Up and com­ing app com­pa­nies hold the best oppor­tu­ni­ties to shine in the mobile devel­op­ment job mar­ket. The best app com­pa­nies are the ones that nur­ture cre­ativ­i­ty and tal­ent, and of-course, release both com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful and pur­pose­ful apps, and this arti­cle takes a look at some of the top app com­pa­nies (two big and two small), the apps they have made, and what sets them apart from the rest.

Fun­zio

Fun­zio is a San Fran­cis­co-based mobile gam­ing app start­up com­pa­ny whose games Crime City and King­dom age have both ranked with­in the top 25 apps for iOS, and have con­tin­ued to lie in the Top 50 since the start of 2012, suc­cess­es which have been mir­rored with the games’ avail­abil­i­ty on Face­book. The devel­op­ment team at Fun­ziois known to be both high­ly expe­ri­enced and high­ly dri­ven, with the CEO Ken Chiu already sell­ing a pre­vi­ous start­up mobile app com­pa­ny to the social gam­ing ser­vice leader Zyn­ga. To prove the val­ue of this com­pa­ny, it man­aged to raise $50 mil­lion with a recent $350 valuation.

Zyn­ga

Anoth­er San Fran­cis­co based com­pa­ny,Zyn­ga is the cre­ator of the immense­ly pop­u­lar social media games Far­mVille and CityVille, with their com­plete game cat­a­logue gar­ner­ing almost 300 mil­lion users each month when they were at their most col­lec­tive­ly pop­u­lar. Found­ed in 2007 by Mark Pin­cus, Zyn­ga was ini­tial­ly focused on free online games for Face­book, the com­pa­ny has been forced to look at things from the mobile angle. The com­pa­ny was once val­ued at $20 bil­lion, but since this peak the num­bers of Face­book Zyn­ga game sub­scribers have been falling, as more and more con­sumers turn away from desk­tops and embrace mobile apps. The com­pa­ny is cur­rent­ly expe­ri­enc­ing loss­es, but with their acqui­si­tion of OMGPOP – the com­pa­ny which cre­at­ed “Draw Some­thing” — and their plans to cre­ate group-play­er mobile gam­ing apps, Zyn­ga looks set to get back on form.

TouchType

TouchType Ltd was found­ed in 2008 by Jonathon Reynolds and Ben Med­lock, both grad­u­ates of Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. After promis­ing career starts from both of them, they decid­ed to enter the oppor­tunis­tic world of mobile appli­ca­tions. Their main app is Swiftkey – an advanced intel­li­gent key­board for Android which uses patent­ed tech­nol­o­gy to make typ­ing much eas­i­er and quick­er. The app has reached num­ber 1 for paid apps a num­ber of times, and was award­ed this years “Most Inno­v­a­tive Mobile App”. Expect big things from this com­pa­ny in the future.

What­sApp

What­sApp is a cheap mes­sag­ing app avail­able on all major smart­phones that lets you exchange mes­sages and var­i­ous oth­er media from any phone plat­form to anoth­er. Even though it is a very sim­ple app, it has achieved enor­mous suc­cess, since it was found­ed in 2009 by Jan Koum and Bri­an Acton,  being a fre­quent top sell­er in all mobile app mar­kets. A com­mend­able fact about What­sApp Inc. is that they like to do things on their own terms, stay out of the lime­light and put their efforts into their prod­uct. They have relied on sim­ple word of mouth to increase the apps pop­u­lar­i­ty, and with tens of mil­lions of users and the app firm­ly and indef­i­nite­ly placed in the top 10 spots of many app mar­kets, this app is look­ing set to reach glob­al pop­u­lar sta­tus very soon.