Game studio Rocket Jump revealed that Mini Golf Matchup had reached the 10 million downloads mark in its first month of release.

Mini Golf Matchup, which launched at the beginning of March, grabbed the No. 1 spot on the top free iPhone apps chart in 28 countries eight hours after it hit the Apple App Store. In the first seven days, the game had 135,000 four and a half star average reviews, which was the most that any game ever received in that time span, says Scopely co-founder and CEO Walter Driver. A huge factor in the early success can be attributed to Los Angeles-based Scopely. Mini Golf Matchup is the first game published by Scopely, which has released four games in total.

“It was a big validation of our ability to work with external teams to create large franchises,” Driver says.

Driver tells Inside Mobile Apps that he doesn’t see his company, which has 55 employees, as a game studio, but rather an interactive content company for smartphones and tablets.

“We started Scopely to be the first mobile-first interactive entertainment network, he says. “We see ourselves as being able to build the first network like a TV network. Like Fox doesn’t create all of its own content. It has both internal studios and external studios and are able to systematically determine what content people want to consume and be able to broadcast that to a large audience and be able to bring premium advertising to the table around that content on a regular basis.”

Driver says Scopely is trying to build an increasingly larger audience with each game it launches. He then describes Scopely as “the HBO of mobile games.” (more…)

App monetization platform Burstly today announced that it has restructured the company into an end-to-end mobile app development solution for developers. Now Burstly, which was founded in 2009, will be offering its app testing platform TestFlight, app analytics tool FlightPath and app monetization service SkyRocket (formally the Burstly monetization platform) to all developers, not just for some of the largest apps in the world.

“For the first time, we are our opening up our monetization platform to all mobile developers and publishers through the launch of SkyRocket,” said Evan Rifkin, CEO of Burstly, in a statement. “With Burstly, developers now have the option of using a full suite of integrated services which are incredibly powerful when mixed together, or the flexibility to use each service on its own.”

With the opening of its products to all developers, the Santa Monica, Calif.-headquartered company, which is used by some of the top mobile publishers including Electronic Arts, Rovio, Zynga, and more, will be allowing developers to now create custom segments of users in FlightPath and then using those segments to create different monetization experiences in SkyRocket. For example, developers can choose to not display ads to valuable users, or apologize to users which have experience an app crash by giving away virtual currency in a game. Burstly is now becoming a service that can possibly compete on a level with the likes of Tapjoy, PlayHaven, Millennial Media and more.

Before today’s announcement, Burstly was last making news when it opened its TestFlight for Android private beta to all users, and in just 45 days of closed beta, 5,000 developers uploaded 4,500 apps which have seen more than 50,000 downloads. Burstly also recently announced the private beta launch of FlightPath, its mobile analytics service for mobile app developers, featuring real-time data that can be customized and segmented to the developer’s liking.

At Google I/O today in San Francisco, head of search and discovery for Google Play Ankit Jain detailed how developers can get their apps discovered through search and other mechanisms on the Google Play app store.

“We’ve never discussed our search for Google Play until today,” Jain said.

Jain first explained major install sources for apps including browsing discovery features and search queries. Some browsing discovery features were charts (Editors’ picks, top free apps, etc.), personalized recommendations (a feature announced at Google I/O 2012), and related/cross-sell (“users also viewed” and “users also installed”). Jain then detailed two kinds of search queries — categorical and navigational. Categorical queries are broad search terms such as “free games,” “train schedules,” and “multiplayer games,” while navigational queries are exact search terms like “Angry Birds,” Hotel Tonight,” and “Beautylish.”

“For the average app, search actually makes up the vast majority of installs,” he added.

To follow up his statement, Jain reveals some Google Play search data for the first time. He said 12 percent of daily active users (DAU) search for apps daily, 50 percent of DAU search for apps weekly and Google sees six million unique phrases searched monthly. (more…)

Parse, the cloud-based app development platform Facebook agreed to acquire in late April, today announced its latest product: Parse Hosting.

