tldr: We downloaded 10,000 mobile apps this year and we’re sharing insights on how we found them, examined them, lessons we learned about building apps, and a heuristic checklist for how not to screw up your own mobile app dev.

This year, Brian and I downloaded over 10,000 mobile apps. We learned a lot about building apps and basic do’s and don’t’s in the process. It was part of the main inspiration for building LinkTexting, a simple SMS text-to-download form builder for mobile app landing pages.

Every landing page for a mobile app should have a simple way to onboard users. That’s what we offer. http://linktexting.com

These are simply ways to make your life a little easier along the way. There are no hacks that yield long term value.

The road to a truly high quality mobile app product is paved in the sweat, blood, and tears of engineering along with hundreds to thousands of hours of talking to users.

The mobile app marketplace is one of the most interesting ones Brian and I had ever set out to explore.

500+ new apps daily.

Every day 500+ apps are released into the marketplace. When we met new people in social settings we’d often ask them what obscure apps they like using the most, especially foreigners because they have access to foreign app stores.

That’s us downloading apps.

We spent $1200 on mobile apps.

We each have our own reasons. Brian has a mobile analytics venture and I think technology is beautiful.

Some of our favorite paid apps are SayHi Translate, Dropcam, Telegram, Venmo, 1Password, Docusign, UX Companion, Timbre, AppStatics, Streak(CRM app), and Helpouts.

How we decided which apps to examine.

These are some of the tools we used.