VISIONMOBILE:2013 Mobile Developer Economic Report (12): Chapter III The rise of large SDK vendors (Part three)

There are four factors that drive the integration of developer tools: Integration challenges, end-to-end performance monitoring, Discovery bottlenecks, and the tough b2d economy.

2013 Developer Economics Research finds that one of the two most important factors in the selection tool is ease of integration. Reduce the cost of integration for developers by integrating multiple tools together.

Second, consolidation is driven by end-to-end application performance monitoring requirements. App download styles are not yet fully understood, but you can see which ad networks and channels guide users to download, and which can be converted to active users in the download. Here, the integration along the developer journey becomes valuable, such as the App Store Analytics distimo Organic extension to user analytics. Expanding the scope of the service on the developer journey will also help the vendor in-depth developer profile information.

Thirdly, integration is driven by the increasingly mature b2d market. Tools found to developers are as difficult as applications to discover to consumers. There is no direct developer tool search engine other than Visionmobie's developer economics portal. Leading vendors, such as flurry, or in the desktop sector, such as Google Analytics, can often survive with tool discovery bottlenecks. As a result, Many developer tools categories tend to be integrated into one or two vendors : User analytics for Google and Flurry, App Annie and Distimo for store analytics, backend as a service for parse, ad network for Google (ADMOB), Cross-Referral network Tapjoy and flurry.

Finally, consolidation is driven by the hard b2d economy. Developer Service is the 0 threshold, which means that developers use the new tool 0 cost, the least effort, this trend inherits the Pc/internet developer market. Developer tools The strategy of a startup is usually the number one, revenue second, and the SDK price drops to zero to get the user before the developer pays for the service.

As a result, it is difficult for their own tool makers to compete with venture capitalists and quickly surrender or be acquired. As the market matures, only a firm with strong financial resources can survive.

It is expected that until 2015, 6 years after the birth of the b2d market, the integration trend of developer tools will not be slowed down. At the same time, this should not be an excuse for developers to postpone the decision to adopt new tools. Developers should investigate before selecting a tool to avoid the pitfalls of tool makers disappearing due to lack of market traction.

consolidation will bring up new types of large SDK vendors that integrate the most common categories of tools for the developer journey. We believe consolidation will revolve around two types of tools: Marketing tools and enterprise mobility services. Not only are these two types popular, but they are also related to the direct demand for developers ' income and have a greater chance of survival.

as long as application discovery bottlenecks exist, the importance of mobile marketing will only increase . Today's developers are not just programmers, designers and entrepreneurs, but more importantly savvy marketers who turn ideas into cognition and money. When the number of apps went from 1.5M to 10m,apple and the Google store continued to dominate the app release, it was only worse to find bottlenecks. The traditional application marketing approach is mobile advertising, according to Gartner data, estimated to have $114 billion market in 2012. It is packed with hundreds of ad networks and advertising exchange companies. But few winners, like Google, have acquired Admobe as a traditional online advertising network, extending services to mobile and integrating them into Android apps.

"In the field of mass consumer applications, more is hype and hero applications. On the corporate side, you have to be able to persuade business people with ROI. Here is not a click to buy, is a long sales process, but there is a more scalable and profitable business model. "Louis Jonckheere,showpad co-founder

Another type of enterprise mobility Service is the need for an enterprise to move its intranet and allow employees to work with their own devices. Unlike consumer applications, businesses provide a significant amount of it budget for each employee, with very stringent requirements for data security, identity management, back-end system integration, and support agreements. In this area, the earliest large SDK vendors are likely to come from cross-platform tools such as APPCELERATOR,IBM (Acquisition worklight), as well as xmamarin, to position themselves as a mobile enterprise application Platform (meaps) by consolidating the entire development-deployment-management workflow.

With more than 500 tools or SDKs available, it's hard to find blue ocean-untapped markets in the Red Sea, a fiercely competitive developer tool. The first advantage is now very difficult to establish, only a few areas, such as consumer support, consumer voting management, has not yet been developed.

Many b2d start-ups want to be bought before they can make a profit. At the same time, many tool types of tools become non-differentiated, making it difficult to compete in non-integrated vendors, that is, those who cannot provide value-added services on top of the core services. Integration of large SDK vendors Appcelerator,flurry and Google will increase the threshold. At the same time, integration is good news for developers because the choice becomes stable and the b2d market matures. Whether you like it or not, building and marketing apps starts to become a common business, following the previous web development and software development footsteps.

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