Joel Auge, who devised a mobile game that pits a fictitious king against the mice infesting his kingdom, wanted to keep players engaged longer. So he turned to Swrve New Media for advice.
With a surge in the number of games and tools available for download through online stores run by Apple and Google, it’s getting harder for developers like Auge to vie for the attention of fickle mobile-device users.
Not every mobile application can be the next Angry Birds. To improve their chances, programmers in growing numbers are turning to Swrve and other companies, such as App Annie and Localytics, which use mathematical models and behaviour data to help mobile developers court users.
Only a sliver of the more than 700,000 apps on Apple’s App Store or Google Play are poised to benefit from the US$46 billion ABI Research predicts mobile apps can generate in 2016. So startups are eager for any help they can get in climbing store rankings and retaining users.
“You’ll see a dramatic improvement,” Auge, HitGrab Inc.’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview. Without Swrve, running the business “was like driving blind,” he said.
While the analytics industry is small, it’s expanding fast. Venture investment in apps-data companies more than tripled in the first half of this year to US$16.8 million, compared with the same period in 2011, according to Rutberg & Co. Over that time, funding of mobile developers grew 35 percent to US$1.24 billion.