BOSTON, USA: Yankee Group estimates that nearly 7 billion U.S. smartphone app downloads will garner $4.2 billion in revenue by 2013. And with the number of smartphone users set to quadruple to 160 million at the same time, Yankee Group uses just two words to describe the market to come: gold rush.
How can developers and app store owners position themselves to profit from the impending bonanza? Two Yankee Group reports, “Forecasting the U.S. Mobile App Gold Rush” and “Which Mobile App Platform Deserves Your Software?” offer key insights:
Fit the app to the platform. While Nokia, Apple, Windows Mobile and RIM each have an installed base of more than 25 million devices, not all platforms are created equal. For now, consumer developers should focus on RIM’s Blackberry, where consumer-oriented apps are scarce, while those aiming at enterprises should target Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android to address those relatively untapped markets.
Price your apps appropriately. Paid apps will account for one in four downloads in 2013. While 99cent apps are the norm now, Yankee Group predicts that paid apps will cost $2.37 on average by 2013, increasing today'’s $343 million download market by more than 10 times over those five years.
Focus on marketing. App store owners need to attract developers by marketing their apps and promoting the store’s successes via top 25 lists, download counters and running revenue tallies.
“Apps have been around for years,” said Carl Howe, director at Yankee Group and author of the reports. “But app stores have created mass-market products with million-dollar revenue streams attached. Every mobile software developer could be the next Bill Gates for smartphones, but only if they bet on the platforms with the right reach and fit for their application.”
Showing posts with label app stores. Show all posts
Showing posts with label app stores. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Smartphone downloads from all app stores to reach 6.67 billion in 2014
MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Smartphone penetration in the US mobile markets is increasing rapidly. For some time, mobile operators have been offering a branded 'catalog' of mobile content and services that could be purchased from the handset itself.
However, all that is changing for smartphones, in which newer types of targeted app stores are being introduced to enable the device owner to purchase content from outside the operator environment. The availability of a large number of inexpensive or free mobile applications that leverage the next-generation technical capabilities of the target device will help drive adoption.
However, in the end, service differentiation and generating suitable return on investment from the app store business could be challenging.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan: An Insight into the US Smartphone Application Storefront Market, finds that smartphone downloads from all app stores will reach 6.67 billion in 2014. The market segments covered in this research include prepaid and postpaid mobile, SMS and MMS, mobile Internet, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian.
"Next-generation devices are being introduced at a rapid pace, and stakeholders are offering app stores to facilitate downloads of compelling applications from multiple categories, serving a wide range of communication, entertainment, information, and personalization requirements of the mobile user," says Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Vikrant Gandhi.
"For example, Apple, Google, Nokia, Palm and Microsoft have either already introduced app stores or are in various stages of app store rollouts and are working to ensure that the entire service experience is compelling for the end user or device owner."
A vast majority of applications are available 'free of cost' to the end user, significantly driving adoption in the US smartphone app store market. These applications leverage advanced device capabilities such as touch screen, accelerometers, full Web browsing, and location-based services, among others, to deliver a truly compelling proposition.
The most significant challenge is to ensure service differentiation and optimal management of the scale of the app store business. App store providers should always be open to support new business models to drive the introduction of innovative services and content types. Having a clear value proposition is also important for mobile operators.
"Unless the app store providers establish exclusivity agreements with application developers -- something that is not feasible for a large majority of applications -- it will be difficult to provide enough differentiation through the app stores," notes Gandhi.
"The best example of how this could be done is Apple's app store, in which the entire experience of service purchase and consumption -- including device characteristics, form factor and the operating environment -- was a radical shift at the time of its introduction."
This does not mean that services could not be differentiated at all. The moot point then is the extent to which providers are willing to invest in their infrastructure to offer new service to their customers, which then ties back into something that is still being examined -- identifying the main purpose of launching the app stores and if app stores alone are strong enough reasons to purchase a particular type of device.
A single participant cannot provide all the services in the mobile content industry. App store providers need to work with multiple application providers and offer them sufficient incentives for their app store initiatives.
Services of independent, third-party app store providers such as Handango, Handmark, and PocketGear can also be used to run an app store business profitably with adequate service differentiation.
"For instance, outsourcing or white-labeling of the app store business might become a good idea in the long run since a device vendor or an operating system provider may not want to commit large resources to manage the smartphone app store business," concludes Gandhi.
