Mobile App Analytics Consolidation: Flurry and Pinch Media Merge

Flurry and Pinch Media are merging to form a strong Mobile App Analytics alliance. The combined company will keep the Flurry name. From their press release:

"As a combined company, Flurry and Pinch Media analytics services will be running on more than 80% of all iPhone, iPod Touch and Android handsets worldwide."

...

"In the near-term, the company's main priorities will be to seamlessly unify its service and significantly increase the analytics feature-set offered. The company will continue to offer its analytics service free of charge."

They claim to have their application tracking installed (via the apps using their services) on 50 million unique devices, measuring over 1 billion sessions per month. That is impressive indeed.

Dean over at Venture Beat notes that the company will have 20 people on staff, with 8 open positions, and hope to combine their services into one by the end of the next quarter. Regarding the business model, he further writes:

Both companies have launched widely used analytics services for the iPhone and Android phones, but they aren’t profitable yet. To monetize the data, Flurry recently launched AppCircle, a recommendation platform. Developers install it in their games and it analyzes a user’s taste in apps. Then it recommends apps for the user. These recommendations are likely to be highly useful because they’re based on the user’s past purchases. Flurry gets paid through a revenue sharing agreement with the developer.

They both have done a great job building out their products, and defining a new niche analytics industry. They will likely continue to innovate quickly, and work hard to find the right revenue stream. My 2 cents is they should look to expand the recommendation platform into a clever search mechanism. With some 400k apps expected through 2010, developers are going to need to be found, and today it's not easy, and Apple can't be the only winner out there.