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How many companies provide SDKs/APIs for mobile developers, world wide?
Hello! Thanks for your question about how many companies develop and sell SDKs/APIs to mobile developers worldwide. In short, there are over 1000 SDKs and more than 16,700 public APIs. There are 403 SDK development companies and 18 API management companies listed in Crunchbase. That said, pretty much every advertising and marketing company that offers website design now offers customized application program interface (API) to assist their business clients in creating mobile apps for their business. According to IbisWorld, there are approximately 370,000 advertising agencies in the world. Below you will find a deep dive of my findings.
METHODOLOGY
As a market sizing exercise, I first wanted to search databases of all the SDKs and APIs available in the market. I used Mobbo and ProgrammableWeb for this research. Next, I wanted to get a sense of the general market and searched news sources for SDK and API developers which led to discovery of a new and growing market with over 500 new start-ups focusing on this and also that API development is relatively widely adopted and used by most mobile developers.
Finally, I hoped to identify the companies that existed in this space. Here, I turned to Crunchbase and found 403 SDK developer companies and 18 API management companies. Please see the findings below.
FINDINGS
A. API
1. Ad Agencies
As you probably already know, SDKs are compromised of a complete set of APIs that allow the app to perform most actions. An API, on the other hand, is just a series of related methods that may be good for a specific purpose. There are a lot of companies that produce APIs as simple tools for companies to convert their website to a mobile app. This is a large growing revenue stream for online marketing companies. Most web design marketing companies offer API design services for their clients (According to Ibis, there are approximately 370,000 advertising agencies in the world) .
Interesting facts to this include:
- These agencies are paid by their clients to "customize" a public API for their client's website use.
- Most APIs are free for mobile developers because have separate revenue streams:
2. API Management Companies
Another business model is the API Management Company that manages the data that is sold through the API itself. There are currently 18 API management companies listed in Crunchbase.
SDKs
You will also probably know that most APIs and SDKs are free because they want the user to use them as a conduit to another revenue stream. Mobbo, a comprehensive mobile app market analysis database, track over 1000 Android and iOS SDKs within the mobile app marketplace, most of them are free.
There are 3,906,230 android apps and 2,494,000 iOS apps listed using SDKs in Mobbo. On average, an iOS app contains 7 third party code libraries (SDK/APIs). These include:
- Multiple analytics and behavior tracking
- Ad serving (networks, meditation, offerwalls, video, etc.)
- A/B testing
- Social (leaderboards, performance measurement, push notifications, Facebook, Twitter etc.)
From this search, I found a news source reference that more than 500 SDK startups and Enterprise IT companies have surfaced since 2009 because "most of the supporting infrastructure for app developers resides within 3rd party developer tools, rather than within the platform itself." This leads to the assumption that this market will continue to grow as mobile app development increases.
I then searched on Crunchbase, a research database on industry trends, investments, and news, and found a simple search of SDKs produced a list of 403 companies in their search results and 18 API management companies.
CONCLUSION
If you want a comprehensive market size that includes online marketing and advertising companies that offer website services, there are 370,421 companies that sell API/SDK based products to mobile developers. Otherwise, I would highlight the 421 companies listed in Crunchbase as SDK and API development and management companies.
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