This should have come a week earlier but, alas, I was on the road – quite literally – en route to San Diego and Qualcomm’s most excellent Uplinq conference.
Life of course did not stop, and amongst the things you should not miss was (and is!) the last iteration of the formidable Carnival of the Mobilists, hosted by our very own Peggy Anne Salz on her award-winning MSearchGroove blog. Amongst the gems not to be missed were:
- An interview of a company focused on Windows Phone 7 (yes, you read that right!);
- Tomi Ahonen with another go at the app economy (which he claims isn’t much of an economy; read my comments on this here);
- A look on web bookmarks as an alternative to apps (to which I still not agree; cf. here);
- A couple of posts on Android, and specifically Motorola’s Droid X (and the future, if any, of Motoblur);
- And many, many more…
Finally, my post on Vodafone’s pondered changes to its revenue share structures featured, too.
The carnival is here, and well worth a read! And, again, my apologies for the late posting of this. But the old Highway 101 along the Pacific just had me in its grips…
Gartner published the latest smartphone numbers for Q1/2010 (or so I read), and it is testament to the continuing rise of this segment: sales increased by nearly 50% year-on-year (and do remember that there was this recession-thing last year). Total sales were 54.3m units in the first quarter of this year. Not too shabby!
On the OS side, the rising stars are Android (9.6% global market share from 1.6% a year ago), which is now bigger then Windows Mobile (and it took it only a year!) and iPhone (15.4% vs 10.5% in Q1/2009). The silverback gorilla still is Symbian which dropped to 44.3% from 48.8%. Blackberry is also down (albeit only slightly: 19.4% from 20.6%).
Here’s a table:

We said it before: mobile is the biggest mass medium on the planet, and now game developers (and not only the sometime masochists that have been there for years) flog to it. According to a fairly large survey by GDR (which can be yours for too many dollars to count and has been reported about here) among 800 developers, a quarter of them are now making games for mobile phones with most of them (namely 75%) – surprise, surprise – choosing the iPhone as their platform of launch. This is doubling last year’s figures (apparently).
The iPhone and its non-phone sibling, iPod Touch (and you have been reading that a year ago here, here and here) are proving a more attractive launchpad onto portable gaming platforms than dedicated gaming systems like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.
The reasons will be the same as they were a year ago: a platform that is relatively easy to work to and a simple distribution model. With the number of downloads Apple continues to pile up, it is no wonder that developers from “traditional” platforms (PC downloadable, online, etc) are attracted to that. They will also be less scared of the marketing challenges since they had had to market their games in the whole wide oceans of the Internet previously (i.e. there were no carrier safe havens with feature slots). Whilst this does not mean that every traditional developer’s games will be successful on the app store, the threshold to enter is lower.
It will be interesting to see if the wave will roll further into other “smarter” platforms, including Android, Windows Mobile (see the latest rumours for WinME 7, including full Xbox Live gaming implementation here), Symbian Maemo and Blackberry. With the device numbers clearly speaking in favour of that, platforms becoming more accessible and, last but not least, with easier paths to the users via OEM app stores, this is to be expected. Good times for mobile gamers!
First, Samsung announced it would drop Symbian from its smartphones in 2010 in favour of its new, home-brew bada OS. Then Nokia said it would drop Symbian (albeit not immediately) from its flagship N-series devices replacing it with Maemo, the OS that premiered on a Nokia device on the recently released geek dream, the N900.
It is said that there are
no current plans for Maemo devices in the [...] X-Series range or the popular [?] E-Series enterprise range
but the word “current” suggests that this might well change soon, too.
This would leave Symbian without its two largest OEM supporters. Will there still be a future for it?
Symbian of course boasts a still very impressive number of legacy devices, and it will therefore be here for a while. However, what does the long-term outlook look like? Android, LiMo, etc all “boast” a nimbler, more agile set-up, allowing for faster development and, arguably, better user experience. This is not necessarily Symbian’s fault (it carries with it its legacy around) but it makes it that much harder for it to reinvent itself.
