Announcing Analytics and Ads for Android Applications
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008It is our pleasure to announce our beta program for the Android platform!
As the leading analytics provider for the iPhone, we, more than anyone else deeply understand how to help developers make the most of their audience. We’re passionate about user experience, understand both the needs of developers and the needs of advertisers, and bridge the gap between the market and marketers in a way that allows developers stay focused on writing great applications. The market has clearly shown that to consumers free is better (http://metrics.medialets.com/charts/apps-by-price) and through the insights our analytics provide to our ad platform, we make it easy and sustainable for developers to continue to innovate and give their apps away.
The world of mobile changed when Apple introduced the App Store. Historically, developers have had to contend with lengthy, often expensive negotiations and certification procedures with carriers to bring their applications to market, and more often than not, the challenges of working in that environment have limited the number and quality of developers willing to undertake the effort. With the App Store, the process has been reduced to a simple submission and review cycle. Combining that with centralized discovery, distribution and payments for applications has led to a new model for mobile app developers that significantly opens up the possibility of building sustainable – even venture scale – businesses around mobile applications. But the App Store is just the beginning. Google was quick to recognize the power of this distribution model and earlier this year announced their own App Marketplace, which like Apple’s App Store, bypasses carriers and lets developers market directly to consumers through the Marketplace.
We’ve built the leading solution for analytics on the iPhone and now we’re bringing it to Android because we believe in Android as a platform and our customers have asked us to support it. The opportunity for mobile developers just grew significantly today as the addressable base of users expanded to include the entire future Android subscriber base.
Why does this matter to the market?:
We believe that the emerging opportunity for mobile developers today is nothing less than the early opportunity for developers of desktop software. The key differences today are that users are more demanding, the platforms are more sophisticated and the market is significantly more competitive. Developers who factor our analytics into their applications have a dramatic, competitive advantage over other developers working without the deep insights our platform can provide. Nobody launches a significant Web property today without a solid analytics package, and neither should mobile application developers.
Our mission is to provide the best possible experience for three major groups: developers, their customers, and advertisers. The more that developers and advertisers know about the types of things users want out of mobile applications, the more effective an ad can be.
We work every day to help developers make the right decisions about where and how to spend their time and money. The better a developer understands their audience, the better an app they will write. Better applications mean stronger connections with customers and stronger connections lead to more opportunities to create maximum revenue potential for their application .
We’ve presented a single view for developers to monitor their applications across both the iPhone and Android platforms. This allows them to track relative performance in either and both markets, gives insights on where and how to spend marketing dollars and significantly simplifies the process of managing their release cycles. Combining our analytics with the update notifications provided by the App Store and App Marketplace gives our developers a key advantage over others in the market and enables them to get onto tighter, more focused release cycles to specifically meet the needs of their current and future users.
Android is the second platform in the new world of carrier-free mobile application distribution, and it also happens to support the development of highly engaging and useful applications. It’s not only valuable to consumers as a standalone offering, it also continues to raise the bar for every other mobile platform vendor to deliver more compelling offerings. Consumers, whether or not they buy an Android phone, will benefit from this competition.
Mobile operators not selling the iPhone today need strong, competitive offerings to convince consumers to buy something other than the iPhone. Much like we’ve seen historically on game consoles, many future mobile phone purchases will likely be influenced by the applications available for the platform. Android and the App Marketplace give carriers a potentially viable alternative to the explosive application market for the iPhone, and with the might of Google behind the platform, we may see development activity that equals or even surpasses that of iPhone developers.
We invite you to sign up for the beta at www.medialets.com/android and always, please reach out to us at any time at connect @ medialets dot com. We look forward to hearing about the apps you’re building!
We turned one month old last week, and as our present to you, we’ve redesigned our sites! Now, Medialets.com, Medialytics.com and App Store Metrics will be under one unified navigation, plus we’ve created some new sections to make it easier to find content and added many new pages describing our offerings in greater detail. Medialets is still shiny and new, so why redesign now? Well, we spend most of our days talking and listening to you, our customers and developers, and we discovered a few things based on these conversations.
