Monetizing mobile apps through API

From McKinsey Insight :
Monetizing mobile apps: Striking the right balance

Mobile apps are becoming big business. Analysts estimate that app-related revenues reached $25 billion last year to $70 billion by 2017.

A small but growing portion of app revenues comes from application programming interfaces (APIs) —gateways that, enable third-party app developers to leverage a company’s aggregated data or selected services.

APIs are generating revenues in one of three ways for the companies that choose to contribute their data.

1. Pay-per-use model (43% market share), a company makes its transactional data available to third party apps.

2. Subscription models (38%), fees accrue during a subscription period.

3. Resource-usage and revenue-sharing models (19%), generate sales of a company’s own products, from which the app developer too gets a cut.

Apple Mobile Payment Initiatives

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/07/24/apple-mobile-payments/13092217/

There is new speculation that Apple will venture into mobile payments, that currently in talks with Visa and other credit card companies for partnership.

The new service would allow users to pay for physical goods on the web, in apps and in retail stores, turning the iPhone act as direct line of payment for credit card companies.

This will skipping fees normally paid to third-party payment processors and run the system without giving up control to wireless carriers.

Its system would involve a secured element in the phones to store sensitive information (phone owner's financial credentials) and utilize Touch ID to authorize payments with Apple's Passbook app acting as a virtual "wallet" to hold the credit cards. Apple is also expected to leverage over 800 million iTunes accounts.

Forrester Research estimates that Americans will spend $90 billion through mobile payments by 2017, up from $12.8 billion in 2012.