July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

Apple’s Tim Cook will shortly be hearing a question something like that, as Justice Lucy Koh has ordered him to appear in court to give a deposition regarding alleged antitrust violations. Apple is one of a list of companies, including Intuit, Adobe, Google, and Pixar, that are being accused of agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees.

The case has been ongoing, believe it or not, since late 2010, when the Department of Justice required the tech companies to nix those agreements and reached a settlement with them.

According to the DOJ, the anti-poaching agreements reached back as far as 2005 for Apple and Adobe, 2006 for Apple and Google, and 2007 for Apple and Pixar. The settlement at the time prohibited the companies from “entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.”

The current lawsuit is a follow-on action brought by employees who claim that the companies’ illegal agreements harmed their employment prospects. And while Cook was not Apple’s CEO at the time,  Bloomberg reports that Justice Koh told Apple lawyers that since Steve Jobs was copied on emails about the practice, she found it hard to believe that Cook would not have been consulted as well.

There’s currently no timetable for Cook’s deposition, but Google’s Eric Schmidt will be deposed on February 20, and Intel’s Paul Otellini will be grilled in the next few weeks.

If Apple and the other tech companies lose the lawsuit, which is being brought employees as varied as engineers and chefs, they would be liable for additional salary and compensation for the affected staff.

Justice Koh is the same judge who is presiding over many of the Apple-Samsung legal battles. You’d think she’d be getting a little tired of seeing the Cupertino company in her courtroom.

photo credit: igrec via photopin cc

At FailCon, the annual conference in San Francisco, not only is it okay to f*** up, it’s a badge of honor. The bigger the failure, the better.

The conference was filled to the rafters with bright-eyed young entrepreneurs. However, a few representatives from household-name companies were also attending. Corporations like Microsoft and SAP are increasingly investing in their innovation and design teams in an effort to be more like a startup. And they got some good advice on how to act like a startup from Bennett Blank, Intuit‘s innovation lead

Bennett is a vocal advocate of “lean startup” principles. The lean startup method, is characterized by rapid product cycles, “pivots”, and an emphasis on customer feedback. It’s most popular with startups, but if you work at a large company, here are Blank’s tips to cultivate a “lean” approach:

• Embrace the “mechanical turk”: This refers to software that works on the front-end, but behind the scenes, people are manually filling the order. It’s a great way to test a product before bringing it to market. For instance, when testing a new product in India to help agricultural laborers compare pricing, they literally had Intuit employees manually source the information and send it back. There proved to be a real need, so the engineering team developed a way to automate the process.
• Offer employees dedicated “unstructured” time: In a policy borrowed from Google, Intuit’s engineers can devote 10 percent of their time to their own projects.
• Host an idea jam: “It’s a program we have across Intuit that is part hackathon, part lean startup incubator,” said Blank. “Essentially, it’s a 48 hour competition to pitch and develop an idea.”
• Get comfortable with failure: Blank opened up about his own failure at Intuit (see video below). If your idea doesn’t prove to be a hit with customers, don’t take it personally. “It’s not that your work was a failure,” said Blank. “As long as you’re learning and gaining insights from that process.”

In the spirit of Failcon, Blank told me about his most epic disaster at Intuit. Curious? Check out the video.