In another move to shore up its image, Yahoo announced today that it will hold a conference for mobile app developers on Feb. 19, 2015, in San Francisco. The conference, which will be free to attend, will feature the unveiling of a new suite of developer tools along with talks by app developers.
The show will be focused on iOS and Android development, with a “State of Mobile” keynote address by Simon Khalaf, Yahoo’s Vice President of Flurry Products, headlining the event.
Jarah Euston, the Vice President of Analytics and Marketing at Yahoo-owned Flurry, said in a blog post announcing the conference that the tools are designed to “help mobile developers better understand their users and improve, grow and monetize their apps.” Beyond that, details on what Yahoo has up its sleeve are scarce. Odds are, the new products will be based on technology developed by Flurry, a mobile analytics firm that Yahoo acquired for roughly $240 million earlier this year.
The event seems similar to Facebook’s F8 developer conference, which the social networking company resurrected this year to announce a variety of changes to its developer ecosystem. Yahoo is clearly making a move to diversify its product base and take advantage of the growth in the mobile app industry with new offerings for developers.
Yahoo is still struggling to pick up search engine market share from Google, but has seen significant user and revenue growth in its mobile products. Of course, these new tools could just be Yahoo trading one crowded market for another – the company will be facing down Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and others in a battle for mindshare among developers.
