Which app platform or marketplace should you focus on?
Despite announcements about new platform and OS ‘collaboration’ initiatives, the landscape for smartphone applications is getting more fragmented, not less. Here’s are 3 things you should look at when considering which platform or marketplace to participate in.
1. International or US. The market share of smartphone platforms is dramatically different when looked at from a worldwide or a US viewpoint. For example, worldwide the iPhone currently has only has a 17% market share. Of course, there are other considerations.
2. User adoption. This one is about a recurring theme you will see on this blog. Do you know your customer? Is your customer a prosumer and early adopter or are they a member of a business community that requires a proven business tool. Studies show that a staggering 72% iPhone owners have downloaded 10 or more apps. In contrast, 73% of Blackberry owners have not downloaded more than 5. This has lead to over 3 billion app downloads from the Apple App Store.
3. App, web or widget. If you are in mobile marketing, you really need to take a step back from the smartphone app frenzy and think about your client’s overall customer engagement strategy and what is the right mobile strategy to get results for them. It may not be an app after all. If you’re an app developer, you need to make sure you understand the bigger mobile landscape and know how and where your product can make the most impact.
HTML5 and lots of other factors will have significant impact on the mobile market in the near future. Be sure to ask questions before you make too much of a commitment to one technology, platform, OS or app store.
Photo Credit: ekilby / CC BY-SA 2.0
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Very Insightful Ken!
All three points are of great concern to the mobile marketer and application developer (both of which are after the same user). First hand, I can tell you that a BlackBerry app fell off our radar in early 2009 when we understood the rules of application publishing for Android (i.e. app publishing without review). We believe an HTML5 solution is much more appropriate for feature phones and the other smart-phones, which endorses your viewpoint that different users may be accessed using different strategies.
The iPhone was a given all along and has been very successful for our free Mall Maps application, but Android has be pleasantly surprising in terms of overall downloads and friendliness of the user community (boy are they starved for apps!).
As a sign of fragmentation, our iPhone application is available to ALL iPhone and iPod touch users, whereas our Android application is only available to OS version 1.6 and north (30% are left in the dark because the handset OEM still hasn’t provided an upgrade – FRAGMENTATION 101!!!). As much as I’d like for this to get better, the OEM/OS tree trunk and branches are forking often enough for me to believe we’re riding the proverbial fence-line between ubiquity and innovation.
Josh Marti – CTO Point Inside
Thanks for jumping in on this topic, Josh. It’s great to get the view of this incredibly dynamic marketplace from someone with your experience.
You are involved in an amazing economic experiment that, at the top level, has two totally different business models about to go head-to-head. Apple’s proprietary, closed system where everything has a cost associated and Google’s massive mission of open source (or is it really a freemium model disguised as open source?).
And strangely, the most pervasive platform in the world market, Nokia, does not seem to be a major player in this experiment.
I think we have lots of chapters to go before we have any clue what the ending will be.