It's another better late than never situation for Yahoo, which is now pitching to mobile developers its suite of tools and the insights the software offers. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer opened up the dialog with mobile app developers during her company's inaugural Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Yahoo and Twitter's positions in the mobile world is much different from that of Google and Apple, which own and maintain the world's most popular mobile operating systems. Twitter began engaging mobile app developers with it Fabric application programming interface (API) at it first developer's conference back in 2014, while Yahoo is looking to put to work the collection of tools it already has.
Mayer pointed to the rise in revenue from mobile devices, which rocketed from negligible figures when she first took on the role of CEO to now grossing about $1.26 billion annually. Yahoo mobile advertising business, which is benefiting from the December 2014 purchase of ad-deliver platform BrightRoll, now ranks third in the world, according to Mayer.
The Yahoo Mobile Developer suite wraps five of Yahoo's analytics and publishing tools into a repository, which can be used to gain insights on Yahoo users and put together packages of ads for them.
Yahoo is encouraging developers to leverage its Flurry analytics platform, which Prashant Fuloria, Yahoo's senior VP of Advertising Products, says has a "deep understanding" of the needs of mobile developers.
"Since our investment in Flurry, we have been hard at work integrating the best of both companies, and now BrightRoll, to create comprehensive suite of solutions for developers," says Fuloria.
The Yahoo Developer Suite's tools include the following:
Flurry Analytics Explorer - This software development kit (SDK) delivers insights on users without the need to write code, compile it or construct queries. The explorer lays out insights in infographic form and generates new information in a matter of seconds.
Flurry Pulse - Expanding on the Flurry SDK, Pulse enables developers to share, or "push," insights with partner.
Yahoo App Publishing - It's the same platform Yahoo uses to deliver ads and monetize its own mobile apps, now strengthen with BrightRoll and Yahoo Gemini and Flurry Analytics.
Yahoo Search in Apps - Developers can integrate Yahoo's Search into their software, allowing users to scour the web without having to step outside of the apps.
Yahoo App Marketing - Channeling the power of Yahoo Gemini, the app marketing tool enables developers to track app installs and find customers that fit their app's demographics.
