Discovery company Appsfire is discontinuing its consumer app, in order to shift its focus to “building the next generation of mobile advertising technologies”, taking a swipe at some of the efforts of Apple and Google on its way.

“We just can’t ride two horses at the same time and our app has slowly become secondary to us for a while now in spite of all the recent updates,” it said.

In a blog post, Appsfire noted that it released its first set of engagement tools 20 months ago, which “gained a lot of traction”, as the company started to work with some large publishers on monetisation.

It recently announced a new monetisation layer with native advertising, claiming that “the feedback and results have been so overwhelmingly positive that we understood right away that it was time to release the first stage of the rocket”.

The company has already debuted its first promotional format, called Sushi, which it describes as “our revamped version of the full screen ads”, with another, called Ura Maki (or Inside Out), due “very soon”.

Appsfire said that existing users will be able to continue to use its discovery app, acknowledging that it may choose to bring it back at a later stage.

According to Appsfire, its app has reached 12 million unique users, generated more than 2 billion recommendations, and “earned consistent top ratings from many thousands of users”.

Apple and Google criticised
Appsfire said that Apple has “consistently added tough, unclear guidelines and rules for app discover apps, refusing to feature any app in that field and rejecting or removing some from time-to-time”.

“While there sever decision is often warranted with players that resort to shortcuts for easy and fast success, it does not look like Apple has figured out a real way to accommodate true value adding app discovery apps; either because they consider the App Store is ‘the ultimate solution’ (it’s far from being one), or by fear of losing that dominant market maker position,” it continued.

With regard to Google, Appsfire said that the search giant “has not done much either to dramatically improve discovery and hit rogue services…it doesn’t feel like this is a priority for them either”.

In contrast, Amazon was deemed “the most active and most developer friendly to date, always creating more compelling bricks to build and merchandise mobile apps”. This store, however, is limited in appeal by its size.