Parse Hosting enables developers to create a web presence for their app without having to manage their own servers or turn to another third party. Previously, Parse offered ways for developers to store their mobile app’s data in the cloud but didn’t host web apps or landing pages on the web for them until now. Parse says developers can deploy their web presence through Parse Hosting with only a single command.

Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar tells us that though the company has been focused on mobile first, many developers have a need for web hosting, and otherwise they have had to use yet another third-party platform.

“It’s a big piece of product infrastructure we’ve had a lot of demand for,” Sukhar says of Cloud Hosting.

The Facebook deal announced April 25 hasn’t closed yet, but the social network says it plans to keep Parse in operation. Sukhar says that the timing of today’s launch wasn’t planned as a follow-up to acquisition announcement, but that it is “symbolic” of the company’s focus on continuing to ship products.

“There are some folks that are a bit worried that the Parse platform will contract rather than expand,” Sukhar says. “I think this [launch] is evidence that Parse isn’t going anywhere.”

He says joining Facebook will allow Parse to grow more quickly in terms of hiring and innovation. Although Parse is a different type of acquisition than most Facebook has made in the past, which are typically for talent and not sustaining standalone products, Sukhar says getting to know the Facebook team and seeing their passion for the product made him confident that Parse would be at home under Facebook.

Currently, Parse has a free model, a $199 model and an enterprise level for its backend services, data storage, social integration tools and other features to make it easier for developers to build and scale apps across different platforms.

To learn more about this topic, join us at Inside Social Apps in San Francisco June 6-7. One of our Vendor Workshops is “Scaling Social Engagement With The Cloud.” SoftLayer Development Community Advocate Phil Jackson will examine what gaming, mobile and social media developers need to consider when building out their infrastructures, including how to deal with massive influxes of users – and what decisions need to be made to make it not only possible, but economical.

Editor’s note: On April 25, Facebook announced an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform providing tools for mobile app developers. The mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) company could be used by Facebook to make it easy for mobile developers to integrate its SDK and use Facebook login, Open Graph and other components of its platform. And with the recently completed acquisition of advertising platform Atlas, we speculated last week that Parse and Atlas could be made — or some parts of it — free to most advertisers and developers to bring them deeper into Facebook’s ecosystem, ultimately driving ad revenue. Ty Amell, founder and CEO at StackMob, a cloud-based mobile application development platform, explains why Facebook has a big problem on its hands, regarding the steep cost of its platform for developers that’s causing them to leave the platform for mobile. In an effort to stop the exodus, Amell elaborates why Facebook agreed to acquire Parse.

The Facebook acquisition is just the latest move of large public companies taking long hard looks at the MBaaS and API industries. Salesforce recently launched their mobile services platform, Microsoft is in preview with mobile services on Azure and Intel recently bought Mashery for $180 million. Not to mention Layer 7 being acquired by CA Technologies.

With Facebook’s most recent acquisition, does this mean Facebook is moving into the MBaaS space? The short answer: not necessarily. Facebook has a big problem — many of the game publishers that made money for Facebook are starting to leave the platform. While Apple can still get away with charging a 30 percent commission to app developers, Facebook is having a hard time justifying those types of commissions. Apple’s App Store is on rocket ship growth trajectory while Facebook’s platform growth may have plateaued. Without that growth, publishers are having a hard time justifying the steep cost of Facebook’s platform. Public companies like Zynga are having a hard time reaching earnings projections as more and more users move away from Facebook in preference of mobile. (more…)

Fiksu today reported a steady landscape for daily download volumes and mobile app marketing costs in its March 2013 Index. The user acquisition and marketing company also announced that its Fiksu Mobile App Marketing Platform has now registered 100 billion app user actions and driven more than one billion app downloads.

