App Annie buys Mobidia to combine app download and app usage analytics in 60 countries

App Annie has long offered an industry-leading app download analytics product. Today the company announced an acquisition that will combine those download and revenue numbers with actual app usage data.

App Annie has acquired Vancouver-based app usage firm Mobidia for an undisclosed mix of cash and stock. The result could be described as a juggernaut.

“We’re combining the two best technologies in the world,” App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt told me earlier this week. “In our analytics space we’re by far the biggest competitor, and in app usage data [Mobidia] was one of the biggest players … which puts us in a pretty strong position.”

App Annie’s existing product aggregates statistics on downloads, revenue, mobile user demographics, and more from over 700,000 apps by connecting to the various app store platforms, with the app publishers’ permission. Mobidia, however, uses a widely downloaded app to get an inside view of usage data right on mobile devices, gaining insider statistics on over 200,000 apps.

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That usage data includes metrics such as number of users, time spent in the app, number of sessions, retention rates, data transmission levelts, and overall penetration of apps. Mobidia claims to be the biggest provider of that kind of data with the largest global sample of users, mostly through apps like My Data Manager that query what other apps are running in the background and monitor network usage and data consumption.

Above: How Mobidia describes its own data product

Image Credit: John Koetsier

App Annie raised $55 million in a series D early this year, and it was precisely for moments like this.

“We’ve always had this idea to go into bigger scale and expand out of the U.S.,” Schmitt said. “At one point, we thought: Why not go even faster? We did this fundraising to give us the ability to do this kind of acquisition, and it’s a very complementary technology.”

Schmitt is very clear about where App Annie will compete and where it won’t, saying that the company does not do in-app analytics but instead focuses on aggregation. The new functionality from the acquisition has already been integrated into App Annie’s product and will be available today.

The result is that mobile publishers can get a very detailed and fine-grained look inside the download, revenue, usage, and retention rates of their key competitors. That helps in benchmarking your own performance, of course, in building competitive strategy and tactics, and in acquisition discussions.

App Annie had recently added Audience Intelligence to provide demographic information on mobile app users. This will add actual behavior data to the information that the company can sell.

The other major benefit?

In an increasingly international industry, App Annie will now be able to offer mobile data products based on information from 60 countries around the globe.

Mobidia is a 10-year-old company with 30 employees. It has only been selling mobile data for three years, however, suggesting a few pivots in its history. The company and its employees will be staying in Vancouver, and will become App Annie Vancouver.