However, all that is changing for smartphones, in which newer types of targeted app stores are being introduced to enable the device owner to purchase content from outside the operator environment. The availability of a large number of inexpensive or free mobile applications that leverage the next-generation technical capabilities of the target device will help drive adoption.
However, in the end, service differentiation and generating suitable return on investment from the app store business could be challenging.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan: An Insight into the US Smartphone Application Storefront Market, finds that smartphone downloads from all app stores will reach 6.67 billion in 2014. The market segments covered in this research include prepaid and postpaid mobile, SMS and MMS, mobile Internet, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian.
"Next-generation devices are being introduced at a rapid pace, and stakeholders are offering app stores to facilitate downloads of compelling applications from multiple categories, serving a wide range of communication, entertainment, information, and personalization requirements of the mobile user," says Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Vikrant Gandhi.
"For example, Apple, Google, Nokia, Palm and Microsoft have either already introduced app stores or are in various stages of app store rollouts and are working to ensure that the entire service experience is compelling for the end user or device owner."
A vast majority of applications are available 'free of cost' to the end user, significantly driving adoption in the US smartphone app store market. These applications leverage advanced device capabilities such as touch screen, accelerometers, full Web browsing, and location-based services, among others, to deliver a truly compelling proposition.
The most significant challenge is to ensure service differentiation and optimal management of the scale of the app store business. App store providers should always be open to support new business models to drive the introduction of innovative services and content types. Having a clear value proposition is also important for mobile operators.
"Unless the app store providers establish exclusivity agreements with application developers -- something that is not feasible for a large majority of applications -- it will be difficult to provide enough differentiation through the app stores," notes Gandhi.
"The best example of how this could be done is Apple's app store, in which the entire experience of service purchase and consumption -- including device characteristics, form factor and the operating environment -- was a radical shift at the time of its introduction."
This does not mean that services could not be differentiated at all. The moot point then is the extent to which providers are willing to invest in their infrastructure to offer new service to their customers, which then ties back into something that is still being examined -- identifying the main purpose of launching the app stores and if app stores alone are strong enough reasons to purchase a particular type of device.
A single participant cannot provide all the services in the mobile content industry. App store providers need to work with multiple application providers and offer them sufficient incentives for their app store initiatives.
Services of independent, third-party app store providers such as Handango, Handmark, and PocketGear can also be used to run an app store business profitably with adequate service differentiation.
"For instance, outsourcing or white-labeling of the app store business might become a good idea in the long run since a device vendor or an operating system provider may not want to commit large resources to manage the smartphone app store business," concludes Gandhi.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Smartphone capability tracker: what’s hot and what’s not
UK: Tim Renowden, analyst at Ovum, comments:
GPS and WiFi are hot
Ovum’s data (collated from DeviceMine and Ovum research) identified 77 smartphone models released by key manufacturers in the sample period. Of these, 59 handsets had GPS capability and 49 had WiFi, indicating that these technologies are now key features across nearly all smartphones, not just high-end models.
Some operators still have a reluctance to admit WiFi-equipped handsets onto their networks, but Ovum believes consumers now expect WiFi to be present in smartphones.
The widespread availability of GPS (across all of the major smartphone platforms) is great news for developers wishing to deploy location-based applications and services, but so far few developers have taken advantage of this beyond basic navigation products.
Ovum’s smartphone capability tracker showed much lower penetration for TV-out capability, although this was of little surprise as it is only recently that most platforms have really possessed the multimedia abilities required to justify its inclusion.
Only the iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms produced devices with TV-out, with Samsung in particular being proactive in supporting the feature. Ovum expects TV-out to grow in popularity among media-centric smartphones, along with increasing processing power and screen resolutions.
On the processor front, most smartphones are currently based on ARM11 architecture, but Ovum expects some ARM Cortex A8-based chipsets to appear in devices within the next update, and platforms like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Nvidia’s Tegra to emerge later in 2009 as manufacturers seek to add greater multimedia functionality to devices.
Devices based on the ARM Cortex A9 multi-core architecture are expected in 2010.
RIAs and widget frameworks are not
Widgets are another buzzword in the industry, but the tracker shows that only around 10 percent of smartphones support Internet widget frameworks. This is another area where we expect rapid growth in adoption through 2009/10.
