The latest newsletter from development tools company Pinch Media answers some of the most common questions asked by iPhone developers such as “which iPhone OS version should I target”. I have shamelessly stolen the first chart of their newsletter to share it with you:

You can read the full report by clicking here.

After I published our iPhone analytics and monetization solutions matrix, Vishal Gurbuxani —one of Mobclix‘s co-founders— got in touch with us as he felt we had left out some unique features out of our matrix. Vishal was kind enough to walk me through their offering, highlighting what he believes are the five core differentiating features of Mobclix:

1. Event Logs: log custom events with different log levels.
2. User Feedback: a comment form to get anonymous qualitative feedback on your app.
3. User Ratings: a rating form to get quantitative feedback the appearance, fun, overall, performance, recommendation, usability, and value of your app.
4. Interactive Ad Units: small JavaScript (SproutCore) based apps within a frame.
5. Application Ranking: I’m not sure how it works (based on sales, popularity?), but it seems to give a good idea of how apps are performing compared to others.

With the only exception of the first feature —which I have seen implemented on other solutions—, I think the other four are pretty unique (though I could be wrong). Among all the usage stats collected by Mobclix’s platform, I personally loved the breakdown of Wi-Fi vs 3G downloads. For iPhone developers wondering if keeping the download size of their apps under 10 MB (for OTA purchasing) pays off, having access to that data would give them an definite answer.

When I asked Vishal about his thoughts on Android, he said they are working on an Android version of the analytics tools that shares the same feature set as the iPhone one. He also added that the while iPhone users currently outnumber the G1 about 20 to 1, that is expected to change soon as more Android–based phones are introduced.

I would like to thank Vishal for his help and hope this post will help fellow iPhone developers on the look for an analytics/monetization solution decide between Mobclix and its competitors.

Keeping the size of your iPhone App to a minimum is interesting because of many reasons, but probably the most important of them is Apple’s 10 MB app size limit to App Store downloads over cellular networks (3G or EDGE). Mind you, this limit to OTA downloads applies to final compressed (zipped) size. Although compressing you app bundle with the “Compress” Finder action will give you an fairly accurate estimate of the final download size, be aware that the iTunes Connect metada might increase size in a couple hundred kilobytes.

Keep reading for two tips on reducing the size of your iPhone apps.

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It has been only 6 months since the App Store was opened, but there are at least eight ‘analytics’ and monetization solution providers iPhone developers can choose from.

What can analytics/metrics software do for you? They track how your application is being used, and log things such as the number of unique users, how much time was spent on certain parts of the user interface, what features are they using the most, how many times the app crashed, etc. All these stats tell you which areas of your application you should improve.

Interestingly, most of the metrics tracking solutions out there do also offer ad placement services. This is an alternative business model to paid apps, although you will probably need tens of thousands of downloads to make some money out of it.

After a little research on each solution provider, I have put together the following matrix:

 
Unfortunately, I have not been able to test all solutions in depth. Therefore, I am not aware of which providers offers the best analytics module, or which SDK is more solid. Also lacking from the matrix are the minimum or average PPC or CPM revenue ratios.

If you find innaccurate or missing information, please leave a comment below and I will gladly update the matrix.

[Update 01/01/09] : Thanks to the commenters for pointing out Greystripe and Videoegg. I will update the matrix as soon as I can look into their iPhone services. Also according to people in the known, AppLoop has gone out of business, and their website is no longer accessible.

[Update 17/01/09] : Added Greystrip, Videoegg and Flurry to the matrix. Removed AppLoop (went out of business).