Today at RoNewMedia I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Martin Wrigley, Director of Partners Technology at Orange, who talked about the past, present and future of applications for mobile terminals. At the moment, most of the developers in the App Store do not manage to make enough money from the applications to cover the costs involved in their development, not to mention the profit, and if we only refer to Romania, then things are even worse. At the level of the entire App Store, only 1% of the developers earn a lot of money from developing applications, but I think that the figure is a bit small for the true success of the applications there. In Google Play, everything is focused on the profit from ads and not necessarily on the one from direct sales, there we all know that piracy is much higher than in the App Store.
Martin said that good applications must not only work correctly, but also have quality content so that users are convinced to use them even after downloading them. He said that developers are not really that "enthusiastic" about the application testing process, many having to be convinced to go through this stage before launching their creations in the App Store, but most of them skip this step believing that their work is perfect from the start. At the base of this wrong assumption is the failure of many applications in the App Store, and not only that, applications that have a limited functionality that does not attract you and makes you delete the application shortly after installation.
In the App Store, however, things are fine, because the company's engineers test the applications before publishing them, but in Google Play, the applications are published regardless of whether they work or not. Martin said that those at Google are not interested in whether the applications work or not, they go by the idea that the best applications reach the top based on user recommendations. I think that this system is wrong from the start because it offers poor quality content, content full of malware and the application recommendation system can be extremely easily defrauded at any time.
At the end, the fact that in-app purchases generate the most money for application developers was brought up again, and we all know how attractive the packages with bonuses offered are. Practically most of the applications, from the top of the titles that produced the most money, are based on the freemium model, that is, they are available for free and produce a lot of money through in-app purchases. Leaving the past aside, we move on to the future and it mainly centers around HTML 5 which is becoming more and more important, but any developer must consider the fact that an application must not only work well, but it must look good and offer quality content.
