Would you believe it? The marriage of what was seen only a short while ago as the quintessential businessman’s phone and the latter’s presumed opposite, the music-centric, young, urban web 2.0-type has is complete. I am talking of course of the Blackberry client of social network MySpace: only a week after being released, the two partners, Blackberry maker RIM and MySpace, reported a rather staggering 400,000 downloads of the application and, perhaps even more staggering, 15 million messages sent and received through it, accounting for 2 million status and mood updates (that’s an average of 5 for every user).
Tag: mobile applications Page 9 of 10
The theme starts becoming lame, I know (and I herewith promise to look for new semi-funny references to Steve Jobs). However: if the world’s largest operator by subscribers changes its dress culture, that is to say swaps from a tightly controlled walled garden to a free store concept, that surely merits this. So, without further ado: China Mobile plans to launch its very own AppStore. Its Chairman & CEO Wang Jianzhou (who was, I think, not sighted in Mr Job’s favourite garment) announced this at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau. Now, with a whopping 436.1m subscribers, this opens fairly interesting vistas for mobile content – if, yes if, one can hit Chinese taste, that is. They specifically cite Apple’s success with its iPhone as a trigger for them to do it. Truly impressive that a company so big would move so quickly.
Following the iTunes success story, we could see it coming, I guess, and indeed after a mere 3 months of going live the mother of all black turtlenecks informs us that the Apple App Store rocketed past 100m downloads for iPhone and iPod. Impressive numbers! And another example how simplicity and a good eye for ease of use wins the day: put applications (games are apparently leading the pack, too, with no less than 700 of them [that’s nearly 25% of the total available]!) into one place where a) people can find them and b) it is easy to download, install and run them, and you are on to a winner (operators, listen to this!).
- There are 3,000 apps on the App Store, 600 of which are for free. Now, for what percentage of downloads these 20% are responsible for, we are not being told though…
- 90% of the apps are priced at less than $10 (this will include the 20% free ones, I guess). However nothing is said if it is $9.99 that is the prevalent price point or perhaps $0.99 a pop.
The App Store certainly is a success for Apple (in particular considering the relatively low number of devices that access the store, and this deserves our unreserved applause! The only thing is: it might just be that 90% of the downloads were of the unpaid kind and another 8% of the less-than-$3.00 kind, and that would mean that it is actually not such a great success for the developers hoping to make a buck from it (rather than only showing off the funky logo on investor presentations).
200m downloads? Who is doing that, you say? Who do you reckon? Zed, Jamba, Thumbplay? No, not them. Getjar, a website featuring free mobile phone downloads (and a logo that cries out for a pro) announced that it recorded 200m downloads in 2 years of operation. See? Users do download content, so where’s your problem? Well… the downloads are not paid for, you see? This makes for a somewhat warped business model…
So, whilst Getjar would certainly appear to prove that consumers are keen to download content and applications to their phones, it does not prove that they would be willing to pay for it. And with mobile advertising sluggish to make a commercially meaningful impact (at least from developers’ point of view) that is somehow not so good really… Better then the Jamba’s et al as they at least make money from it and pay their developers.
Congratulations to the good folks from Getjar anyhow. I hope at least you guys got a good numbers of clicks on your Google apps…
I’ve been a fan of those “bloggers on speed” of the likes of Jaiku, Twitter, etc for a while but I am not entirely happy with the interfaces yet: the services live of proximity and timeliness in that is then that they unfold their true power. Otherwise, the old-fashioned web accessed from an old-fashioned computer with 10x more bandwidth and a proper keyboard might actually be superior. Mobile blogging however is relatively clunky so far. There are a few guys out there who offer mobile little J2ME apps, (mobile) browser plug-ins, widgets, you name it (see for some solutions here) but, let’s face it, they’re not really as slick and seamless as they could (and should?!) be. Tellingly therefore, both Twitter and (now Google-owned) Jaiku use SMS as the prevailing interface to communicate with the world through their networks via your mobile phone. Is that really it? Look at the Facebook Blackberry app: so slick in comparison!
UI, accessability and discovery are the key drivers for mass user adoption – and this what all social media lives of (apart, perhaps of the institution of marriage, which seemingly works best in micro-communities of 2), so why do they not tackle this bit more aggressively? The answer might be that, whilst they realize that mobile is a major contributor to their value-add when compared to other web apps, they are not actually mobile companies; they are web companies.
The idea of utilising the power of web 2.0 and its wealth of widgets and applets contributed by a gazillion of independent developers and fan boys might all be very well but it slows adoption: Facebook apps only became successful after Facebook itself was such a huge community, they did not drive that growth (although they now arguably contribute significantly). Therefore, it would seem to me, it would be required that the originators/owners of those networks contribute more energy and resource into optimizing the user interfaces to use the actual service before falling back on third-party add-ons. Alas, it is impossible to find a Google widget (for iGoogle or Google Desktop) even for Jaiku, which Google acquired. Tellingly, the only available widget was produced by fans… There’s quite a bit to be done, I think…
And here’s a somewhat disappointing mobile debut: business network superstars LinkedIn announced the launch of their (beta) mobile “application”. However, the app is a mere WAP site with, alas, all the downsides of that: latency, onerous navigation and the whole info from the website only toned down in graphical appeal.
Now, whilst I am big fan of LinkedIn, this is sub-par. Have a look at what Facebook did for the Blackberry: a small downloadable app (yes, I know, it’s painful but probably for the time being the only way to enhance the user experience on mobile), information reduced to the key things one might want when accessing this from a mobile device and then the option (sic!) to access the full monty via WAP. The one piece of information I couldn’t access on the LinkedIn WAP site was the contact info. Hmm. Wouldn’t that arguably one of the key pieces of information I would want to have when I’m on the road (“well, I’m in London. Why don’t I drop John Doe a line. Don’t have him in my address book as we haven’t spoken in a while but we’re still ‘linkedIn’. Doesn’t work. Doh!”).
With all due respect, dear LinkedIn friends, you’ve got work to do!