Win a new Galaxy S6 from Bitdefender Mobile Security

Win a new Galaxy S6 from Bitdefender Mobile Security

Robert Zak 2015-03-02T13:00:00Z2 months ago Robert Zak A tech aficionado since he first picked up a NES controller, Robert has written about technology, videogames, and film across a range of sites and magazines, including Den of Geek, Gamasutra, and Computeractive. At AndroidPIT, he'll be bringing you the latest Android news and reviews from the front line in the UK.

Bitdefender is a veteran of online security for PCs, and its Android app, Mobile Security & Antivirus, has for some years now been keeping our Android devices safe from the growing number of mobile security threats out there. In our review, we put the latest version to the test.

Giveaway winner:?Congratulations to Bianca Salonbianca for winning our?Bitdefender competition. Bianca has won?a brand new Samsung Galaxy S6!?Thank you to all who participated and keep an eye out for the next competition.?

c Bitdefender Good?? ?Scans your PC for malware with a single tap?Useful extra features include app locking and remote contact?AndroidPIT readers get a free 180-day license?Now protects Smartwatches tooBad?? ?Some features on the mybitdefender.com website don't always work consistently

The malware scanner draws on Bitdefender's vast malware database and is automatically kept up-to-date, so all you need to do is tap the big button?and wait a couple of minutes for it to turn green to indicate that your phone is safe.

If you want to explore your smartphone security a little deeper, then you'll like Privacy Advisor, which shows you the apps that have the most permissions on your phone and which ones leak your sensitive information. Want to minimize the amount of your data getting into third-party companies' hands? Here's the place to find the culprit apps, and uninstall them from within Bitdefender.

Set passwords for specific apps, and see which apps leak sensitive information about you / c ANDROIDPIT

The updated Anti-Theft feature lets you remotely issue commands to your phone if you've lost it or think it's been stolen. You can contact your phone using a web browser or SMS to remotely lock, wipe or locate it. You can also send a 'Scream' command to your phone (don't worry, it's an alarm and not?an actual scream), helping you find it if you've misplaced it around the house.

New features are regularly added to Bitdefender Mobile Security. The most recent ones include protection for your smartwatch and App Lock, which lets you set passwords for individual apps on your phone.

In a security app such as this, you never want to be more than a couple of taps away from making your device safe, and Mobile Security & Antivirus fulfils this role brilliantly. There is a big button at the top of the homescreen that with a single tap scans your device for malware.

If you want to dig a little deeper into the app's other features, then you're never more than a couple of taps away from settings passwords for apps, setting anti-theft features and so on. We don't want to spend long fiddling with the security settings on our devices, and Bitdefender Mobile Security makes sure we don't.

Navigation in Bitdefender is clear and easy to figure out. / c Bitdefender

Mobile Security works very fast. We tested it out on the HTC One (M8) and the mid-range Huawei Ascend G7, and it usually completed scans within a minute.

In the time that we've been using the app, we didn't experience any crashes or performance problems, although there were a couple of times we had trouble accessing some of the remote anti-theft features on the mybitdefender.com website. We'd usually access them in the end, but the site could do with a little bit more stability.

$14.95 or ￡9.95 a year isn't a high price to keep your Android phone secure. But luckily AndroidPIT readers get an even better deal. Once you've downloaded Bitdefender, just click this link to get a 6-month subscription to Bitdefender Mobile Security for free. Six months will be plenty of time for you to decide how much you need this app.

Bitdefender Mobile Security & Antivirus is an easy-to-use yet comprehensive mobile security suite for Android. If you're unsure about whether you really need such powerful security on your device, then you've got nothing to lose in taking advantage of the 6-month?free trial. In fact, you've got 6 months of free powerful online security to gain.

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Bitdefender is giving all AndroidPIT readers the chance to win an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S6. To enter the competition, all you need to do is download?Bitdefender Mobile Security, and show Bitdefender a bit of love on Facebook and Twitter. Not too much to ask, is it?

You can earn entry tickets into the giveaway by completing the following tasks in the RaffleCopter widget located below.

·?????????5?tickets for?downloading Bitdefender Mobile Security & Antivirus ?

· ? ? ? ? 1?ticket for liking?the Bitdefender Facebook Page

·?????????1?ticket for following Bitdefender on Twitter

a Rafflecopter giveaway

No comparable apps are currently known to us. If you happen to know one, it would be great if you could get in touch with us.

