News

Yahoo Tells Devs Mobile Is All About Apps, Not Web

• By David Ramel
• August 28, 2015

Apps continue to beat up the browser in the mobile world, Yahoo said at its developer conference this week, citing statistics from its Flurry Analytics tool.

Yahoo said the same thing almost a year and a half ago, but this week updated the stats and pointed to an even greater divide between apps and browser usage on mobile.

"Today only 10 percent of the time spent on mobile is spent in the browser, down from 14 percent a year ago," said exec Simon Khalaf in a blog post Wednesday. "The rest of the time, 90 percent, is spent in apps. Effectively, the browser has been sidelined on mobile."

Along with guiding developers as to where they should focus their mobile efforts, the information has important consequences for content producers, Khalaf said. "If mobile users aren't using browsers, the media industry will have to look for new approaches to content discovery and traffic acquisition." Conveniently, Flurry has noted it has "built solutions to help apps get discovered and acquire traffic."

2015 Flurry Analytics Stats

2014 Flurry Analytics Stats

And along with the guidance for developers, Yahoo announced updates to its Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite designed to help them follow through, including free real-time metrics via Flurry that get updated every 15 seconds. "Real-time metrics will work at any scale, whether a developer has a hundred, a thousand or a billion users," Khalaf said.

Developers can also spread the word about their apps through Tumblr with one click, giving users of the microblogging platform who read the post the option of seamlessly downloading the app. "App developers will also be able to see engagement on content shared by their users, such as how many times it has been reblogged, clicked on or liked," Khalaf said.

Yahoo is also seeking to help developers integrate advertising into their apps with native video ads. "Yahoo can now help developers integrate an advertising solution into their app that is designed to increase monetization by combining native, the best performing ad format, with video, the best performing ad content," Khalaf said.