New mobile app advertising network cuts out the advertiser

As the mobile app market evolves, we’re seeing many new ways emerge of publicizing applications. Earlier today, there was an announcement from Apprupt – which sells apps through storefronts placed in publishing partners websites. But a new service from Denmark is going one step further: by allowing developers to publicize each others work from within their own apps, The Kinetic can cut out the advertising and publishing middlemen.

What’s the story?

Developers who sign on with The Kinetic simply place a small button called “More Apps” within their own application. A user that presses that button is presented with a scrolling screen of other applications:

All of these apps are sourced from developer partners of The Kinetic – if you sign up with them, your app can appear there too. But when you place The Kinetic in your application, you also get to choose which apps you want to appear within it. So users of your application will be presented with a selection of apps you have chosen, and that fit in with your own idiom.

How does it work?

It’s based around download credits. For every download that is pushed through your app, you earn a download credit – meaning that if you don’t power any downloads, you won’t get downloaded either.

It’s currently available for both iPhone and Android developers, and today The Kinetic has announced that 111 mobile publishers have uploaded apps through the

What we think?

This is a pretty cool service. I think what I like most about it is how unobtrusive it is – it’s a little button down there on the taskbar that you can use if you want to. It really doesn’t push itself all that much. But if your users download other applications from within yours, it powers further downloads for you – a sort of cross-promotional marketplace. I’ll be interested to see how this service grows – or, indeed, if it grows.