While it is prudent for organizations to promote their apps in the largest and most popular app stores, it’s worth keeping in mind the benefits of listing your apps in other marketplaces that may be less well known by the general public but are still serious contenders.
After all, if you manufactured products and only let them be sold in large shopping malls to the exclusion of smaller stores, you would stand to miss out on a large portion of the audience that has more specific needs for the goods or services you offer.
For example, Google Play has a large share of the market and developers have a 100-percent chance of being featured. However, developers have a 347-percent chance of seeing their app featured in the Opera app store, a 669-percent chance of being featured in the Amazon app store and 2,084-percent chance of being featured in SlideME app store, according to latest figures from the One Platform Foundation.
It pays to know which app stores are more popular to help you determine the best places to publish. About 65 percent of developers use Google Play, which has captured the lion’s share of the market, noted a recent report at Developer Economics. Approximately 56 publish on Apple’s store and 26 percent sell apps through Microsoft’s Windows Phone store. By contrast, Blackeberry World sells apps for about 20 percent of developers while some 16 percent of developers publish on the Amazon store.
Top 5 App Stores
Amazon Appstore
Amazon’s Appstore kicked off in high gear when it landed a major deal to become the exclusive distributor of the enormously popular Angry Birds Rio game. Amazon already had a great deal of mindshare with its customers for books and other items, enabling it to leverage its popularity to penetrate the mobile device market. It saw a 500 percent increase in downloads over the course of a single year. The launch of the Kindle Fire device gave Amazon even more clout in this regard.
Getjar
Billed as the largest independent app store in the world, Getjar has seen more than 2 billion downloads so far, with about 395,000 publishes and app developers registered with the platform. With its system of virtual currency and rewards, Getjar encourages users to personally recommend apps to other users in exchange for points they can use to upgrade or unlock their own apps. For example, the team behind Guitar Solo found success using Getjar’s reward system, achieving up to 300 percent more revenue, noted the Getjar development page.
Opera Mobile Store
The Opera Mobile Store provides a cross-platform store for mobile devices including Android, Blackberry, iOS, J2ME, Symbian and Windows Phone. So far, India is the biggest market for the Opera Mobile Store and has 13 million users visiting each month. Opera now lets developers bid for downloads from customers through its self-service promotional portal.
SlideME
Developers looking for an alternative to Google Play seek out SlideME. This app store launched in 2008 and does not take a cut from the money earned through app sales, but instead obtains a 3.5-percent credit card payment processing fee, compared to 30 percent taken off at the Google and Apple stores. SlideME gets revenue through licensing the contents of its app store to allow manufacturers to pre-load apps on their devices.
Mobango
Another major independent platform is Mobango, which boasts of 95 million downloads, up from 80 million in 2012. Based in India, Mobango had 45 million downloads in India in 2013, an 80-percent increase over the previous year. This app store includes apps and games for Java and Android platforms. It’s a major destination that organizations will want to consider when marketing their new apps.
The Future
While mobile device usage is become widespread to the degree that the industry can support multiple app stores for smartphones and tables, wearable device app development is starting to ramp up.
This signals a need for specialized app stores to meet the needs of people using wearable devices. Accordingly, Pebble has launched Pebble Apps, the unofficial appstore designed for users of the Pebble smartwatch. We will be keeping close watch on the wearable device app user base to better meet the needs of our customers.
The article was originally published on Tech Blog by OpenXcell Technolabs.
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