Fiksu reported a cost per loyal user increase of 5 percent, or $0.07, to $1.36, from $1.29 in February’s Index. Marketing costs are up by approximately 5 percent year-over-year when compared to costs of $1.30 per loyal user in March 2012′s Index. The Boston-based company, which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free iPhone apps in the U.S., noted a 4 percent decline in daily mobile app downloads, moving from 5.20 million daily downloads in February to 5.02 million downloads in March. Although daily download volumes remained steady month-over-month, volumes were up 12 percent year-over-year from March 2012′s figure of 4.45 million daily downloads.

“The ‘new normal‘ continued in March, which was good news for mobile app marketers,” says Micah Adler, CEO of Fiksu, in a statement. “Inventory has increased but costs have held steady, reflecting a maturity in the overall quality of apps and their ability to engage users. Despite the last few steady months, marketers must always be prepared for the ebbs and flows that inevitably happen in the complex app ecosystem.”

For the purpose Fiksu’s Indexes, the company denotes a loyal user as a person who open an app three or more times. These reports are meant to help mobile app marketers gauge their performance against industry trends.

Facebook today announced an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform providing tools for mobile app developers.

Parse offers backend services, data storage, social integration tools and other features to make it easier for developers to build apps across different platforms that scale more efficiently.

Facebook is buying Parse outright, meaning this is more than the typical talent deals Facebook makes. Parse will continue to operate and offer its services. Currently, it has a free model, a $199 model and an enterprise level. The company says there are 60,000 apps integrated with Parse’s platform.

Facebook Director of Developer Products Doug Purdy wrote in a developer blog post today:

“We want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.”

Parse is one of 10 recently named Facebook Technology Partners, which is similar to the Preferred Marketing Developer program, but focused on technical solutions for developers rather than marketers.

Parse says the deal with Facebook will not change existing customers’ contracts or affect their apps in any way. Parse apps will not be required to use Facebook functionality.

However, what Facebook can do with Parse is make it really easy for mobile developers to integrate its SDK and use Facebook login, Open Graph and other components of its platform. Basically a mobile app developer could potentially save time and money without having to redevelop their own app’s backend to access Facebook services. With this week’s acqui-hire of the team behind Spaceport — a cross-platform development framework – and now the Parse acquisition, Facebook seems to be making key moves to improve its mobile app platform.

Although Parse hadn’t disclosed its financials before it was acquired, selling backend services could be a new healthy stream of revenue for the social network, particularly as its revenue growth from games payments declines. It’s also possible that Facebook could make Parse available for free, making it more universal among developers so that it can get more of them building on their platform and buying ads. This could hurt others in the space such as Stackmob, Kinvey and Kii, which use a freemium model like Parse does currently.

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Facebook.

In an effort to work more closely with its European publishers, mobile game cross-promotion service Chartboost today announced that it has opened its first international office in Amsterdam, with a team of five led by Dutch game development veteran Ilja Goossens.

“Chartboost has been global since day one, and probably the fact that I’m European makes the whole company be more international,” Maria Alegre, CEO of Chartboost, told Inside Mobile Apps. “Right now probably one-third of our developers are European, so it made sense for us to have a team there and be closer to them.”

Alegre says the company chose Amsterdam because of the convenient airport connection between the city and San Francisco, where Chartboost is currently headquartered. Amsterdam is also the city that has easy access to locations where many of its top European game development customers reside including Supercell, King, Wooga, NaturalMotion and Rovio.

“Europe is a leader in mobile gaming,” she says. “I don’t know why it took us so long to get there.” (more…)

China’s largest web company Tencent recently launched a TV commercial campaign for its messaging app WeChat which targets the Singaporen market.

The TV commercial features two Taiwanese celebrities — Alan Luo Zhi-Xiang and Raine Yang. The commercial, which can be seen here, shows the two stars demonstrating some functions of the app, including a voice recognition functionality and stickers, a special emoji. The same TV commercial was used in Taiwan. The TV spot will air on free-to-air channels including Channel 8, Channel U, W drama and E-City starting this week.

Louis Song, country manager of Tencent’s international business group for Malaysia and Singapore, said the Chinese web giant hopes to increase the app’s presence and market share in the country.

