Market strategy firm Vision Mobile released a very interesting survey report this week, called “Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond”. The report goes into many aspects of mobile app development based on surveying 400+ worldwide developers, segmented into the eight major mobile platforms: iOS (iPhone), Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash/Flash Lite and mobile web (WAP/XHTML/CSS/JavaScript). The full report is available free of charge here.
We’d like to take some aspects focussed on mobile app distribution and app stores from the report:
Taking applications to market
The research goes into the question how developers nowadays take their applications to market. A lot has changed in a few years. While operator deals were a main method of distribution of mobile apps, operator portals and on-device preloading through OEM or operator deals is the primary channel to market for fewer than five percent of the surveyed developers. The preferred go-to-market channel for applications varies significantly by platform. The vast majority of iPhone respondents designate an app store as their primary channel for selling apps, followed by around 50 percent of the Android and Flash developers.
Time to shelf and payment
According to the report, app stores have revolutionised time to market for applications. To research exactly how radical the time to market for applications has changed since the introduction of app stores, the survey focused on two parameters:
- Time to shelf, i.e. how long it takes from submitting an application to that application being available for purchase
- Time to payment, i.e. the length of time between an application being sold and the proceeds reaching the developer’s bank account
The report’s findings show that app stores have reduced the average time-to-shelf by two thirds: from 68 days across traditional channels, to 22 days via an app store:
For developers choosing an app store to retail their apps, almost 60 percent get paid within a month from the sale of the application. In contrast, when using traditional channels, the time-to-payment increases substantially. On average it takes 55 days to get paid via an operator channel, 69 days when preloading an app via an operator and a whopping 168 days (5.5 months) when pre-loading an app via a handset manufacturer. All in all, app stores reduce the time-to-payment by more than half; from 82 days on average in the case of traditional channels, to 36 days on average with app stores.
For more survey results, see the full report here.
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