I am not sure if there is place (and – timewise – the runway) to reinvent itself without the backing of big OEMs. I would be surprised if carriers would use it; they – even more than OEM – require adaptability and customization, which the newer platforms seem better suited to serve. Vodafone’s choice of LiMo for their first two Vodafone 360 devices is testament to that.
The ever-bright Tomi Ahonen suggested a comparison with DOS/Windows and MacOS: he compares Symbian to DOS, Maemo to Windows and iPhone to MacOS: MacOS led in UI and leads to this day. DOS outsold MacOS in spite of its dramatic inferiority because of the legacy instal base. Windows then overlaid DOS and rolled out on all the legacy devices with MacOS, as a result, always playing second fiddle despite its superiority.
The market place in mobile looks different though: DOS was nigh dominant (outside the mainframe and large enterprise side of things) whereas Symbian “only” covers about 5% of the current market. It is big but probably not big enough to bridge the DOS/Windows migration gap. With Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, LiMo, JavaFX (if that ever takes of properly), etc all on the map, too, the situation is very different to the DOS/Windows/MacOS world. Would Nokia be quicker in execution, I might still look at it differently but, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be that way.
So is it good bye, Symbian, then?
The conference formerly known as Symbian Smartphone Show (or something along those lines) is back this year as the Symbian Exchange & Exhibition (or SEE09). It kicks off this Tuesday in London’s Earl’s Court Exhibition Grounds and boasts a rather impressive line-up:
Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Founder and one of TIME’s 100 most influential people) will be the headliner. There will be keynotes and panels with senior executives from the world’s leading vendors and carriers, including Nokia, IBM, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung, as well as application pros from the BBC, Guardian, GetJar, Navteq and many, many more.
SEE09 is the world’s largest event for the Symbian platform, which is – even if recently often maligned – still the largest smartphone platform anywhere!
Attendance is FREE. You can register here (it’s not too late…).
I’ll be there, too, so please drop me a line if you want to meet for a coffee (or beer at the party – attendance of which is also FREE). See you in London this week then!
In the last two days, two forecasts informed us about the value of the mobile app market in – convenient as ever – the distant future that is 2013. US analyst firm Yankee Group predicts the US app mobile market to be worth $4.2bn by then. Today, British analyst Wireless Expertise (run by former Netsize exec Anuj Kanna) topped this easily by predicting the (global) app market size to be $16.6bn by that time (free copy of the report here).
I can hear your moans…
However, let’s have a look at the numbers then, shall we? At the end of 2008, there were 4.1bn mobile phones in the market. Because apps tend to thrive most on smartphones (and the analysts seem to thrive on them, too), let’s have a look at that sub-sector. I would estimate the smartphone share to being somewhat under 10% (Symbian claims c. 250m devices in market, Apple has some 30-odd million, so RIM, Windows Mobile, Android, Palm, etc should probably be OK with the balance of some 100m). In Europe and the US, the share is much larger but in the big volume markets China and India it is bound to be much smaller, at least for the time being. Global smartphone shipments in 2008 were around 140m.
If we estimate a 20% growth year-on-year for smartphones (vs. 5% for the overall phone market, which seems to be loosely in line with the general dynamic), then we would end up with something like 900m smartphones by 2013. Yankee Group predicts that smartphones in the US will quadruple by then (from 40m to 160m) and does not seem to be very far off. Wireless Expertise thinks the global number will be 1.6bn, which again, might not be that far off.
The question is however if people will really download this much stuff: Yankee Group predicts that the actual value of the market will rise 10-fold and that the average price point of an app will be $2.37. Why that is so, you ask? Well, pay $495 and you will know; I don’t…
Now, the good folks of Wireless Expertise see the thing quadrupling until 2013. They do, however, count “ordinary” mobile games as they are being sold through carriers amongst the apps, which means that their starting point is higher, namely $4.6bn in 2009, so they’re looking at this quadrupling. They raise some smart points on app stores and how they (well, it) changed the way users access and consume content, how carriers will need to look for alternatives to increasingly commoditized voice and messaging propositions, etc. But why there should be a 400% rise in e.g. traditional J2ME mobile games remains – whilst it would be wonderful – pretty much in the dark.