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( Labels: Bitdefender, GALAXY, Mobile, Security ) Read more

App Annie is at Global Mobile Internet Conference – Beijing 2013!

App Annie is at Global Mobile Internet Conference – Beijing 2013!

Join App Annie at Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) 2013 on May 7th and 8th in Beijing!

GMIC is a leading independent mobile conference and expo held in Beijing and Silicon Valley. Over 10,000 of the top mobile industry professionals from executives to engineers, designers to developers, come together to exchange ideas and shape the future of mobile.

Our CEO Bertrand Schmitt will be making a presentation titled ‘Popular Game Trends in the International Market.’ Mobile apps have certainly changed the face of the gaming industry, with mobile-first companies like Supercell, King.com and GungHo Online really leading the industry on monetizing mobile app users. Bertrand will be giving away insights into some of the latest trends in Asia and the international market.

May 8th 10:00 – 10:20 1st Floor, Hall-C

Stop by the brightly-colored App Annie booth and meet the team! We’ll be discussing all things mobile and handing out our popular App Annie Index playing cards.

Find us just near the entrance on the left side of the exhibit hall on floor #1. Look for the real life Annie!

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( Labels: Annie, Beijing, Conference, Global, Internet, Mobile ) Read more

Mobile App Growth Led by Video Sharing: YouTube in the Crosshairs?

Mobile App Growth Led by Video Sharing: YouTube in the Crosshairs?

Posted by Peter Farago on Tue, May 08, 2012

With the frenzy created by the speed and price for which Facebook bought Instagram, app entrepreneurs and investors are excitedly looking for where consumers will next flock within mobile apps.? In a recent report, Flurry quantified the dramatic increase in usage among social networking apps on smartphones. ?For the first time since the App Store launched in summer 2008, the Games category found itself rivaled by another category in terms of time spent in apps. The rise in popularity of apps like Instagram, Path and Skout signals a new era of content consumption on mobile phones where consumers are finding new, compelling ways to spend their time beyond just games.

This report reveals emerging trends in mobile app category usage.? By studying how consumer time is shifting across app categories, we provide an early, clear demand signal. ?In other words, we see where consumers are spending an increasing amount of time in apps beyond Games and Social Networking to show what’s next in mobile app popularity.? For this study, Flurry leverages a sample of 8 million active mobile app users across all app categories.? Flurry Analytics tracks more than 180,000 applications for more than 67,000 companies across iOS, Android, HTML5, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. The chart below shows the fastest growing app categories based on where consumers are spending their time.

The above chart shows the top five app categories based on growth in minutes spent from October 2011 to March 2012. Starting on the left, the Photo & Video category has grown the most, by 89%, in minutes spent per active user.? Music, Productivity, Social Networking and Entertainment round out the top five with growth of 72%, 66%, 54% and 40%, respectively.? These categories represent the fastest growing categories in mobile apps over the last 6 months.? When considering what’s hot beyond the gaming category on mobile, this gives us a strong indication.? Beyond the topical Instagram success story, chances are that future hits are among these categories.? Some apps with momentum today include Path, Skout, Viddy, SocialCam, Evernote, Spotify and more.? Please note that for iOS and Android, Flurry looks at equivalent categories (e.g., Photos & Videos in the iTunes App Store vs. Media & Video on Google Play).? For all charts we use iOS category names.

We next drill down into the Photo & Video app category to better understand growth in this category.? Expanding the time range in this chart, we show the number of minutes spent by active user per month from July 2011 through March 2012.

?

The “overnight” sensation of video sharing apps like Viddy and SocialCam has actually been more like a 9-month tsunami gaining power.? Looking at growth from July 2011 to March 2012, time spent in Photo & Video has grown by 166%.? Video sharing apps offer a compelling benefit to consumers, allowing them to conveniently capture, edit and share videos on-the-fly using the powerful mobile computing devices in their pockets.? Trained by the sharing behavior of Facebook, and enabled by a confluence of underlying technology like built-in HD video cameras, hardy on-device processors, increased network bandwidth, cloud storage and user-friendly applications like Viddy and SocialCam, social video apps are taking off.? It’s a meaningful example of the unique innovation possibilities afforded by mobile apps.

