Mobile advertising network InMobi today announced the launch of App Publish, a free distribution platform that can publish an app to more than 130 Android app stores, with just a few clicks. This new product is a result of InMobi’s acquisition of mobile content management and distribution company Metaflow Solutions back in July 2012.
As Inside Mobile Apps readers and AppData users know from reading our weekly updated charts, Google Play is an important but also highly competitive platform, making discovery a challenge. Alternative channels like T Mobile, Mobango, Slide Me, and the many app stores based in territories like Korea and China can, cumulatively, drive billions of downloads. But different territories around the globe have different legal requirements, different platforms have different aesthetic and informational requirement, and managing these variables across many app stores can be quite a challenge.
InMobi’s App Publish platform offers to make this process much easier by allowing developers to launch and manage their apps on more than 130 app stores globally, all from a single dashboard.
“Once you’ve saturated Google Play, which is always the first stop for a developer, there’s a whole lot of other stores and many of the new guys aren’t aware of them,” InMobi director business development and former CEO of Metaflow Solutions Charles McLeod told us in an interview. “Maybe they know Amazon or Samsung, but there’s 200 other stores. We allow developers to get into these places that are just too costly, complex and time consuming. They get extra monetization, bigger reach, bigger communities.” Once the app is published, developers are also invited to use InMobi’s ad platform and its lifetime value platform InMobi LTVP.
If you’re publishing a free app, McLeod told us that, at least for the moment, the platform is completely free to use and doesn’t mandate any SDK. However, if you’re publishing a premium app, meaning it has a upfront purchase, InMobi takes a 20 percent cut of the net revenue. Over time, with some customers and large volume, that cost will decrease.
“You don’t have to signs 100 different contracts to get on these app stores,” vice president of marketing Shrikant G. Latkar told us. “We can give you that today. You can get 10 to 30 percent additional downloads for free, and it will take you 15 minutes on our website to sign up and submit. We even take care of translation.”
The translation is done via Microsoft translate, which McLeod admits is a quick and dirty way to do it, but it does the heavy lifting and is enough to get the app published. App Publish will also put developers in touch with vetted third parties that can help with more thorough localization, which has shown to greatly increase engagement.
InMobi has more than 800 employees, offices in 25 locations, a reach of more than 600 million unique users across the world, and deliver more than 100 billion ad impressions a month.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on today’s first quarter earnings call that mobile app install ads were “one of most important new ad products” the company offers.
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