See the original story in Japanese.

Today Japanese startup Unicon launched a platform called Fello, aiming to help mobile gaming app developers improve the user retention rates in their apps.

The platform provides testing and analysis features for typical mobile gaming app functions such as push notification or messaging via an SDK. For now, the tool is available for iOS and Android, with support for platforms like Unity, Cocos2d-x, and Air on the way.

The startup was launched by entrepreneur Ryuichi Tanaka. He previously founded a different startup called Knockin’on [1], but went on to later work with Zynga Japan. He leads a team experienced in mobile gaming development, committed to serving native app developers with the tool.

In comparison to GrowthPush, a similar solution that we (coincidentally) featured earlier today, the Fello platform also provides a messaging feature as well as measuring push notification performance.

Since leaving my previous job (business department lead at Zynga Japan), I’ve been providing a KPI analysis tool for developers. Making a native app is more time-consuming than a browser-based app, and you will typically find problems to solve around screen transitions, charging users, and notifications. You’ll also need to develop a bulletin board feature. So our tool provides developers with an analysis feature as well as helping them improve user retention.

The startup claims that a gaming app improves its retention rate by one and half times through push notification. They believe a Fello-enabled communication feature may raise that rate even further. Its analysis feature delivers useful metrics about an app, such as daily active users, user retention rate, and the number of app installations.

The startup was registered in Singapore and is now based there since casual games are on the rise in the South East Asia region.

Their monetization model looks a little unusual, since this tool is currently available for free. In their announcement, it was mentioned that they are planning to add features to help app developers drive user traffic and monetize. Based on that, we can assume they will launch advertising or premium services in the future. However, Tanaka didn’t disclose any specifics about how they will make money.

We’ve seen several app analysis tools in the US gaming market, where Flurry has been showing steadily growth since its launch back in 2005. Here in Japan, the recent smartphone shift will help the casual gaming app market expand further, almost certainly increasing the need for these kind of tools.

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1. A startup running affiliate services and job posting sites. It was acquired by Japan’s leading car navigation system vendor Zenrin DataCom back in November of 2012. ↩