Tech Report: App Developers Struggle To Stand Out

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) _ A two-day App Developer Conference wrapped up in San Francisco Thursday. It's a relatively new market that has grown furiously along with the rising popularity of smart phones within the past few years.

KCBS Technology Analyst Larry Magid Comments:

"A speaker at the conference said that for every 'Angry Birds' there's 1,000 angry developers," said KCBS Technology Analyst Larry Magid. "It's like restaurants or other businesses where there's going to be some that are wildly successful, many that are going to fail, and some that fall in the middle."

Magid said that what makes an app stand out is good playability, positive word of mouth and good marketing.

The app market brought in about $5.2 billion in 2010 to $58 billion in 2014.

Magid said that while the iPhone is still the most popular app platform, Android is quickly catching up. Nielsen research shows that the average iPhone owner has 48 apps, while the average Android owner has 36 apps.

"Unfortunately Apple has set it up so that it's not trivial to port your application. People have ways of doing it, but it's not like you can just write it once and then run it on both platforms, so developers really have to think about which one to go with," said Magid.

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