Talking of J2ME and feature phones: I do not know how they are being woven into the equation but there would certainly be a wide field for any self-respecting crystal-ball-reader here: on the one hand, app consumption on such devices has traditionally been fairly shabby but, on the other hand, this could well change if connectivity, bandwidth, UI and the right price plans would come together to offer a compelling mobile web solution. So then apps would need to be translated into widgets or something like that. Would users then pay for them? Don’t know. Or would it be the “Freemium” model according to which “Free gets you to a place where you can ask to paid?”
The challenge of these reports is their “simplified” assumptions: if only one of them fails, you go “oops”, and your prediction is halved (or worse). On Wireless Expertise’s case, this is particularly clear: their assumption is that there will be a dual strategy of (presumably OEM-driven app stores) and mobile web-based widget stores. Now, they further assume that Ovi, Windows Market, etc will all be as successful as Apple’s App Store. By early (anecdotal) data, this could not be further from the truth (see here for what that may mean). Nokia in particular struggles to get its head around a viable and compelling media strategy (cf. here and here). And hence the beautiful hockey stick would actually fall flat on its face.
Now, I am not predicting total doom and gloom, in the contrary. I do think that Apple’s wake-up call has brought a much-needed new wave of innovation and I also believe that this will be successfully incorporated by some carriers and OEMs. But by all of them? Not very likely.
And so we see: the reports are a touch on the optimistic side when it comes to volumes and assumptions. But, hey, that’s their job, I guess, and after all they have at least dropped their masks now: Yankee Group call it fairly openly a “gold rush”. And what happens then we had been shown a long time ago: you end up eating your shoelaces. So maybe this is less of an app bonanza and more of an analyst bonanza then…
Spotify was a breath of fresh air when it hit the markets. Finally, there was someone who combined the ease of iTunes with unsurpassed breadth in catalogue. Lots of songs. Always available. And even the ads weren’t all that bad (which is why few people upgraded to the ad-free premium version [more on this below], much to the dismay of label executives who – rightly – fail to see the greater good of dependable revenue streams from those few ads; although they are getting more, mind you).
Then, back in July, Spotify submitted its iPhone app to Apple. And the big wait began. After lots of back and forth and speculation if it would or would not, Apple finally approved the app. So now it’s live, and not only on the app store (where it ranked #1 on the UK store when I checked tonight) but also on Android Market. A Symbian version is in the works.
All reviews I have read are raving: from “very impressed” (and that’s the Daily Telegraph no less) to having “to pry it out of my cold, dead iPhone” (Wired), everyone waxes lyrical about the thing. It comes with a load of stuff, too: streaming all your favourites from over 6m tracks on the go sounds promising, and one can also sync up to 3,333 (what a number!) songs for offline use in the networks’ broadband doldrums.
The trouble (!?) is: you can only use it as a premium subscriber, which means forking out £10 per month. Which brings me conveniently to the key point, which is the business underlying model.
The labels are fairly happy, it seems. Because they got shares in Spotify itself. Some more equal than others though: the majors are said to have received a disproportionately high stake). The same report claims though that ad income is only £82,000 and, in the UK, only 17,000 users had signed up for the premium version. However, shareholders and all that, Spotify still has to pay the labels a fee per streamed track, irrespective of the user paying or not. Tricky model, that. Note though that this might be different in other countries: according to reports, the world’s largest major, Universal Music is making more money from Spotify in Sweden than from iTunes!
Anyhow, all this was before the mobile app, and mobile may well be the game-changer for them… The launch of the iPhone app, glorified niche audience or not, seems to have gone fairly well (#1 position on fhe app store within days of launch). Spotify reckons that mobile is where its future lies. And this had been echoed (and well ahead of the actual launch!!!) by others in the industry, and perhaps rightly so: if users are used to (and in love with) a service they are more likely to pay for it if that means they can also have it whilst on the road. For the marriage of music with the world’s leading MP3 player come mobile phone, the iPhone, this seems to be made in heaven: I can have the smallest model and still carry 6m+ tracks around with me? Wow! Here’s value-add!
