Adam Marchick — CEO and Co-Founder at Kahuna

This is the first major move Yahoo has made that makes it relevant in mobile. Yahoo spent the first two years buying for mobile app companies to get more mobile DNA into the company (an expensive strategy), but the real play for Yahoo is not to own the world’s best mobile apps. Instead, it’s to be the best provider of tools for mobile monetization and app development. The Yahoo Mobile Development Suite, which has been built on the acquisition of Flurry, could derive real value for Yahoo Mobile. Yahoo is still quite a bit behind Google and Facebook, but Flurry’s 600,000 apps gives them a jumpstart. This is such a massive market that having any market share is a big deal. Going from zero market share to even 10% would be a major win for Yahoo, and make it a much more valuable company.

Here’s how I predict they will gain critical mass: Yahoo’s competitive edge is its ad technology and inventory, which will help them attract developers. Yahoo’s ad and search offerings can help mobile app developers effectively monetize their app while its compelling ad properties can give them a boost in the market. It’s possible that Yahoo will also start giving preferential treatment to apps built on their mobile development suite. Introducing a mobile development suite — one that capitalizes on their assets in ad technology and inventory — is a much more lightweight strategy to enter the mobile market than trying to develop a Yahoo! Phone and Yahoo! App store. Yahoo is taking a fast route to becoming relevant in mobile.

We’ll find out if mobile developers will ever use Yahoo as their development platform, but as long as the ad monetization works, mobile developers will add the SDK and give Yahoo that much needed mobile foothold.

Gideon Baldridge — Co-Founder at Attribution

From Yahoo’s perspective this is a great strategy, and there is no doubt that buying Flurry has given them a valuable tool to offer developers. Yahoo is pushing hard to get a foothold in mobile advertising. It looks like Yahoo’s strategy is to bundle their advertising SDK with Flurry and hope that app developers choose to use Yahoo ads because they already have the Yahoo SDK from using Flurry. If the advertising products they bundle with Flurry are the best products available, then this will work beautifully.

If their mobile advertising products are not the best tools avaialble, developers will balk at adding 10.4MB of Yahoo code just to use Flurry analytics. For comparison, the Flurry SDK loaded with Segment is less than a tenth of that size at 796KB. This is the fundamental problem with bundled software. It only works if all the software is good. When the excitement settles, the only thing that will matter is the quality of Yahoo’s mobile advertising products. App developers will use the best tools, bundled or not.

Adam Lovallo — Co-Founder at Grow.co

If nothing else, the Yahoo App Marketing combination should make it easier for marketers to understand what their options are when buying from Yahoo. Over the past 6–12 months the announcements out of Yahoo have been rather disjointed (ex: Tumblr announced the launch of their app install inventory in Nov 2014 while Yahoo proper had already been running app install inventory for months).

It also seems like a smart move that they are tapping into the self-serve demand via gemini off the bat since so many FB campaigns are run on a self serve basis through the Power Editor. The easier they can make it for a FB advertiser to port over campaigns to Gemini they better off they will be.

Robleh Jama — Founder at TinyHearts

I think this suite makes a lot of sense for Yahoo. It’s a smart strategy to lure developers with free tools so they can eventually buy ads. The tough part is going to be getting the attention of developers when there are literally hundreds of analytics and monetization options out there. I personally missed this announcement. I’m much more excited about the implications of things like Apple Watch or iOS 8 extensions. Facebook and Twitter are also putting out great developer tools like Parse and Fabric. It’s clear that Yahoo is playing catch up. With that said if the tools work, developers will adopt them and Yahoo will sell more ads.

Ramesh Padala — Founder & CEO at yogatailor

The announcement came as no surprise, especially with their recent acquisitions (Flurry, etc). The approach that Yahoo is taking is nothing new. Google did this with Google Analytics, Google AdSense, and Google AdWords. Facebook, not to be left behind, has formalized this with their whole “BUILD, GROW, MONETIZE” paradigm. The question is, will this really work for Yahoo?
The Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite claims to help the users with growth and monetization. I believe for Yahoo to influence this ecosystem, they need to focus more on helping developers with app growth and engagement. Monetization is definitely on the app developer’s mind but it typically comes later in the game. The earlier in the development cycle Yahoo gets in, the more they will have developers eating out of their hands.

Growth: The Yahoo Mobile Marketing Platform seems like an interesting avenue, especially if it can help developers get relevant and engaged users at reasonable prices. One could argue that a really engaged user who actually spreads the message about the app is priceless.

User Engagement/Development: The Flurry analytics platform has definitely taken off within the developer community. In addition to the usual vanity metrics, it enables developers and product managers to look deeper and really create engaging experiences.

What’s missing: Deeper feedback mechanisms that go back to the app, programmatically, are missing. Notifications are an easy win here and they are missing. What would be a killer feature is the user experience adapting based on the user’s interaction with the app, without having to wait for a whole new app update. With notifications and deep links becoming richer and more powerful, I feel like the Yahoo suite has a big hole here.
Another aspect that’s missing is a cloud infrastructure that can be used for computation and storage — a big thing for the new generation of developers who feel like even AWS is too barebones.

All said and done, I think Yahoo is making the right strategic moves. I see them making a few more acquisitions soon ☺