Back in 2006, Google acquired the buzzy YouTube for $1.65 billion after its own Google Video service could not keep pace. ?Now it appears new “cool kids” in the form of Viddy and SocialCam threaten to disintermediate the web juggernaut’s acquisition.? In a recent Forbes article, Eric Jackson laid out a hypothesis that the new breed of social companies, typified by Instagram, view mobile as their primary, often exclusive platform. ?“They don’t even think of launching via a web site. ?They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.” ?He concludes that “we will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.”? Just consider that it’s now possible to capture, edit, share and view engaging, meaningful videos among friends, all from your phone, without ever touching a computer.? In this perspective, a threat to YouTube begins to feels real.

To generate a comparison between mobile app and Internet video consumption, Flurry combined its data set with publicly available comScore Video Metrix data.? In the chart above, we show the number of minutes consumers spend per month using smartphone video apps versus Google Sites on the Internet (primarily YouTube).? Over the course of 2011, minutes spent viewing video content online grew from 276 minutes to 472 minutes, or 71%.? Over the same time period, video apps grew from 63 minutes to 152 minutes, or 141%.? While mobile app video consumption grew more than online consumption, the gap in usage at the end of 2011 was still meaningful.? During 2012, however, is where things get interesting.?? As online video consumption dropped by 10%, mobile app video consumption increased by another 52%.? By then end of March, consumers were spending 54% of amount of time in mobile video apps compared to Google Sites online, 231 minutes in apps versus 425 minutes online.?

While it cannot be concluded that mobile video apps are cannibalizing YouTube, the shift in time spent between these two platforms appears to be a signal of disruption. Think of it this way: With every mobile video you share of friends, family, vacations, parties and weddings, you are likely loading another bullet in the chamber for Web 3.0. ?For YouTube, it appears they need to run, outrun your gun.

View the original article here

( Labels: Crosshairs, Growth, Mobile, Sharing, Video, YouTube ) Read more

Social Networking Ends Games 40 Month Mobile Reign

Social Networking Ends Games 40 Month Mobile Reign

Posted by Peter Farago on Fri, Apr 27, 2012

The app revolution has changed the way software is distributed and used among consumers.? With a perfect storm of digital distribution, free content and powerful touch screen devices, the success of mobile apps has disrupted industries from telecommunications and games to music and news. ?To date, no category of apps has been more successful than Games, directly disrupting the traditional gaming industry.? Flurry recently wrote about the impact iOS and Android game popularity has had on Sony and Nintendo.? And with low barriers to entry for armies of entrepreneurial developers, indie game developers continue to thrive on iOS and Android.

Consider for a moment Facebook’s speedy billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram, a service that succeeds by delivering Facebook’s core value proposition of photo sharing, but only on mobile.?? When one understands that consumers now spend more time in mobile apps than they do online, Instagram’s value begins to make sense. ?With over 500 million iOS and Android devices in the market, mobile apps are the new battleground for consumer engagement. ?If Facebook feels compelled to snap up Instagram in this way, perhaps this is an indication of how relevant social networking has become in mobile apps, or simply how relevant mobile has become overall. ?In this report, Flurry focuses on the rise of the Social Networking category in mobile apps. ?Let’s start by looking at where consumers spend their time by application category.

In the chart above, Flurry compares the time consumers spend across different application categories when using smartphones.? Starting on the left, we look at the average number of minutes a consumer spent each day, over the course of Q1 2011, across different app categories.? For this period, we calculated that consumers spent 25 minutes (37%) of their app-using time in Games.? They additionally spent 15 minutes (22%) of their time in Social Networking apps.? News and Entertainment were the next most popular categories, garnering an average of 11 (16%) and 10 (15%) minutes per day, respectively.? All other categories combined made up the final 7 minutes (10%) of time.? During Q1 2011, Flurry tracked approximately 30 billion application sessions worldwide.

On the right, we conduct the same analysis for Q1 2012.? Compared to the same quarter in 2011, time spent per consumer each day increased from 68 to 77 minutes.? Additionally, the distribution of time spent per category shifted. ?Games usage dropped by 4% down to 24 minutes per day, while Social Networking increased by 60% up to 24 minutes per day.? Games and Social Networking categories each controlled 31% of consumers’ time.? News, Entertainment and Other categories commanded 12 (15%), 10 (13%) and 7 (9%) minutes, respectively. Flurry tracked approximately 110 billion application sessions during Q1 2012.