The much-discussed freemium model it is then: get them hooked on the free desktop app and convert them to paying users on mobile. It has long been known that users are more likely to pay if stuff is portable (I can still recall the disbelief of music executives when they realized that people would pay more for a monophonic ringtone than for a full-blown music track). And whilst now the link between (free) basic service on the desktop and (premium) mobile service is new, the principle is old and proven: and it is simply added value (plus the little things like being used to paying on mobile and having convenient existing billing models in place). If the user perception is that they are getting value for money, they are willing to pay. And if it is for such a fairly special thing such as music (don’t we all love and nurture our very own musical mix tastes?), the step is even easier to make.
Spotify fully expects this to fly: they are upgrading their servers already. Labels are said to be still a little jumpy but I reckon their experiences over the last decade or so have shown that their is a need to re-think incumbent models…
Samsung’s new app store (no one can do without one these days!) will be operated by Handmark and is set to go live on 14 September (2009, that is), I read. The respective site is (sort of) live and appears to accept registrations of prospective vendors. Go here if you feel like it… Launch will be in the UK, France and Italy first. No word when the others follow.
According to the press release, the content available will consist of Windows Mobile and Symbian s60 titles and will be available on the Omnia, I8910HD, Omnia II and Omnia Lite (so a true omni-store then). Billing is available via both credit cards and operator billing, which is – on the face of it – good (i.e. plain and simple credit card-billing doesn’t often work; Apple’s app store is an exception, I’d say, because input is via iTunes with which people are already familiar).
I’ll spare you the rest of the lyrical odes to the various partners… But let’s try and break this down: how big will this thing then be? Samsung is a force in mobile and its Omnia phones have had some very significant success indeed: in some markets (Germany was one), the Omnia outsold the iPhone by some margin (in December 2008, the Omnia had a 14.9% share of the German smartphone market compared to the iPhone 3G with 7.6%). It also launches in India now. I could not get my hands on solid sales numbers though (in the top 10 list by accessory sales for June, the Omnia came in on #10)… However, anecdotally, it is behind Nokia, RIM and Apple in global smartphone market share. So if we say that, on a global basis, there will be about the same number of devices around, that would make the phones a good success for Samsung.
However, when it comes to usage, I am not sure if the Omnia can compete with the iPhone. If we take ad impressions as an indicator (and it really is just that), we’ve seen that the iPhone’s 8% market share translates into 40% ad impressions. And because a lot of apps (and web “apps”) use ads, I think it is probably safe to assume that usage is higher. And this is arguably the crux of app successes: they need to be available but they also need to be discoverable and usable, and all of this with a lot of ease. Will they succeed? I hope so as it would do a ton of good to the industry would there be more than the niche player Apple. Their new TouchWiz SDK (see here) should help ease development for better UI, and the features of the store they announced look decent so far, so let’s keep our fingers crossed!
Image credit: GSM Arena
Last week, there was the Mobilebeat conference on, and – amongst many other things – a lot of guys felt they had to air their opinions on the future of mobile apps or, errh, no apps. They spoke so elaborately about it that even the revered FT (albeit in its blog section) and the BBC felt compelled to run stories. Amongst others, the CEO of “indie” app store Get Jar and Google’s wonderful Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering and also equipped with this most valleyed of all Silicon Valley job titles, i.e. “Evangelist” (I would really like one like this, too!), in his case for developers spoke about where they saw information and entertainment on mobile phones going in the future and how the ecosystem would look like.
Now, let’s get serious.
What was Said?
First, GetJar‘s CEO sees the market for mobile applications becoming – get this – as big as the Internet (woah!). He then said also that it would peak at about 10m apps (in total?) by 2020. Hmm. GetJar then went on to warn that the number of developers would drop “drastically” and that only about 10% would be able to survive. The others would take their skills elsewhere. So where then? To the web? (This is of course interesting also because GetJar will deliver Sony Ericsson’s App Store…).
It is here where Google comes in. Gundotra said that, according to Google (and who would question them), the web had won. Even (!) Google was struggling with the device fragmentation in mobile and many, many applications could be delivered through “incredibly powerful” browsers as well. He even borrowed Steve Jobs for his argument, pointing out that the Apple CEO had announced that the iPhone was “Built for the Web” upon its launch.
