Potential opportunity for operators?
App store owners are forcing developers and their clients to operate without the information they need to decide which platform to develop on, according to one mobile agency.
Michael Tomlins, managing director of InfoMedia Services, said that his agency has had customers who have delayed developing applications because they can’t get access to any stats beyond volumes of overall downloads.
A major football club, he said, is one example of a customer that has built an iPhone app but doesn’t know where to go next, as the relevant data is not available to it. There are plenty of others, he added.
Nokia and Blackberry might both claim they have 2 million downloads a day, but potential developers are left with little else upon which to make investment decisions.
Tomlins said that the overall downloads per day is an “empty” stat. “What is the proportion of premium downloads? How much do end users spend “inside” the apps? How many apps are downloaded per customer? How long is an app held on a device before it is discarded? How many updates are downloaded? Without answers to these questions, developers and brands have no idea of the real reach and engagement of a mobile strategy,” he said.
Although there are app store analytics companies, such as Motally, providing information to developers, that tends to be only for a developer’s own app rather than providing overall stats.
So why aren’t app stores sharing the knowledge? Perhaps its a question of “no news” = “bad news”. I think they don’t want to stick their heads above the parapet,” Tomlins said. “The non-Apple platforms are potentially struggling in terms of premium sales because they don’t have a sophisticated retail network in place, like iTunes.
So could operators perhaps benefit from this reluctance to share data, stealing a march in terms of openness, as they build out their own app strategies?
“Certainly,” Tomlins said. “If, for instance, Vodafone360 had some great stats on in-app purchases, on their users’ tendency to buy, how long a user keeps an app before deleting it, average app revenues – and I’m not saying that this would be the case – but if they shared that then that would be a real bonus for our clients.”
Tomlins said such information would help operators in another way – by giving operators information on which handsets and platforms drive usage and ARPU – hence aiding ranging and pricing decisions.