Everyone is jumping on the app store bandwagon and, so far, Sony Ericsson had been a little behind. Some thought this might be related to its PlayNow Arena offering, which is already an app – or rather media – store of sorts. But it turns out that the handset maker was plotting a different strategy and one with an interesting result indeed.
It was reported today that Sony Ericsson will partner with GetJar on the creation of an app store. GetJar (the guys with the ugly logo) is a giant in the distribution of mobile content who had gone to clock up 200m downloads in only 2 years by last year (and now recording 6.5m+ downloads per week and more than 300m since launch)), which was, prior to the Apple App Store a very respectable number indeed. Now, GetJar has now something like 45,000 apps on their store. However, these are for free. The company appears to making their money with ad injection…
Sony Ericsson will apparently provide a mix of GetJar’s free applications and premium content. The solution will be using GetJar’s platform and will roll out in the 13 countries that currently support PlayNow Arena first. Compatibility is currently ensured with 38 of Sony Ericsson’s handsets but they intend to roll out to further markets and models over the year. It supports J2ME and Symbian on the outset but they plan to support other platforms in the course of the year. Android probably…
The deal allows Sony Ericsson to jump start its store though and that might be the most important piece of it: it can combine its own catalogue (through its current offerings) with GetJar’s huge catalogue of free apps, thus avoiding the fairly empty places that some of the other guys put together (Palm announced it will launch its Web Catalogue with “a dozen or so” apps, even Nokia’s Ovi Store had “only” 20,000 “items” in at start). GetJar’s platform is arguably fairly powerful since this is the only thing they do, so a quite smart move.
On GetJar’s side, I wonder if this is the one of the first steps into a new direction (Sony Ericsson was not the first app store deal they signed; 3 UK and Portuguese carrier Optimus apparently signed up with them, too, which I had overlooked; apologies). The company’s business model is/was based around ad infusion, it seems (see their CEO blog about it here). So this might be the next wave to monetizing platform and content on it…
They’re coming… The big entertainment players are increasingly gearing up to take charge of their mobile destinies. Whereas previously a lot of the big movie studios would simply license out the rights to mobile applications and games to independent game companies (Gameloft and Glu having been particularly active), they seem to increasingly embrace the medium themselves. Sony, Disney, Paramount – they have all recently been self-publishing on the – erm – iPhone. Other mobile platforms? The 98% non-iPhone handsets? Erm, maybe later…
The sales power of the Apple App Store is legendary with its 1bn+ downloads in record time. I have repeatedly held though that the other end of this ecosystem, i.e. the entry door to the app store (and related SDK and all) – and its relative ease of use – was an equally imporant contributor to Apple’s success. And now we have a