The most significant trend is that, for the first time in the history of applications (Flurry began tracking application usage in 2008), another app category is rivaling Games.? We take the rise in Social Networking apps as a signal of maturation for the platform.? As game demand may be hitting its saturation point, consumers are also discovering other apps, namely Social Networking.? The year-over-year growth in Social Networking has been staggering.?? Not only has time spent increased by 60%, but also within a growing amount of total time spent in smartphone apps among consumers, from 68 to 77 minutes, or a growth rate of 13%.

Through its mobile app traffic acquisition network, Flurry AppCircle, the company can also see how apps with growing audiences earn revenue through advertising.? When app developers amass larger audiences, among the chief ways to monetize their businesses is by showing ads to their consumers.? In the chart below, we show revenue earned by publishers in the Flurry AppCircle ad network for each of the last three months.? Flurry AppCircle reaches over 300 million unique devices per month, making it one of the industry’s largest ad networks by reach.? The columns in the chart grow from month-to-month at the same proportion as AppCircle publisher revenue growth.? From just February to April of this year, Flurry AppCircle publisher revenue has grown by 23%.? Please note that we forecast the remaining few days of April for the chart below.

From inspection, ad revenue in apps is driven primarily by Games and Social Networking categories.? In other words, audiences using these apps a combination of the largest and most receptive to ads.? For February, March and April, Games apps earned 35%, 35% and 36% of total ad revenue in the AppCircle network.? Over the same three months, Social Networking climbed from 24% in February to 25% in March, and then to 37% in April.?? This is the first time in Flurry’s history that any category has surpassed Games in ad revenue generated (Flurry launched AppCircle summer 2010).

Over the last couple of years, the term “SoLoMo” was coined to describe the convergence of social experiences on mobile devices that leverage some element of proximity (i.e., location) to the experience.? While a Silicon Valley term in origin, it speaks to the new consumer experiences possible when dreaming up any combination of these three factors.? Phones are powerful, connected and always with consumers.? And they are considered personal devices that easily enable sharing of personal content and information through apps.? Build a clever app that leverages these aspects in a compelling way, and you could have the next Pinterest or Instagram.

As business ventures, the ability for Social Networking apps to engage consumers in a meaningful way is driving a wave of investment and bullish valuations.? Social networks like Pinterest, Path and Skout are raising major venture capital rounds.? This month, Andreessen Horowitz invested $22 million into Skout, and Greylock and Redpoint helped plow $30 million into Path.? Pinterest, which has a strong mobile component, has become the third most popular social network behind Facebook and Twitter, and ahead of LinkedIn, Tagged and Google+.? With so much innovation, coupled with high engagement among consumers, this appears to be only the beginning.

The rise of Social Networking apps also signals the end of the era of gaming dominance within mobile apps.? While the free-to-play business model performs extremely well, enabled by in-app-purchases, it does so primarily for simulation games, a sub-genre of the total games category.? As long as the total iOS and Android installed base grows, all categories will continue to grow naturally.? However, as we reach saturation for mobile gaming on a per user basis (one consumer can play only so many free-to-play games), the Games category could start behaving more like a “zero sum game” from here on out, meaning that game companies would have to fight over a finite group of consumers in order to grow their businesses.? For one app to grow, it would have to take from its competitors.? Even with an influx of new consumers into the market, the expected would-be casual gamers will be increasingly wooed away from games by compelling Social Networking and other apps.? Going forward, the Games category will have to look to innovate on mobile to maintain its dominance and growth.

For the comparison of minutes spent in this blog post, it’s important to clarify that these figures exclude tablet usage, and focus on smartphones only.? While Flurry calculates that consumers spend an average of 94 minutes per day using mobile apps, that figure is a reflection of total usage spread over both smartphones and tablets. When we isolate just smartphone usage, as we’ve done in this analysis, the number of minutes spent on apps is lower.

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( Labels: Games, Mobile, Month, Networking, Reign, Social ) Read more

Love, Courtship and the Promiscuous Male Mobile Gamer

Love, Courtship and the Promiscuous Male Mobile Gamer

Posted by Dan Laughlin on Fri, Mar 29, 2013

GDC is in San Francisco this week, just next to Flurry’s headquarters. By the size of the crowds, we (very scientifically) estimate that attendance should easily surpass last year’s record of 22,500. Having tracked the growth of mobile games for several years, we weren’t surprised to see more than 30 sessions during the week focused on smartphone and tablet gaming.

