Over the past year it’s been a tremendous pleasure to meet and spend time with mobile developers around the globe. Their ideas and projects are incredibly diverse. However, no matter how varied, developers all share a common need to grow usage and retain users. This is particularly important as many developers aim to turn their apps into businesses, typically through a combination of mobile ads and in-app commerce.
In an effort to learn more about our users, we decided to take a look into where developers are actually building apps.
Looking at Flurry’s own usage data, we began by identifying projects created since the beginning of 2016, as these were new apps actively being built, tested, and in most cases, launched. The sun never sets on our Top Ten App Development Cities:
What about cases where app development is outsourced from one company to another? Taking the same set of projects from the first analysis, we looked at the geolocation of non-developers accessing Flurry. These users are the product managers, product marketers, and growth hackers working on mobile apps. While there are some minor differences in the ranking of a few markets, the non-technical users are largely from the same markets as the technical ones.
Clearly a tremendous number of new apps are being developed in India, and many non-developer users are based there, as well. The same can be said for the San Francisco Bay Area, London, and Hong Kong. But the biggest takeaway is while apps are built in regional pockets of innovation, development has truly gone global in an effort to capture a two-billion-user audience.