Category Archives: Twitter

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Yahoo: Mobile App Developers, use OUR analytics!

Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer, urging mobile app developers to use Flurry.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer, urging mobile app developers to use Flurry.

The battle is heating up, to convince mobile app developers to embrace new analytics packages, in their iPhone Apps and Android Apps.

Desirable Apps recently reported that Twitter was keen for users to dump Google Analytics, in favour of Twitter’s Answers Analytics Tool.

Now Yahoo has jumped into the fray, urging mobile app developers to use Flurry, to “use our mobile developer suite to make money”.

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo just revealed a big piece of its plan to catch up with competitors on the mobile front.

At its first mobile developers conference, the company unveiled its mobile developer suite, a new set of tools for app makers that combines Yahoo's Flurry analytics platform, the BrightRoll and Gemini ad networks, and Yahoo search.

The star of the suite is Flurry, the mobile analytics platform that Yahoo acquired last year. More than 200,000 developers use Flurry, but the suite also leverages Yahoo's native advertising and marketing tools. The suite itself is comprised of five products: Flurry Analytics, Flurry Pulse, Yahoo App Publishing, Yahoo Search in Apps and Yahoo App Marketing.

Flurry Analytics is the refreshed version of Flurry's existing analytics service, which provides developers with insights into how people are using their apps. Flurry Pulse is a new software development kit (SDK) that lets developers easily share Flurry's insight's with partners, and Yahoo Search in Apps provides better integration of search tools within apps.

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What do web giants get out of offering free mobile app analytics?

Why are big players like Google, Twitter and Yahoo, so keen to woo iPhone App Developers and Android App Developers to use their suite of analytics tools? What do the giants of the software industry get out of providing tremendous amounts of compute capacity to mobile app developers for free?

My guess is that it helps them refine their search results. Search engine giants like Yahoo, who have been playing catchup to Google for years, have suddenly woken up that all these free “analytics” which Google provides, help Google gauge which pages of websites users find interesting – which pages Google should put at the top of the search results.

Mobile app screens are not directly indexed by web based search engines (usually), but perhaps the analytics for mobile app developers are simply used to gauge how popular mobile apps are, and perhaps to pick up a few hints as to what the mobile apps do.

Yahoo’s only hope of creating a search experience which rivals Google, is to convince web developers and mobile app developers to switch to using their analytics service. Since Google provides their service for free, Yahoo have gone one better with the claim that, not only is their service free, but that you will make money from using their service.

But Twitter is not a search giant, like Google?

Where does this leave Twitter? Twitter isn’t a search giant – or are they?

In a subtle way, Twitter have quietly grabbed a large chunk of the world’s search traffic – an awful lot of the world’s web search is now performed using Twitter. If a major event happens somewhere in the world, one of the first things people do, is search for tweets from people relating to that event. This in my opinion represents a threat to Google’s dominance of the global web search industry – and puts Twitter just a short step away from being a new dominant web search player.

What should mobile app developers do, faced with all these choices?

What should mobile app developers do about all this choice? For now I’m sticking with Google Analytics, unless a client expresses a particular interest in the other services. Yahoo is still too new, in my opinion – it might have teething troubles. And Twitter – wow, who knows? I shall certainly be taking a closer look at Twitter’s Answers Analytics Tool.

If you would like to know more about Mobile App Analytics, and how they can help your app to maximise its potential, please contact me

New Mobile App Developer Tool- 5 Billion Sessions/Day

Twitter Answers - New Mobile App Developer Tool attracts 5 billion sessions per day

Twitter Answers – New Mobile App Developer Tool attracts 5 billion sessions per day

Twitter has claimed that its Answers mobile app developer analysis tool is currently juggling 5 billion sessions per day – a figure which puts Twitter into the same league as major rivals such as Google Corporation.

According to Wired;

Twitter says it’s now juggling about 5 billion “sessions” a day on its Answers service, the tool it released this past summer in an effort to help the world’s software developers analyze the performance of their mobile apps.

In other words, the company says, developers are using the seven-month-old service to collect app data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices out in the real world.

Answers is part of a larger suite of tools for software developers, known as Fabric, that Twitter formally unveiled at its inaugural developer conference in October. With Fabric, the company aims to help improve the performance and design of mobile apps—and perhaps integrate its own services into the larger world of computing. The suite, for instance, offers a tool for syndicating tweets through third-party apps.

“We want to empower the mobile app ecosystem for everyone,” says Brian Swift, who helps oversee the Answers tool. “We want to make these tools available for free—and make them as easy to us as possible.”

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Why do I need a mobile app analysis tool?

App Analysis tools like Answers Service are critical for serious mobile app developers and entrepreneurs, because they provide precise information on how users are using the mobile apps – which functions they spend time using, which functions they find confusing, even which functions they avoid. This feedback is critical for serious iPhone App developers and Android App Developers, because it provides detailed information about which areas of a mobile app need more development, either to fix problems, or because a function is popular, and should be expanded. Mobile App users rarely provide detailed information about a mobile app unless it is defective. A stream of negative reviews in Apple App Store or Google Play Store is NOT the optimum way of discovering and responding to problems – it is much better to get advance warning of problems, and address those problems, before they spill over into a public barrage of negative feedback.

Google Analytics – the main rival to Twitter Answers

I must admit my preferred tool for mobile app analysis is Google Analytics. However, Google Analytics can be a little intimidating to use for non technical users – it provides a lot of information, but Google actually recommend you attend a training course to make full use of their tool. It really can be that complex to use.

Why is Twitter Answers taking market share from Google?

Twitter Answers, which has only been available since last October, and is designed to be much easier to use than Google Analytics. Twitter promote their tool with the slogan Finally, mobile app analytics you don’t need to analyze… The fact that in such a short time, Twitter have attracted 5 billion sessions per day of usage, is strong evidence that ordinary users and technical mobile app developers are embracing the new analytics paradigm.

If you would like to learn more about mobile app analytics, and how analytics can help boost the popularity of your iPhone App or Android App, please contact me.