on Apple’s iOS store — to one of Google’s other apps, YouTube. And mobile messaging app WhatsApp continued its meteoric rise to messaging supremacy.

Those are just two of the quirks and insights in App Annie‘s February index of what’s happening in mobile apps, which has just been split from its game index to provide more insights into which companies and apps are doing well on Google Play and Apple’s iOS app store.

Here’s a selection of the most interesting insights:

Google still owns top spot on Apple’s app store

Source: App Annie

Top downloaded iOS apps

Months after YouTube and Google Maps were unceremoniously booted from Apple’s core iOS offerings, they continue to be the top downloaded apps on the App Store, swapping first and second position in the past two months.

Essentially, users are speaking with their fingers and telling Apple they want these apps.

Google Play is more diverse than the iOS app store

Source: App Annie

Top apps by platform

There’s more variety in the top apps on Google Play than on Apple’s iOS app store. While the top 10 apps on iOS are all from just five publishers, most notably Apple itself, the top 10 apps on Google Play are from eight publishers.

Aside from Apple, Google, and Facebook, there’s just one small company (Keyloft) on the iOS top 10 list and one individual (Jessie Tao). On Google Play, there’s WhatsApp, Adobe, Viber Media, and Outfit 7.

Gree and WhatsApp are completely killing it

Source: App Annie

Google Play top publishers by revenue (excluding games)

Gree, the mobile social gaming company, is tops in monthly revenue on Google Play. And WhatsApp jumped an astounding 93 spots on App Annie’s index to slot in at number seven.

That’s not all WhatsApp has done — it’s also fifth in the iOS app story by monthly revenue, fifth on Google Play by downloads (for both of its apps), and it took the second spot on Google Play’s most-downloaded list for its main WhatsApp Messenger app, which is also the sixth highest-grossing individual app on Google Play. By any measure, that’s impressive.

Other highlights?

TurboTax by Intuit jumped into the top 10 list on both iOS and Google Play as tax season is upon us, and Evernote nudged into the top 10 list on iOS, jumping 45 spots.

Find more details and info at App Annie’s index page.

photo credit: Sugar Daze via photopin cc

Discoverability is a key factor in getting to the top of the iOS or Android app markets. Most titles are buried under dozens of other products with no hope of ever breaking out. One developer wants to change the way people look for apps and improve their chances of reaching a mass audience in the process.

Fetch is a new tool now available on Google Play that provides a way for smartphone owners to search for games based on the components that make up the product and not based on keywords and user ratings. Born out of the Game Genome Project from developer Best Apps Market, Fetch breaks down games based on over 250 characteristics. App-seekers can hone in on games based on those traits.

Fetch believes it can help smaller developers find their niche. For example, a Fetch search for 2D fantasy strategy games will return major successes like Blood Brothers, which has over 5 million installs, and Pixel Kingdom, which only has 10,000. Pixel Kingdom doesn’t appear in the first few pages of a Google Play search for “fantasy strategy.”

Best Apps Market is also working on an iOS version of Fetch that it hopes to release soon.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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