Here’s the big picture, based on our estimates: There are now over 1 billion active smartphones and tablets using apps around the world every month. And of all the apps consumers use, games command more than 40% of all time spent. Looking at revenue, games also dominate. Today, for example, 22 of the top 25 grossing apps in the U.S. iTunes App Store apps are games. Gamers spend money, and game makers are in love.

In this installment of research, Flurry studies how age, gender and engagement vary across key game types. Understand this, and a game developer can design a more engaging game that appeals to the right audience. In short, they can build a better business. In this study, we included more than 200 of the most successful free iOS games, with a total audience of more than 465 million month active users. For a better comparison, we organized these games by their game type (aka game mechanic) instead of traditional, less granular genres. Let’s start by looking at how different kinds of games appeal to gamers by age and gender.

The chart above plots game types by age and gender. From left to right, we show what percent of the game audience is female, with the far right equaling 100% female. The opposite is true for males. For example, 0% female equals 100% male. From bottom to top, we show the average age of the game type’s user base, between 20 to 50 years old.? Putting it together, games in the upper right quadrant are preferred by older females. Games in the lower right are preferred by younger females. Games in the lower left are preferred by younger men, and so on.?

Inspecting the chart, the tightest cluster appears in the lower left; specifically, game types such as Shooters, Racing, and Action RPG skew younger and more male. Card-battle and Strategy games also skew toward younger males. The only genre that skews toward males over 35 is Casino/Poker, with pure poker games skewing even more male than the game type as a whole. This appears to leave a big gap in the market for developers who can create games that appeal to middle-aged and older men.

While men tend to gravitate toward competitive games, women gravitate toward games that are less competitive and tend to be played in a more enduring way. These include Management/Simulation games where players can build out an environment, Social Turn-Based games in which they can play over time with friends, and Match3/Bubble Shooters and Brain/Quiz games, to which users can frequently return when they have a few spare minutes. Slots and Solitaire are both solo-play game types that skew toward females who are over 40, suggesting that they serve as long-term time-fillers.

From a marketing perspective, mobile game publishers can also leverage this knowledge to design targeted campaigns appropriate for the kind of audience to which a game appeals. Flurry’s ad network, AppCircle, allows publishers to target specific demographics for efficient spending.?

We find that mobile gamers tend to prefer playing a few kinds of games and demonstrate highly predictable play patterns. In other words, they form relationships with their games. Savvy publishers understand these dynamics and use them to inform acquisition strategy, gameplay design, and both in-app purchase and ad-based monetization tactics.

In the chart below, we map game types by usage and retention. On the y-axis we show the number of times per week consumers play different game types. On the x-axis we show how long different games retain their user (i.e.,?Flurry defines Rolling Retention as the percentage of users that return to the game 30 days after first use, or any day after that). To see how usage and gender work together, we’ve also colored-coded game types by whether they are more male, female or neutral in appeal. ?Let’s take a look.

The chart above reveals that different strategies should be employed for different kinds of games. It also shows, loosely, that women are more committed while men are more fickle. Sound familiar in life? Hmmm. For the gaming industry, the universal take away is that to optimize engagement, retention, and monetization, developers must tailor their mechanics and messaging to match their ideal target audience. Let’s take a tour of the quadrants.

“Players” try a lot of different games, play for only a short time and tend to be found in highly competitive games (e.g., “Player vs. Player style games). While fickle, they tend to have a high willingness-to-pay in order to progress faster in a game or increase their ability to compete at a high level versus other players. Attracting the right users through targeted acquisition can pay off, as those that stay will pay. Notably, Card-Battle games have very low retention but off-the-charts monetization, extracting enormous revenue from the small number of users that stick. One implication is that these games need to be highly polished at launch with updates ready to go, as gamers will discard games quickly and move on if the game fails to resonate. From a design standpoint, these games should offer immediate opportunities for users to advance by purchasing upgrades and boosts. For the users that might not spend, a lucrative option is to offer in-game currency for watching video ads.

