App developer launches analytics company

Application developer Flurry today launched its free mobile application analytics service for other developers to pave a path to monetization at the app layer.

The idea is that by knowing how, where, when and by whom mobile apps are used, developers will be able to create refine future apps and attract advertisers to fund the services. Like its Web-tracking counterparts, Omniture and Bango, Flurry Analytics first version can track both technical and performance metrics – such as what devices, what carriers and the capability matrix of the devices – and usage metrics, including the number of sessions, number of users, number of new users, average session length and interval or what country the user is from. The next iteration will add behavioral tracking as well.

As an app developer, the vendor introduced Flurrymail and Flurryfeed, a direct-to-consumer email client and RSS reader designed to give any handset Smartphone functionality. With more than three million downloads on 1,200 handsets but no info beyond that, the company turned its focus to building out a technology to track the app in action. The tools Flurry came up with actually turned out to be a better business opportunity than the app itself, according to Peter Farago, Flurry’s vice president of marketing.

“When we talked to the developer community, we shared with them our challenges and they shared their challenges,” Farago said. “We found out the stuff we’ve solved was really desirable and a big pain point for a lot of guys. Some [developers] don’t really know what’s going on with their application once it’s launched. They’ll basically distribute their app into the wild, and it goes into a black box once a consumer downloads it. In fact, they don’t even know if the download to the phone is successful, and they further don’t know if launching the application was successful, or if it failed, they don’t know why.”