Why does Apple (finally) care about app store discovery?

On November 30th, Josh Elman, a prominent technology executive who had previously worked in venture capital and as the VP of Product at stock trading app Robinhood, announced that he would be joining the App Store team at Apple to “help customers discover the best apps.” Apple spends an enormous amount of money on App Store curation and editorial,...

13h

The economics of game streaming

In this episode of the MDM podcast, I speak with Stephen Ellis, the founder and CEO of Pipeline.gg, about the economics of game streaming and the future of the games streaming landscape. As a former professional gamer and then an employee at Facebook working on the company’s games streaming product, Stephen witnessed first-hand just...

2d

Apple and Facebook’s sparring over IDFA helps no one

Back in October, a coalition of human rights and privacy advocacy organizations — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation — penned a letter to Apple that criticized its decision to delay the effective deprecation of the IDFA through mandatory implementation of the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework....

2w

Apple’s platform fee reduction is strategically genius

This morning, Apple announced that it would roll out a new platform fee scheme beginning on January 1st called the App Store Small Business Program. In this new framework, developers that earn less than $1MM per year through IAPs — across all of their apps — are eligible to join the program, which entitles them to a 50% reduction in platform fees applied...

2w

Why is Roblox allowed to stream games on iOS?

Since October 1st, Roblox, the cross-platform game development and distribution portal, has achieved the #1 Top Grossing position nine times in the US on iPhone. Roblox monetizes by selling a hard currency, Robux, to users that can be spent across the Roblox portfolio of games. Robux can be purchased on any platform, but prices differ...

3w

Podcast: Contemplating the next 18 months of mobile advertising

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with David Philippson and Nebo Radovic about the near-term future of mobile advertising. How will the deprecation of the IDFA — and of mobile advertising identifiers more generally — change: the way teams are constructed; demand for various media sources;the degree to which programmatic...

3w

Navigating the post-platform mobile future

This is the third part in my three-part series on the future of mobile platforms. Part 1 is The current war between Apple and Facebook and Part 2 is The future of mobile content platforms. Important background can be found in The coming war between Apple and Facebook. In Part Two of this series, I explored how the changing landscape of content...

4w

Why doesn’t traffic trading work on mobile?

Every so often, I’ll hear a pitch for an idea that the presenter is convinced is novel: a traffic trade network on mobile — but especially for mobile games — in which participants swap traffic with each other so as to avoid paying for installs. This “traffic co-op,” in theory, allows members to substitute users that have no demonstrable economic value...

4w

The future of mobile content platforms

This is the second article in a three-part series. For part one, see: The current war between Apple and Facebook, and for background, see: The coming war between Apple and Facebook. In the first article of this series, I laid out a case for why tensions between Apple and Facebook have boiled over into outright hostility. Facebook is responding...

5w

The current war between Apple and Facebook

In January 2017, I wrote The coming war between Apple and Facebook, in which I laid out the case for why I thought a cold war between Apple and Facebook would eventually turn hot. I concluded the piece with four hypothetical “first shot” scenarios: What if Apple refuses to allow developers to link directly to their App Store pages in the future,...

Oct 2020