At the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, there was big news of twelve major operators wanting to create a kind of Super Appstore, to counter Apple’s successful approach. Overall there was word that we will end up with 40 major appstores in 2010.
Now that’s a big number, but looking at the fragmentation of the mobile world, it is not a crazy number. This show presents once more those conflicting interests of handset manufacturers, operators, software&service providers, each one looking at the areas it is classically not covering with a “grass might be greener” – lust, so it is an only natural development.
Something else I noticed at the show: Development environments really start to catch up with the hype, providing both tools to deal with different handsets as well as standardized approaches to develop for a range of different stores. Finally, many of those stores are fueled by the same underlying operating system (in most cases Android, some Blackberry) that makes it easier to post to those. If there is a decent customer base and posting my app can happen in a few hours, I am not afraid of that type of fragmentation, however if I am required to come up with a new set of documentation for my app or even have to talk to carriers, don’t count on me being intrigued.
For myself, I will definitely start to spend time on pushing my existing apps into more channels. The effort is rather small compared to the initial development cost, so it starts to make sense.
However, developers have to decide where to focus on and there are many aspects influencing such a decision, most of them non-technical. There is still a major need for those creating new appstores to embrace the fact that this is not just a technical extension to a development environment but a complex ecosystem where small things have a big impact in consumer perception and how many apps a developer will ultimately sell. An ecosystem, that we developers understand better, pay much closer attention to and discuss amongst us much more than I currently feel is understood by the various appstore creators.
I have seen many first steps and small announcements starting to embrace that idea. It’s great to see how the registration screens for a specific appstore look like. It would be fantastic to see a follow-up session with an overview of how charts work, what sells well and what not on a platform, what are the right price points, etc.
If you really want to intrigue developers to work for your platform, we need more of this commercial information and acknowledgement that the strong need for this type of information exists.
