App developers for Windows Phones should pay more attention to low-memory smartphones reveals Microsoft's analysis.
According to statistics released by Microsoft, nearly 71 percent of app downloads from the Windows Store are for "low-memory devices." Therefore, Microsoft advises app developers focus more and create applications for the Windows Phone platform that are optimized for and cater to these low-memory smartphones.
The low-memory smartphones are basically devices that on Windows Phone 7.x platform have 256MB of RAM or less. However, low-memory devices that operate on the Windows Phone 8.x platform have 512MB of RAM or less.
"With 71% of downloads now coming from low-memory devices, you can more than double your potential market by optimizing your app to run on low memory devices. If that's not possible, consider creating a version with lower memory requirements to offer alongside your primary apps," suggests Microsoft in its Windows Phone blog.
By comparison, only 29 percent of the downloads were for high-memory smartphones on the platform.
The Lumia 520 is the most popular Windows Phone on the basis of usage. This smartphone accounts for nearly 25 percent of the app downloads, which is indicative of the fact that developers would do well to focus on apps for smartphones that have low configuration and RAM.
The adoption trends reveal that Windows Phone 8.1 is the most uses OS for Windows. The platform accounted for nearly 65 percent downloads in 2014, compared to less than 5 percent from Windows Phone 7.x devices. Therefore, this trend suggests that app developers should focus on creating apps for the Windows Phone 8.1 OS primarily.
For Windows Phone devices, games were the most popular app downloads, then Tools and Productivity, music and videos, social and photos rounding the top five.
If developers were to take these statistics into consideration, then creating games would make the most business sense.
Developers would also do well to include other languages apart from English to increase the reach of their apps. Microsoft reveals that simply suing English tantamount to 25 percent reach to Windows Phone customers, whereas the inclusion of Brazilian, Spanish, Mandarin, Portuguese and Russian will increase the reach to over 50 percent of the customers.
