Your Mobile App Is Not Taking Off? Blame The Platform Owners

As we all know, the mobile app industry is so big they actually created a whole new industry and segment called "The App Economy". The market ecosystem simply consists of platform owners, developers and of course the users. Tens of millions of apps have been submitted to the marketplace, millions of them are now ready to be downloaded by users, but only a fracture got the chance to survive. And a big part of this is the platform owner's fault.

App marketplace has three main tasks: curation, distribution and discovery. They curate and filter the apps in order to kick the bad apps downloading from the marketplace and make sure users feel safe with these apps. Some marketplaces like Apple's App Store are very strongly controlled with high standards, while some marketplaces such as Google Play are more loosely filtered.

Distribution-wise, I think all platform owners are trying very hard to sell devices and get their platform to more users.

But nowadays, all marketplaces have the same problem in which only the app developers can see: discovery. For the past few months, a lot of developers are trying hard to get their app featured on the marketplace's frontpage using their personal connection to the platform owners, some even don't mind paying to get under the spotlight.

Their objective is to get their app to be featured on the front page of the marketplace. They can always use other methods to promote their apps outside of the marketplace, but that means the marketplace isn't doing one of its main jobs. Nobody's going to go as deep as the 10th page on the search results to find cool apps, they look on the frontpage and MAYBE the 2nd and 3rd page. It's different if the user knows exactly what they're looking for, they can always search and find the app.

This situation is similar to Hollywood's film industry, where a film is counting on the earnings on the first weekend of premiere. It's "Make it or break it" game. Of course there's always an exception, but generally speaking, if an app doesn't get enough downloads in the first month or so since they were launched, they are done. And not necessarily because their app sucks, in some cases they just don't get enough people discover their app.

From the platform owner's side, of course it's hard to promote all the hundreds of apps under their platform but whoever can crack the code and give developers the same fighting chance as another can get the support from developers. In this game, it's better to have hundreds of developers making hundreds of thousands of dollars, rather than 5 developers making millions of dollars.