It’s generally recognized that part of Apple’s success with the iPhone is due to their focus on applications. The App Store was the first of a kind, and is still a leader in mobile phone applications with over 225,000 apps available. Android has been coming on strong, but is still a distant second place with over 50,000 apps. No other smartphone platform even comes close to this type of application availability, including Microsoft and BlackBerry.
I’m sure most of the people who read this blog are not developers…that’s not our intended audience. But I think it’s instructive to understand what developers are thinking. Recently a company called Appcelerator published a survey of developers and their view of the various platforms. I’d recommend you at least read the overview. They also have a pdf to download if you want more detail. As you read it, just remember that Appcelerator makes a cross platform development tool called Titanium. So they have a specific point of view that influences the questions they ask. They also have a specific type of developer that uses their tool. Regardless, the information is interesting.
The chart to the left is one of the most interesting segments of the survey. What it shows is a very focused interest in Apple and Android. Everything else is waning. Pretty interesting stuff given BlackBerry is still the leading smartphone seller by far. However, they have lagged and continue to lag in the application development game. They also have not done much with novel handset delivery.
For those in the industry, we should pay attention to what the huge development community is doing. While developer acceptance has helped to boost Apple, lack of developer acceptance played at least some role in the demise of Palm. Developers are not the only barometer of trends in the mobile industry, but they are one of the key metrics we should all be paying attention to.
Global Intelligence Alliance Group has just released an analysis of several app stores for mobile applications. By this time we are all very familiar with the iPhone App Store, and the fact we are so familiar with it is pretty amazing. It was launched only eight months ago, but currently boasts over 15,000 applications and surpassed 500 million downloads back in January of this year. About all you can say is “Wow!” But since that isn’t very enlightening, I’ll try to provide some observations on app stores in general.
First of all it’s important to remember that only two app stores actually exist. These are the iPhone App Store and the Android Marketplace. All the others you may have heard about like Ovi from Nokia, Skymarket from Microsoft, BlackBerry Apps Storefront, and the webOS Software Store from Palm are all just announcements right now. That’s right. You can buy any software you want from an app store as long as your smartphone is an iPhone or the G1 phone. That’s it. There are not any other choices right now today.
So why all the noise about what are essentially download sites for only two devices? Because until the iPhone App Store, if you wanted a mobile application for your smartphone, you had to either go through a carrier storefront (which tend to be limited and difficult to navigate) or hunt around the Internet for software to download from sites that may or may not be legitimate. So being able to go one trusted place for software for your device is a big deal. Add to that the fact that one of the devices has sold like no other mobile device before and you see why app stores are getting so much press.
But for all the positive press, and it is certainly well-deserved positive press, there are still some issues that need to be addressed to really free users. In no particular order some of the biggest issues are:
- Searching has to be improved – In some cases even if you know the name of the application it can be difficult to find in the iPhone App Store. This problem will only get worse as the number of applications grows, and as business applications begin to populate the store.
- Many more devices must be supported – With the announcement of several new app stores this problem should improve over time. I still wonder how useful it will be if you are a small business and have to go to the iPhone App Store for one person, the BlackBerry Apps Storefront for another, and the webOS Software Store for another. That’s not a very effective way for a small business user to find what they need for their business. And that brings me to the third point.
- Business applications have to be supported – Right now all of the app stores that exist, and the ones that are coming all cater to consumer applications. There is nothing wrong with providing consumer applications, but who is going to provide applications for small and medium business personnel? After all, there are over 120,000,000 of them in the US alone.
We are early on in this new world of app stores, and we are off to a great start. But to really unlock the potential of mobility for business users, the app store landscape will need to change to address these and other issues.