There were others who contributed: Nokia’s Head of Services reminded everyone that Nokia was there to help with its Qt (Cutie, geddit?) cross-platform application network . The Symbian Foundation’s Executive Director, Lee Williams queried the need for more app stores and called, instead, for more than “just a bucket of apps”, which should look like an aisle with the very stuff that specific consumer is interested in and which (s)he could wander down at leisure.
They all however concluded that it [scil. the mobile web] was not there yet. Hm again… Let’s try to disentangle this all:
The Needle in the Haystack
Upon the launch of the app store and the wondrous stories of the iShoot developer Ethan Nicholas who coded in his bedroom after work only to resign from his day job weeks later because he made more money than he had ever thought. A lot of developers read that and, since it is the wet dream of every games developer (earn cash with an honest game without the “suits” fiddling with your game in between; anyone remember Copeland’s skateboarding turtle?), embarked on the journey themselves. And then they found, oops, it does not work that way? Why not? Well, because there are more than 400 applications going live every day. And with the sheer number of them, it could well be that the best app ever written is already out there but buried deep a couple of categories down in the app store.
This is no big surprise. It is how it works in any sector: one smart kid is not enough, you also need the environment and a lot of other building blocks to have a winner (as reigning F1 World Champion Lewis Hamilton is painfully realizing this year).
In the app store’s (and a gazillion other) case, this means that you have to make sure that you gain some attention. From Apple (or any other app store operator), from the press, from the users out there. And this is not news. There have been very well written pieces about this galore (see here for just one of them).
So will this mean the fall of a lot of the developers that went about their business thinking the app store magic would do away with centuries of business logic (there is a reason why companies have sales & marketing departments, you know…)? Yes, very probably. But does that mean the app model is flawed? No.
The Hit Dilemma
One of the Mobilebeat participants, namely Playfish, creators of some of the most successful Facebook games who released on the iPhone, too, complained about the hit-driven nature of games on the App Store. Whilst I am painfully aware of this dilemma, one has – again – to point out that this is pretty much how most of the economy works, too, unless, that is, one builds a superior and dominant brand (Tetris would be the example for the games world).
Other industries know this, too. Everyone knows IBM is a leading computer maker. Hardly anyone remembers that the Dutch electronics giant Philips used to be one of the biggest players in that market (not even Wikipedia mentions this); their CeBIT booth was bigger than IBM’s throughout the 70′s and early 80′s (my dad worked for Philips then; I need to dig out some pictures). What happened? Hey, they missed some crucial disruptive innovations and they were history…
What I want to say is that no one is immune to the demand for constant innovation and improvement (otherwise some Firefox will sneak around the corner and steal market share). The reason why this hit dilemma is more painful in mobile games than elsewhere is the relatively small size of the market to date: it is more difficult to build reserves than in other, more established sectors.
How Many App Stores? Mee too, me three, me four, …
With Apple’s roaring success with the app store, the whole industry stampeded to put out their own, and they have been moderately successful or failed. But it is early days! Why did they fail? Because they equally had hoped that one thing and one thing only (just name your bucket of apps an “app store”) would heal the painful failure of the sector in converting otherwise gladly paying users to also using, consuming, contributing to entertainment and information on their mobiles. Now, this overlooked that Apple’s model did not only consist of a storefront. It also consisted of a fairly simple developer programme (with a click-through agreement), a fair(er) revenue share to the developers and unprecedented ease of use in getting to the app of one’s choice. Try and apply this to, say, the launch of Nokia’s Ovi Store…
So do users need more than one store? No, not in general. If you can get all you ever need, want or desire from one destination, you don’t need another one. This however becomes a little precarious with a view to monopolizing channels. You would never know if there are not some that are a little more equal than you… So, having Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. next to Internet Explorer did the world a ton of good. And having Nokia, Sony Ericsson, the carriers working on alternatives to Apple’s app store is arguably of equal value. Will the user care? It depends on the execution: Google’s superior search algorithms made the old-style catalogue model previously found in search engines superfluous; why do I need to sort something if I have a little fairy that races to get me what I want in no time? So: if I have a bucket that comes with a little fairy, I don’t need long, long supermarket aisles. I’d rather get it home-delivered by the search fairies.
