Mobile App Publishing

In the past few months, I have looked at the mobile application space. One particular topic has piqued my interest. Before my research, I held the opinion that the market was a free-for-all, and that small and individual publishers had equal footing with large developers.

This is not completely true. With hundreds of thousands of apps, and with each category reaching saturation, it is necessary to differentiate yourself to get noticed. Sure, adding the appropriate description to your app and putting it in the right category will help, but what about offline marketing? How do you work with similar apps? How do you price your application? Large development houses and content providers have an upper hand when it comes to marketing applications, with their experience and scale.

The mobile app space adopted a familiar organizational structure or pattern. There are a number of app development houses that are branching into publishing services. For example, Bottle Rocket’s Thruster is essentially a publishing agency for mobile gaming apps. Everyone knows that Rovio and Angry Birds wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without teaming with Chillingo.

The business model is crystal clear. You partner with the publisher, they take a cut of the proceeds, and in return they provide marketing and development support. In a market filled with individual developers and authors, this seems to be a natural organization with an attractive value proposition for all participants. The new market resembles the old market.