“Going Steady” game types are found in the lower right quadrant of the chart. Usage is less frequent but retention is very high. While these gamers don’t play as often, they are loyal. This group of games tends to be easy-to-learn and easy-to-return-to even after a lapse in playing. They lend themselves to quick play while in a “wait state” (e.g., waiting in line, taking a bus or perhaps checking out of the meeting or class they’re in). Since these are not particularly immersive or competitive games, they are less likely suited to in-app purchase. However, they can generate significant ad impressions over time, and can be designed to show banner or interstitial ads without being overly disruptive to the experience. For games with larger audiences, publishers are utilizing mediation platforms that enable the use of multiple ad networks in one system, ensuring maximized fill and ad-revenue for each space.

“Committed” comprise of consumers who play games for the long-haul. As such, game makers should think of it like a marriage. Think about appoint mechanics like setting a date (hey, even married people need to keep it fresh). These games should be designed with deep content and not try to sell too hard to their users too quickly. From a monetization perspective, commitment-oriented games have great potential for in-app purchases since users of those games are likely to value such purchases and amortize them over long periods of gameplay. And while only the largest titles have achieved this to-date, this group of games are great candidates for in-app product placement. Additionally, with high impressions counts, it is worth publishers’ investment to implement monetization platforms that make ad spaces available to real-time bidded ad exchanges, ensuring they reach the brands and advertisers that value their audiences.

“Infatuated” consumers have fallen hard and fast for their games, but the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. They have crushes, and show binge behavior. During the “crush” window, the developer needs to work hard to extract as much revenue as possible. As such, developers must provide vast amounts of content to the users, consistently, in a short-window. Matching monetization to game type, the competitive nature of Strategy games, and Slots users’ incessant desire for in-game currency, make a solid in-app purchase strategy paramount. Sales, events, and purchase opportunities timed with key moments of emotional investment can drive significant profits for publishers.

In gaming, there are a vast number of game types that attract distinct audiences.? And these different consumer segments display very different usage patterns, which have direct implications on monetization strategies. As in life, where the richest relationships are borne from knowing oneself and his or her partner, game companies must also understand both. Only then can you get the most out of the relationship.?

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( Labels: Courtship, Gamer, Mobile, Promiscuous ) Read more

Mobile Apps: We Interrupt This Broadcast

Mobile Apps: We Interrupt This Broadcast

Posted by Simon Khalaf on Wed, Dec 05, 2012

During the month of November, Flurry reached a major milestone, measuring more than a trillion unique events completed inside of mobile apps by consumers.? The magnitude of this number, and what it means to an industry barely over four years old, that has already generated tens of billions of dollars, is unprecedented. ??An industry has shot up around Flurry in a way that no one, anywhere, could have imagined.

So it was against this backdrop that I began reading a series of differing investment theses written by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (What Has Changed), Dave McClure of 500 Startups (What Hasn’t Changed) and Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz (The Product Lens).? The gist was about the cyclical nature of investing between consumer internet and enterprise companies, with another suggestion to focus on product over finances. ?The debate is entertaining, and not surprising. ?It validates a theory I’ve held since the mid-nineties about the fundamental difference between entrepreneurs and investors.? Simply put, entrepreneurs focus on opportunity while investors focus on risk. ?

The venture industry wants familiarity, so it talks about consumer versus enterprise.? The web comes with an understood set of metrics like page views, visits, unique users, returning visitors and bounce rates, to name a few. ?And there’s still a standard way of buying traffic (SEM) and getting traffic organically (SEO). There’s a clear index and path to the web, called Google, and most VCs understand Google economics. ?They understand the lifetime value vs. cost per acquisition equation. They can value businesses accordingly.

What the venture industry doesn’t yet understand is mobile and apps. Traffic acquisition is still an art more than a measurable science.? No one has defined a set of metrics that the venture industry can use to universally compare the value of one app property to another, and business models on mobile are still new. ?On Sand Hill Road, the best line I hear is that “99 cents is the new free,” referring to the freemium model, but few truly understand what it means.

Mobile and apps are gobbling up the web and consumer Internet, and that’s where the opportunity is. And the opportunity has never been bigger. ?All around me, I see entrepreneurs living it, loving it and collecting it “99 cents” at a time. ?Meanwhile, the VCs are debating it.

In the month of November, we measured over a trillion events from over 250,000 applications created by more than 85,000 developers. ?Events are actions completed by consumers inside apps such as completing a game level, making a restaurant reservation or tagging a song. ?In November, we also measured over 60 billion sessions, which is the start and a stop of an application on a mobile smart device. ?The chart below shows the growth in events tracked since May of 2008, when we first made our analytics service available to developers. ?This growth reflects the growth of the app economy.

