Some background

Mplayit had the pleasure of co-hosting a special developer lunch at GDC last week, along with our friends at community platform providers Playhaven and top tech lawyers Cooley Godward Kronish.

Special guests at the lunchtime panel were Bryan Mitchell, creator of the mega-selling Geared and Lima Sky’s Igor Pusenjak, co-creator of multi-million-app selling Doodle Jump to share their App Store experiences and to pass on a few marketing tips.

We think there is some great stuff here. It’s definitely worth watching/listening to the whole thing, but here are some highlights we particularly liked, if you want to just skip through:

The Best Bits

• From 18:53 – Bryan Mitchell shares his thoughts on App Store pricing
• From 17:50 – Lima Sky’s Igor Pusenjak on why for Doodle Jump, .99c was always the right price
• From 14:45 – Mplayit’s CEO, Michael Powers, on App Store price elasticity, the race to free and why that doesn’t necessarily mean lower revenues
• From 9:20 – Igor Pusenjak on the 3 things you HAVE to do to promote your app… in short 1) TELL everyone 2) BE exciting 3) BE persistent (but DON’T be annoying)
• From 4:10 – Michael Powers on how to get your app discovered via social media and the web

The Video

I apologize for the quality of this video. Although the Droid is a great device, its exposure meter just can’t compete with a window and a (less than typical) blazing March sun in San Francisco. But we think the audio alone makes this clip worth a watch.

I’ve personally shared this app on Twitter and Facebook simply because I enjoy it. I know I don’t have the skills to “drop PHAT beats”, but I want to. The video showcases yet another oh-my-God-the-iPhone-is-amazing app. It is sure to inspire anyone who sees it to consider buying it. I bought it to support the artist who made it, but (really) in the hopes that he’ll release more videos!

Enjoy the video below or find Everday Looper on the iPhone Arcade. Developers keep the videos coming our way!

Mplayit has got a busy week ahead in San Francisco – here’s what we’re up to…

Tuesday 9^th March Mplayit Founder/CEO (and independent developer) Michael Powers will be sharing the secrets for success in promoting iPhone Apps in a GDC lecture entitled – “Social Networks: The New Marketplace for Mobile Games?” 3:00pm — 3:30pm, Room 309, South Hall. Make sure you put this one in your calendar!

Wednesday 10^th March Don’t miss the hottest and most sociable GDC party of the week (well we would say that!) when Mplayit co-hosts a mingle with Scoreloop www.scoreloop.com and PocketGamer www.pocketgamer.com. Mark this one in your calendar too – more details to follow very soon!

Thursday 11^th March  Join Playhaven and Mplayit for a free lunch at Lulu’s just around the corner from the convention center.  We’ll be discussing App Marketing along with the developers of Doodle Jump and Geared.  Spots are very limited – click here to secure yours!

And if you can’t make any of these, we’ll be around all week if you want to meet up. Just email craig at mplayit.com and we’ll find some time.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Welcome to our long awaited corporate blog. Numerous members of the Mplayit team will be contributing authors to this blog. We hope to share our insight, metrics and general thoughts about the business of mobile app discovery. The Mplayit community (Mobile Arcade, iPhone Arcade, Android Arcade and BlackBerry Arcade) is quite vibrant and never ceases to amaze us. One thing is abundantly clear: the market clearly needs social discovery for mobile apps. We look forward to sharing what we learn and helping developers connect with consumers.

With games making up only 20 percent of the over 130,000 iPhone apps available on Mplayit, nearly 50 percent of the site traffic centered on games. Among Android users, only 20 percent of browsing focused on gaming applications. Even BlackBerry users are more fun-loving than Android users, with about 30 percent of activity coming from the games category.

iPhone developers are driving this phenomenon, putting out simply fantastic games that get people excited, but the ‘developer catch up’ is underway on Android. And although Blackberry is renowned for apps, it continues to be underrated and overlooked as a games platform.

Our users can rate, comment and recommend individual apps to their social network on Facebook and Twitter, in addition to browsing friends’ app collections and following their interests.

Our findings were drawn from live data collected from over 50,000 users on our Facebook app store over a two week period ending January 29, highlights the kinds of games that were popular for each of the three major smartphone audiences.

The most active game categories on all three platforms were largely identical: Arcade, Casual, Card/Casino and Puzzle. However, there were some significant differences in taste across platforms.

Music games were particularly popular on the iPhone, befitting its media-centric iPod heritage. Android users showed a predilection toward ‘geeky’ games making innovative use of things like the GPS, camera and augmented reality. The BlackBerry audience gravitated toward television and movie tie-ins.

There were also some significant commercial differences. BlackBerry users stuck with major franchises and larger publishers, reflecting perhaps the carrier-centric history of the device. Indie developers hold their own against the big games publishers on the iPhone, and continue to dominate the Android’s relatively immature market.

Intense competition on the iPhone makes it increasingly hard for apps to surface. Android is a less crowded, even playing field that we expect will grow and grow quickly.

Apple’s iPhone famously has many more apps than even its closest competitor (the iPhone has over 100,000 available, compared to about 20,000 Android apps and around 4,500 on Blackberry App World).

We looked at the most popular application categories across platforms and compiled the top apps in each category for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Our analysis found a great deal of similarity in the most popular apps in the most active categories, demonstrating that despite the big differences in the number of apps available by device, for the majority of consumers, there is less and less to choose between them.

Cross-platform apps did particularly well. Evernote registered among the top three of the most popular apps in the Lists and Notes category on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Similarly, Pandora Radio is among the top three music apps on all three smartphone platforms. Also, Barcode readers have recently shot to the top of the most sought after apps on all three leading smartphone platforms.

Some platform-specific favorites held their own. However, in the Lists and Notes category, Evernote shared the top three spot with different lesser-known competitors on each platform: Things and AwesomeNote on iPhone, ThinkingSpace and QuickList on Android, and TaskManager and SlickTasks on BlackBerry.

To a customer, the app catalog is a key component of the smartphone experience. Our cross-platform store on Facebook® is currently the only place they can directly compare what is available. We crowd-source our recommendations to expose popular apps that you don’t find necessarily find in Top 20 charts.

If you are thinking about switching to a new smartphone, don’t worry! Each smartphone catalog has good coverage in the categories that mattered most.

If you’re switching to a new phone, you don’t want to give up functionality. It’s not really necessary to match Apple app-for-app to offer a compelling mobile experience. Android and other platforms only need to offer the best and the brightest, as well as the same utility and features.