It’s the Usability, stupid!
Now to the key question: separate apps or web? Now in Google’s case, their pleading is somewhat obvious: well, they would, wouldn’t they?
Google, on the other hand, has apps out on most platforms for most of their web services: Be it Gmail (great Blackberry app!), Maps, or – all in one – their iPhone Google app, it comes as an app. And why?
Because it would otherwise be unusable! OK, let me rephrase that: the delivery of browser-based applications through mobile phones suffers some very severe setbacks today, amongst which usability on a small screen, constant connectivity and bandwidth. Whilst the latter two are arguably solvable some time soon, the former is a little trickier: when delivering to a mobile device, you not only have to download all underlying data (graphical assets, etc) but also an interface that works on that device. And because of the small form factor of mobile phones (even in the case of large-screen touchscreen phones like the iPhone), this is likely that your user experience will be significantly worse than on a large screen equipped with mouse, touchpad, etc. Apps can bridge this usability gap, and I would argue that this is precisely why Google is producing them. The underlying content can often (not always) well be delivered from the cloud but the UI of small devices is crucial to their sensibility.
With both (mobile) browser technology and handsets improving, the space available for services that can sensibly (and with superior costs) be delivered from the cloud (i.e. through the web) will increase, and steeply. However, there will always be applications that will either be impossible to deliver via the web (name a high-end 3D racing game on the web) or where a specific mobile UI would greatly improve the usability of any service.
It is another question if these will be delivered via flexible widgets or larger, more comprehensive apps (functionally, a lot of apps effectively are covert widgets); this will simply be (and remain) a question on the complexity of any given task and the ease and superior (or not) delivery an app would provide over a browser-based service. There will be an equilibrium between the two but I posit that there will remain large areas where browser-based delivery will not be able to compete with specific applications (that will draw on data from the cloud as well). Incidentally, 58% of Wired readers agree with me (and another 17% don’t care; check the bottom of the article)
This can be seen on the (“normal”) web, too: Google Docs (Google’s online suite of office applications) is, despite a lot of effort and being free to use, an utter underdog to MS Office or Open Office (the only numbers I could find give Google Docs a market share of between 1% and 5%). It is, I think, because downloadable office “apps” are so much more usable (and react instantaneously irrespective of my ISP’s moods) than online services. The complexity of the computing (and – more importantly – the bandwidth necessary to deliver it) is just too overwhelming (see here for a previous post on this).
More evolved mobile apps often are (and/or will be) a hybrid: they offer a front-end that optimizes the data drawn from an online environment for use on a specific mobile device. It will not be an “either/or” but an “and”. Anything else would anyway be so last century!
In Conclusio:
Whenever possible, services will move online because it is cheaper to produce. Whenever necessary, they will be delivered through dedicated apps because it is required to use them!


Also: Ovi Maps looks like a VERY good a
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a keynote at
The ecosystem is tough to address as every mobile game developer will tell you. Which is why the iPhone was such a huge game changer: one device on one platform with one distribution channel globally. And all presented well, easy to use, great UI and users get to content with very few clicks and without unnecessary warnings). It is also always connected (rather than only connected in theory) and hence opens the doors to a new way of consuming, promoting and using content, specifically interactive one such as games and apps. Everyone else scrambles to follow but they struggle because it is such a different way to look at the world (well, different when you are a network operator or handset OEM). And because of this, competition on this platform is now fierce, very fierce.
Do not forget: people (and brands) want to reach people. Full stop. They do not necessarily want to reach people who happen to have an XYZ device running the ABC OS on the carrier X in country Y! Apple is wonderful (I am an avid iPhone user and do not plan to change – well, yet) but it is a niche. And if you have business to do, you may want to look beyond that niche.
After much huffing and puffing, Vodafone
It has an address book with nodes into Facebook, IM (Windows and Google) and will “soon” also cover Twitter, Hyves and StudiVZ (the German Facebook clone). Two tailor-made (!) handsets that use a proprietary (!) interface based on LiMo’s release 2 mobile Linux OS. Users can create groups across different networks (which is very neat!), an app store with 1,000 apps at launch (no word so far what this comprises) and syncing with your computer.