Ovum has previously discussed the potential for rich Internet application (RIA) frameworks as application platforms in mobile handsets, but the tracker shows how little impact RIAs have so far made on smartphones.
Adobe’s Flash and Flash Lite have achieved the best penetration, with 41 smartphone models supporting Flash. Symbian dominates this figure: 25 are Symbian-based (all except one of the Symbian handsets released support Flash).
Windows Mobile has patchy support for Flash (manufacturers even support it inconsistently across their Windows Mobile portfolios), and iPhone OS and Android currently do not support it at all.
Of the other RIA frameworks tracked (Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight), penetration is zero, indicating that usefulness of these platforms for application developers is still some way off.
App stores are cooking unevenly
One of the biggest talking points in the industry in the last 12 months has been the rise of on-device application stores. Despite the limitless hype, for the sample period very few devices were released with pre-installed app store clients. Apple’s iPhone, HTC’s Android devices and several Nokia handsets (featuring Nokia’s Download! client, not the newer Ovi Store) were the only devices with app stores pre-installed.
We expect a big change in this area in the next version of the smartphone tracker, as platform owners and manufacturers have now begun to respond in earnest to the app store buzz. On-device app stores have launched on BlackBerry and Palm’s WebOS, Nokia now has Ovi Store, Windows Mobile 6.5 will feature an app store, and a greater proportion of new handsets will feature these clients in the next version of the tracker.
GPS and WiFi are hot
Ovum’s data (collated from DeviceMine and Ovum research) identified 77 smartphone models released by key manufacturers in the sample period. Of these, 59 handsets had GPS capability and 49 had WiFi, indicating that these technologies are now key features across nearly all smartphones, not just high-end models.
Some operators still have a reluctance to admit WiFi-equipped handsets onto their networks, but Ovum believes consumers now expect WiFi to be present in smartphones.
The widespread availability of GPS (across all of the major smartphone platforms) is great news for developers wishing to deploy location-based applications and services, but so far few developers have taken advantage of this beyond basic navigation products.
Ovum’s smartphone capability tracker showed much lower penetration for TV-out capability, although this was of little surprise as it is only recently that most platforms have really possessed the multimedia abilities required to justify its inclusion.
Only the iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms produced devices with TV-out, with Samsung in particular being proactive in supporting the feature. Ovum expects TV-out to grow in popularity among media-centric smartphones, along with increasing processing power and screen resolutions.
On the processor front, most smartphones are currently based on ARM11 architecture, but Ovum expects some ARM Cortex A8-based chipsets to appear in devices within the next update, and platforms like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Nvidia’s Tegra to emerge later in 2009 as manufacturers seek to add greater multimedia functionality to devices.
Devices based on the ARM Cortex A9 multi-core architecture are expected in 2010.
RIAs and widget frameworks are not
Widgets are another buzzword in the industry, but the tracker shows that only around 10 percent of smartphones support Internet widget frameworks. This is another area where we expect rapid growth in adoption through 2009/10.
Ovum has previously discussed the potential for rich Internet application (RIA) frameworks as application platforms in mobile handsets, but the tracker shows how little impact RIAs have so far made on smartphones.
Adobe’s Flash and Flash Lite have achieved the best penetration, with 41 smartphone models supporting Flash. Symbian dominates this figure: 25 are Symbian-based (all except one of the Symbian handsets released support Flash).
Windows Mobile has patchy support for Flash (manufacturers even support it inconsistently across their Windows Mobile portfolios), and iPhone OS and Android currently do not support it at all.
Of the other RIA frameworks tracked (Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight), penetration is zero, indicating that usefulness of these platforms for application developers is still some way off.
App stores are cooking unevenly
One of the biggest talking points in the industry in the last 12 months has been the rise of on-device application stores. Despite the limitless hype, for the sample period very few devices were released with pre-installed app store clients. Apple’s iPhone, HTC’s Android devices and several Nokia handsets (featuring Nokia’s Download! client, not the newer Ovi Store) were the only devices with app stores pre-installed.
We expect a big change in this area in the next version of the smartphone tracker, as platform owners and manufacturers have now begun to respond in earnest to the app store buzz. On-device app stores have launched on BlackBerry and Palm’s WebOS, Nokia now has Ovi Store, Windows Mobile 6.5 will feature an app store, and a greater proportion of new handsets will feature these clients in the next version of the tracker.
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