Marissa Mayer unveiled the Yahoo Mobile Development Suite  at Yahoo's inaugural Mobile Developer Conference, held on February 19th in San Francisco. How will it help you?

Here we'll tell you what it is but is is perhaps tempting to start with "who?"

Yahoo isn't exactly top of most developers agenda and while the event was a sell out there were only around 1,000 attendees at the one-day event.

In March 2014 we reported Yahoo Launches Games Network,a new platform for third-party game developers with facilities for authenticating players, charging for games, and social sharing. In December the Yahoo Classic Games that was launched as part of the platform was closed down but users were reassured there was "over 100" games still available to play - not an impressive total. 

So will this new initiative be any more attractive? 

As an SDK the Mobile Development Suite initially appears a bit thin. This is not an SDK for building apps but instead one for existing apps. In fact most of what it does can be achieved by copying and pasting a few lines of code. This isn't in itself bad but a whole conference for something this simple?

However, the result could be lucrative as the suite includes three components concerned with monetization:

• Yahoo App Publishing for deploying high-quality native, video and display ads using the combined capabilities of Yahoo Gemini, BrightRoll and Flurry.
  
  
• Yahoo App Marketing for promoting apps across Yahoo’s network of premium content, Tumblr and thousands of mobile apps.
  
  
• Yahoo Search in Apps for integrating Yahoo Search directly into apps, creating an additional monetization channel

The other two components of the suite are Flurry Analytics with Explorer, an update to the existing Flurry Analytics that introduces a new exploration interface:

and Flurry Pulse, which lets you send app data to partners with a single SDK.

Ah-ha!

The idea that Yahoo now has a mobile developer suite now makes sense - Yahoo has Flurry - the mobile analytics, monetization, and advertising company which joined Yahoo in August 2014 - and brought with it mobile developers.

At the time 170,000 developers used Flurry Analytics and Flurry recorded app activity from 1.4 billion devices monthly or 5.5 billion app sessions per day with Flurry Analytics is in 7 apps per device on average. On the other side of the equation 8,000 publishers monetize with Flurry.

Yahoo's acquisition of the video advertising BrightRoll last November and its adoption by Firefox as the default search engine in the United States are two more reasons for developers to have more confidence in it. 

So perhaps Yahoo ... who? can be relegated to history.  

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