“Singapore is a very strong market like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand,” he says. “We are witnessing a sturdy growth in mobile application platforms.”

At the 2013 Boao Forum For Asia in early April, Tencent president Martin Lau revealed that WeChat now has more than 40 million overseas users. In total, WeChat last reported that its user base was more than 300 million. Compared to other messaging apps in the Asian markets, Line Corp.’s Line currently has 120 million users, up by 20 million since January, and South Korean KakaoTalk has 70 million users. In the U.S., messaging app giants like WhatsApp haven’t released user base figures, but its estimated to be as high as 300 million, and Kik Messenger has officially said it now has more than 50 million registered users.

As Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston recently told Inside Mobile Apps, “messaging is the killer app in mobile.” Adding that whoever wins messaging will win this era of computing. While the messaging market remains very fragmented, WeChat making a market play in Singapore is another sign of a company wanting to spread its reach and become a global player in messenging.

Editor’s Note: Earlier this week, Apple booted out app discovery service AppGratis, which promotes paid apps by offering one for free everyday, from the Apple App Store for violating clause 2.25 of Apple’s App Review Guidelines, which states that “Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.” The app also violated clause 5.6, which states that “Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.” VentureBeat reported that Apple reached out to AppGratis last Friday, informing the company that it was welcome to change its app and resubmit it. AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat said in a company blog post that there were no discussions between Apple and AppGratis in advance of the Cupertino, Calif.-headquartered corporation removing the app. Dawlat (who also explained the full story of how AppGratis got pulled) said he did eventually speak with an Apple employee over the phone and does want to speak further with Apple.

With all that said, in today’s guest post from Noya Polliack, marketing director at Side-Kick Games, a developer of family and mid-core games, says that despite discoverability being a huge issue for app developers in the crowded mobile app market, AppGratis is the latest example of Apple being keen on clamping down on any apps that violate its policies.

Six months after adding clause 2.25 to Apple’s App Review Guidelines, AppGratis finds itself outside of the best store in town – Apple’s App Store.

AppGratis is the second app banned from the App Store due to the new guidelines which restrict apps from providing pure app promotion services. These Apps usually function as app recommendation services and/or alert users when discounts are available. Among this type of apps are FreeAppADay, Appoday, Daily App Dream, Appsfire and more. Earlier in December, the popular AppShopper app was removed from the Apple App Store.

Both AppGratis and AppShopper offered developers burst campaigns — massive traffic in a short period of time. The result of these campaigns is usually high ranking in the Apple App Store for a few days. This method of app promotion is used by many developers in order to overcome the number one problem in the crowded app market today — discoverability.

At the moment there are still plenty of other discovery apps, which offer third-party promotions. While Apple’s next move is unknown, it’s definitely an issue that app developers should address.

Is Apple acting in the users’ best interest?

One of the reasons the new clause was added is that by attracting millions of users, third-party aggregators like AppGratis allow a way for developers to spend their way to the top 25, violating the Apple App Store’s purity. However, big game development studios that can afford to create a marketing buzz before they launch their app can be accused of doing just the same. While these well known studios get the media’s attention and use their apps portfolio to cross promote their new app, indie developers with a low marketing budget and a single app stay behind. Sadly, the outcome is that many new great apps are not visible to iOS users.

It’s also important to remember that burst campaigns can be executed using different user acquisition tactics such as web-based affiliate networks, ad networks and user acquisition networks. Since all of these sources use in-app ads to promote other apps, we can expect to see the mobile ads market growing faster than expected.

As Apple’s ranking algorithm remains a mystery, it’s known that the number of downloads plays a key factor in Apple’s app store ranking. Since app installs can be acquired one way or another, it only seems fair that users’ experience and rating will have a much stronger influence on apps’ ranking.

Looking at Apple’s latest moves — adding clause 2.25, clamping down on incentivized apps downloads, changing the Apple App Store’s look and the unknown magic formula of how to get featured — it’s clear that Apple is keen to stay “hands on” picking the “right” apps for its users.