The chart below updates Flurry’s analysis comparing time spent in mobile apps on smartphones and tablets to time spent on the web using a browser. ?For web usage on desktops, laptops and smart devices, we build a model using publicly available data from comScore and Alexa.? For mobile applications, we use Flurry Analytics data, now gathering data from over 250,000 applications.? This time around, we add time spent on television using data released by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2010 and 2011. ?Note that the bureau hasn’t yet released their 2012 numbers, but given the maturity of the TV market, we assume that time spent on TV is flat year-over-year.

Between December 2011 and December 2012, the average time spent inside mobile apps by a U.S. consumer grew 35%, from 94 minutes to 127 minutes. ?By comparison, the average time spent on the web declined 2.4%, from 72 minutes to 70 minutes. ?By our measurement, U.S. consumers are spending 1.8 times more time in apps than on the web. ?

The chart also shows that time spent in apps already totals 76% of time spent on television.? With new content released via thousands of new apps each day, we expect this trend to continue. ?In fact, we ultimately expect apps on tablets and smartphones to challenge broadcast television as the dominant channel for media consumption. Compared to the 60-year-old television industry, apps are just over 4 years old.? In particular, tablets will drive growth in app consumption in 2013 as TV-style content and major programming moves to the tablet. Most TV Networks have already adjusted to a dual screen world and are synchronizing their TV content with their tablet app content.? We believe that, with the introduction of connected TVs, TV shows will behave like apps.

Finally, we measured the time spent using mobile apps per app category across iOS and Android smart devices. ?For this comparison, we use Flurry data over the month of November 2012 as a baseline, and then adjust based on Flurry’s penetration per category. The chart below shows that 80% of the total time spent is across gaming, social networking and entertainment categories.

The stats on gaming are particularly interesting. ?Returning to the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey data, the average U.S. consumer spent 1.2 hours (72 minutes) per day playing a game, on any platform. Our data shows that 43% of time spent in mobile apps, 55 minutes, is spent in games. This means that mobile gaming on tablets and smartphones has absorbed 76% (55 of the 72 minutes) of the total time consumers spend on gaming, anywhere. Now, that's disruptive.

In just 4 years, mobile apps have overtaken the web and are beginning to challenge television, the top media channel. ?As we enter 2013, the app industry shows no signs of slowing. ?On the contrary, we continue to see a strong flow of new devices and new apps activated in our network. While VCs debate what part of the investment cycle we’re in and how to manage risk, all entrepreneurs need to know - from one entrepreuneur to another - is that you're witnessing the opportunity of a lifetime.

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( Labels: Broadcast, Interrupt, Mobile ) Read more

The Screen Bowl: Mobile Apps Take On TV

The Screen Bowl: Mobile Apps Take On TV

The Super Bowl is one of the world’s top media events. This year’s contest, Super Bowl XLVII, was hosted in New Orleans and drew an average of 108.4 million viewers, the third largest audience in U.S. television history.? According to Nielsen, previous Super Bowls captured the top two U.S. TV audiences, with last year’s event drawing 111.3 million viewers and the previous year’s attracting 110.0 million.

( Labels: Mobile, Screen ) Read more

The Gamification of Mobile Games

The Gamification of Mobile Games

Apps are big business, and the biggest app business is games.? In 2012, Flurry estimates revenue earned from apps will approach $10 billion, with games taking over 80% of the pie.

APP是個大生意，而APP中最大的生意就是遊戲。Flurry估計在2012年，從APP賺取到的收入將會接近10億美元，而遊戲將占到其中超過80％的金額。

The free-to-play business model (aka freemium), where consumers download and play the “core loop” of a game for free, but then pay for virtual goods and currency through micro-transactions, is the most prolific business model in the new era of digital distribution.

免費遊戲的商業模式（即免費增值），消費者可以免費的下載和執行“基本功能”的遊戲，但隨後可以透過微交易模式使用貨幣支付購買，這種微交易模式是數位發行新時代最賺錢的業務模式。

When it comes to app consumption on iOS and Android smart devices, consumers spend over 40% of all their time using games.

當談到消費者在iOS和Android智慧型手機上使用APP的時間，可以發現其中有超過40%以上的時間都花費在玩遊戲上。

( Labels: Games, Gamification, Mobile ) Read more