There is hardly a hotter segment in the market today than mobile application development. While much has been made of the explosion of both applications and developers in the relatively new niche, much less has been done to provide services to those developers.
Distimo, the winner of the best business-to-business application at the most recent The Next Web conference, is betting that there is money to be made supporting this explosion of application development and the developers behind it. During the American Gold Rush it was common knowledge that it was more profitable to serve the miners hunting for gold than to search for it yourself. Distimo is making a similar bet, helping developers fight for supremacy amongst each other.
Who Is Distimo, And What Do They Do?
Distimo was founded by four intrepid Dutch entrepreneurs who became annoyed with the lack of functional reporting on how individual applications were performing in different application stores. Imagine if you had to have two separate pieces of analytics software to track your website’s traffic. One for Europe, and one for Asia, say. Even more, imagine if both were inaccurate.
That was the landscape before Distimo began offering inclusive application analytics for a number of app stores, including Android and Apple, that were accurate. Distimo puts it like this , they are building an application “to solve the challenges created by a widely fragmented app store marketplace filled with equally fragmented information and statistics.”
In short, once you build an application and release it, Distimo will give you the fullest and most accurate information about not only where it is selling, but in what quantity and when.
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That Sounds Expensive
A tool that powerful must come with a high price tag, right? Not this time, Distimo is free for developers to use. And by the looks of it, they intend to keep the product like that.
So how do they make money? They collate all the data that is collected and stored by the system on the applications being monitored, and build both monthly that are for sale. If you are big development house, you want both information on how your applications are doing, and how the market is performing.
To summon an example of why more normalized data sets in report form would be useful, consider a dip in your monthly application sales on the Android platform. You cannot be sure if that dip is localized to your application or genre, or it was platform wide. A report might be able to answer that question for you.
Whether this form of freemium will work in the long run remains to be seen, but for the foreseeable future developers are in for free.
What Does It Look Like?
If you are familiar with Google Analytics, Distimo will look quite normal. These are two screenshots of the main report page:
More Information, More Power
The most basic perspective on Distimo is this: it gives developers more, and better, information than they ever had before. Not only will that allow developers to make more informed decisions, but it will raise the quality of mobile applications world-wide by allowing for increased fine-tuning.
Distimo is in an excellent position to grow its own business and provide a vital service. That is why the company won the B2B award this year, they won for a great product well placed in a hot market. Keep an eye on Distimo, you will hear from them again.
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