Just a couple days ago, Yahoo announced that it would be purchasing Flurry, a mobile analytics, monetization, and advertising company. This is big news for a lot of reasons.
To start, congrats to the Flurry team—well done! This is undoubtedly one of the most exciting times in the team’s history and I’m excited about the acquisition. Even though Flurry focuses more on consumer apps than they do on the enterprise app space, this shows continued focus on the mobile app space (just like Apple’s purchase of Testflight), which, if you ask us, is always great news.
Yahoo’s acquisition of Flurry also points towards another important trend in mobile apps: analytics. Sure, they’re doing it mostly for consumers, but in all cases, companies still need to be aware of analytics if they want to develop better apps and ultimately, track ROI. No matter whether you’re an enterprise developing an in-house app or a consumer brand developing an app to streamline customer experience, you can’t know how effective your app is without analytics.
All of that said, Flurry’s sale does bring up a worrying point: data privacy. One of Flurry’s biggest ‘selling’ points for companies is that it’s free. Sort of. Flurry’s entire model is built off of generating ad revenue from the data they get from all of their customers, and now, all of that data is in the hands of Yahoo. That’s fine, of course, and it’s great for customers like indie developers or Fortune 500 companies building consumer apps, but this absorption by Yahoo does leave some questions as to how private data will be, and how it will be used now that it’s a part of Yahoo’s larger ecosystem.
This may not be as big of an issue for consumer apps, but is absolutely something to worry about in the enterprise. With a platform like App47, all of the data that’s collected through our platform—namely our app store and analytics—belongs to you. We won’t do anything to jeopardize your privacy, we don’t derive revenue through the use of your data (that’s why our platform isn’t free), and your privacy is an important concern of ours.
Whether you’re managing your app with Flurry or not, this should serve as a reminder to always be careful about what’s done with your (and your customers’) data. Privacy matters.
We’re very happy for Flurry, and for Yahoo—but we hope that this can start a conversation about app data usage in the enterprise and how you know your data is private.
