Reports come and go about the app economy and the tide seems to have changed from “the revenue potential is great” to “the revenue potential is rubbish”. Gartner are predicting that only 0.01% of developers will make any money from their work by 2018. I’m not a huge advocate of market research reports, it’s hard enough trying to forecast one year out let alone four.

It’s not a case that the app economy is dead, you just have to think of ways of upscaling the revenue. In-app purchases obviously springs to mind but if you can collate user behaviour and have a market to sell that on to, well that’s even better.

Your metric data is hot property, firstly to you and potentially to someone else. With uVoucher of old I could track customer behaviour within the phone. Which vouchers were being read, the time it took for a customer to respond to reading, redemption if it did or didn’t happen. From this the retailer was building a picture of which customers were actually responding to the brand and who to target in future offers.

It was never about making money from the app, it was about making it from everything beyond that only I was three years too early….