Zombies are attacking the App Store, Android is catching up with iOS, Liam Neeson is taking revenge on the offender - and other news of the week for a mobile developer

Zombie Apocalypse on the App Store scale

“The end of the App Store” —this is how dramatic the forecast by the company Adjust provides . According to analysts, new applications year after year it is becoming increasingly difficult to get into the top lists of the store, which makes them virtually invisible to users.

Applications that almost never catch the eye of the user, in the Adjust are called zombie applications, they should, according to analysts, cause the App Store to die soon. The number of zombie applications from the beginning of the year to the present has risen from 74% to 82.8%.
')
“If this trend continues, and most likely it will be, then by the end of the year we will see less than 10% of applications that can organically attract users. And among this share there will be only those applications that already have enough traffic, ”- says Christian Henschel, Adjust CEO. - “The App Store, as a source of organic downloads, has a limited resource.”

Judging by the growth rate of the market, among the “visible” applications soon there will only be projects with a big name and budgets.

Unity solved the problem of 64 bits

Unity reported in their blog about the release version of the Unity 4.6.2 engine with support for 64-bit architecture for iOS.

The release of the engine with support for 64-bit architecture is timed to the deadline set by Apple. After February 1, 2015, all applications downloaded to the App Store “from scratch” must support 64-bit code. And from June 1, 2015, all updates should be compiled with this requirement in mind.

Unity warns that there may be a number of problems with the new version of the engine. The new version of the engine involved technology IL2CPP. It will allow developers to create universal builds that support both 32-bit and 64-bit architecture.

Games, Stars and Super Bowls

The American Football Super Cup is the most significant event in the world of American sports and the most desired piece of airtime for advertisers. This year, as always, last year's record was broken by the number of viewers and the price of advertising: more than 114 million viewers had the opportunity to watch advertisements sold by channels in the amount of $ 331 million during the breaks.

The price of 30 seconds of the most expensive airtime this year was $ 4.2 million. And the most important thing for us is that among the 89 videos shown, there were
as many as three advertising large game projects. It turns out that the effectiveness of television advertising for mobile applications is rapidly growing, and therefore the projects themselves expand the audience.

So, the viewer was presented:


Liam Neeson (Angry_Neeson52), threatening the assassin in the Clash of Clans,


the deadpan and merciless Kate Upton in the Game of War commercial,


and simple and clear movie Heroes Charge.


PS For those who, after listening to the passionate tirade of Liam Neeson, decided that it was not good for a big actor to star in advertising games for a phone, we highly recommend viewing one of Al Pacino’s latest works .

App Annie Index survey results: 2014 Retrospective

App Annie provided an overview of the App Annie Index: 2014 Retrospective, where you can see changes in the mobile application market over the past year.
Although it is not news that the gap in monetization between Google Play and the App Store is still great and the advantage on the “apple” side, but by the end of 2014, Google Play almost reached the App Store level in 2013. The situation with downloads is slightly different, but rather Google Play has increased the gap from the App Store, despite the fact that both stores have grown over the past year.


The best indicators of revenue growth from mobile games in BRIC-markets: Brazil, China, India and Russia. Over the year, the total revenues of these regions increased 2.3 times. Although this is quite surprising, since the last quarter in Russia was pretty bad. Also, these regions showed the most active growth in downloads - they increased 1.4 times.
Leaders in revenue and downloads remain the same: Japan, South Korea and the United States - although the growth rate leaves much to be desired.


It is important to note that at the end of 2014 in the App Store Russia ranks 5th in downloads and 9th in revenue, and on Google Play - in 4th place in downloads and 10th in revenue. Pretty good performance, given the growth, despite the crisis, I wonder how this market will show itself in 2015.


The original study material also lists project and publisher tops for downloads and revenues. Most of the leaders are well known to everyone, but there are also unexpected companies or projects that fall into the top 10 of one category or another.

DAU-UP study results

Another study from DAU-UP shows that the ROI of games for Android at the end of 2014 was comparable to the return on investment of games on iOS. Against the background of a significant increase in ARPU in Android applications, advertising prices have risen quite weakly. At the end of 2015, ARPU Android games account for 65% of ARPU iOS games, but advertising costs are 20-50% cheaper than Android.
The very growth of Android ARPU in DAU-UP explains:
improving the quality of Android devices;
increased stability as well as Android quality and UI;
the migration of early followers (people purchasing a new product soon after its appearance on the market) on Android;
the continued distribution of Android devices among middle adopters, the main paying gaming audience;
Android's significant growth in Asia and the Latin American markets;
the emergence of an increasing number of projects that appear, first of all, on Android, and not on iOS.


************************************************** ************************************************** *****************************************
If you liked the material and you had time to evaluate the professionalism of the authors of this blog - there is an opportunity to join them. The KamaGames Studio website has a list of vacancies and information about our company. Let's do mobile games together!