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Sprint announced its "Place Your Ad" program this week, which will allow developers and publishers to bid on featured placement in its tab in the Android Market and its Sprint Zone app for its customers. This follows in the steps of other App Store providers like GetJar that use similar systems to sell their featured slots, but it also reinforces the need for developers to do their own marketing, rather than solely relying on app stores to do it for them.

This was a point that came up yesterday in the WIPJam at Apps World NYC, as Caroline mentioned in a tweet:

It's become clear over the past several months that the app store world is becoming more and more like the world of content decks in some ways from several years ago. Apps from big publishers are dominating the top-download charts, and once those apps get in the charts, they're hard to dislodge. When they do get knocked out, it's often by an app or game from another big publisher.

This used to happen because these...

The April edition of the WIP App Store Report is now available. The Report is a PDF version of a set of the data contained in our App Store Catalog here on the WIP site, along with some additional commentary in to the world of app stores. This month, we take a look at the interest that's sprouting around in-app purchases, seen by many as a big hope for developers to create solid app revenues.

As app stores mature and become more crowded, there’s a race to the bottom for prices of many mobile apps. While some premium games and branded apps are able to hold their purchase prices up somewhat, price competition for other apps remains very intense, particularly as more developers turn to an advertising-based revenue model.

For many apps -- particularly basic content-centric apps -- free replacements abound; if they don’t yet, they will. Many developers have seen their sales vanish into thin air overnight after a free competitor emerged, leading more and more to try and head off such...

These are the latest Samsung, Microsoft, Google, Nokia/Intel and Apple devices...

Obviously I'm not talking smartphones! But rather a smart box (a.k.a  Set Top).

Can you recognize them?

(there's a prize for first person to write a comment with all the devices, OS, manufacturer)

A year ago we organized our first MiniJam at IP&TV World Forum. In expectation of the Google TV announcement, the world was abuzz and full of promises, Apps on the TV were going to revolutionize the world!

A year later the buzz has definitely disappeared and TV apps have little space in developer conversations. And a few hands suffice to "count" the results from the app bonanza everyone was expecting. Arguably the real bonanza was to be found in the TV platforms. 

Apple TV, Boxee and Google TV are here for the buzz, Samsung TV, Meego and Microsoft MediaRoom play the hiding giants. And I'm sure I'm missing a few. Now, mobile device fragmentation looks so, well, over-hyped.

However...

This month's WIP App Store Report, a PDF version of our App Store Catalog, is out. Grab the download for a summary of information on the app stores in the catalog, and some added analysis. This month, we wonder if the growth in the number of app stores has peaked.

You might have noticed some of the big news from the mobile industry during February: Nokia’s new partnership with Micro- soft, or perhaps something from the big Mobile World Congress confab in Barcelona. But you probably didn’t notice another significant piece of news: the number of stores in the WIP App Store Catalog held steady at 113.

Journalists are taught in school that things that don’t happen aren’t news; that’s not the case here. Given the torrid growth of the number of stores in 2010, the fact that just 3 have been added so far in 2011, and none in February is quite significant. Particularly when one considers MWC -- a flashpoint of industry product and service launches -- took place in the month.

The...

The February edition of the WIP App Store Report is now available, and this month it takes a look at two key issues pertaining to app stores for developers: reach and submissions. Reach is important for pretty obvious reasons: scale drives downloads (in most cases). But reach is just one part of the equation developers should use when determining which stores to target, since submission of apps can become a major timesink. 

The problem here is twofold: accurate information on reach is difficult to come by, and the differences in submission from store to store are, often, pointless and do little more than cause headaches. The status quo causes headaches for developers, but will become a big problem for third-pary app stores as well, if their reach can't justify yet another differentiated submission for a developer.

Download the PDF report to find out more, and also check out our Jam@MWC for more on submission.

Thanks to the upcoming Christmas and New Year's holidays, we're on a slightly accelerated schedule with the latest WIP App Store Report, a monthly report based on our App Store Catalog, the most comprehensive collection of information on mobile app stores available -- so think of this as an early present!

The number of stores in the catalog grew by only one during the month, edging up to 110 now. But it's the growth during the year that we want to focus on. As you can see from the chart above, one year ago, the WIP App Store Catalog featured just 32 stores; since then, it has more than tripled, giving developers an unprecedented array of distribution outlets. The overall growth has been driven in absolute numbers by independent app stores -- a reflection of the fact that today’s smartphones allow for open distibution channels, and that anybody with a decent level of technical skill could conceivably start their own app store. But it’s worth highlighting the growth in a few...

Caroline and I were in San Francisco last week for the annual fall CTIA show, and I gave a presentation at the Android Bootcamp event, hosted by the Silicon Valley Android Developers group. As part of an illustrious panel featuring WIP friends Raj Singh and Martin Tannerfors from Samsung, I spoke on developing, marketing and distributing Android apps internationally. You can check out my slides, which as I pointed out, broke two of our "No Powerpoint, no Panels, no Ties" rules

There were three key points I stressed:

• Look outside the Android Market to other distribution channels, which might better suit your monetization plans and/or geographic target markets. The WIP App Store Catalog is a great place to start, as it lists nearly 30 app stores that support Android apps in different regions, for different devices and operators, or allow different revenue models.
• There are a...

A few months ago, I went on an app store placement spree in preparation for the Android App Store Competition in Berlin (promise I won't mention it anymore!). The results were telling, in terms of the variance of the usability between stores, and some of the rather uninspired error messages they returned:

• "Please provide an interesting and accurate description" -- Isn't it my right to putt something dull if I do not want people to spend time reading the description and download the app instead?
• "Illegal characters in description! Use English and numbers only" -- Something any person with a sense of logic and group theory awareness will object to.
• "Upload a jpg legend..." -- Which is a nice error when, in reality, the site only accepts PNGs.

I'm just finishing a new placement spree today, and when I started, I was full of hopes that things had changed. Judge for yourself by these messages I got:

• "Password Must contain both letters and numerals" -- What if I want...

32 mobile appstores!

That's what we finished 2009 with (see January report on wipconnector)! And luckily we do not list yet the various appstore announcements on the verge of the mobile sphere like the Ford SYNC enabled appstore or Sun Java Store otherwise our wiki would be on fire.

So 2009 was the year of the appstore glut maybe… however it was also a year that saw new forms / concepts of appstores rather than un-differentiated ones, addressing specific issues such as discovery and recommendation or specific markets which can only be favorable for developers and consumers. Have a look at the newcomers for December and judge by yourself.

If we are to judge future smartphone platform success by the number of appstores distributing their apps, Android has a slight lead with 53% of appstores distributing Android apps, followed by Windows Mobile with 50% (mostly for historical reason one could claim), Blackberry with 40% and Symbian with 37.5% are forming a second group of...