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Since I had the Apple iPhone in my gad­gets list I have to say that I have been very impressed by the AppStore.

It is def­i­nitely a quan­tum leap in appli­ca­tion distribution.

iPhone App­Store

In the past we had only a few means to dis­trib­ute appli­ca­tions on a mobile device:

• Pre install the appli­ca­tion on the mobile device. This is some­thing that only an hand­set man­u­fac­turer or an oper­a­tor can do. Every­body in the indus­try knows that this a pain. You need to plan this kind of dis­tri­b­u­tion with great advance and most of the time you end up pre installing a boos­t­rap appli­ca­tion that down­loads and install the real appli­ca­tion at the cus­tomer first use of the appli­ca­tion itself. More­over you will not get any money for this. The advan­tage of this method is that all of the cus­tomer base for that par­tic­u­lar mobile phone will get the appli­ca­tion but you do not have any guar­an­tee they will use it.
• The other pro­vi­sion­ing mech­a­nism is send­ing a mes­sage (SMS/​MMS) to the cus­tomer with a link which the cus­tomer may check in his browser and down­load the appli­ca­tion from there. One of the major prob­lems with this kind of dis­tri­b­u­tion is the fact that the redemp­tion is usu­ally very low.
• In a sim­i­lar way to the pre­vi­ous one you may put link to the appli­ca­tion on your mobile por­tal and wait for cus­tomers to down­load and install it. Again, very low redemption.
• Sev­eral hand­sets man­u­fac­turer have tried to put on their devices an appli­ca­tion cat­a­log (e.g. Nokia) and this was one approach quite close to the one that Apple took with the App­Store. The point is that there was no busi­ness model attached to this or, at least, quite loosey-​goosey. You install a trial appli­ca­tion and then get an acti­va­tion code from the web (mobile or fixed).
• For busi­ness cus­tomers and open oper­at­ing sys­tem you may pro­vi­sion appli­ca­tions over the air using some sort of device man­age­ment soft­ware but this will not def­i­nitely scale. At least for the masses.
• Finally you can shop for appli­ca­tions online (e.g. on sites like Han­dango) and the pro­vi­sion your mobile phone using your per­sonal computer.

As you can see look­ing at these appli­ca­tions dis­tri­b­u­tions mod­els the oper­a­tor is out of con­trol for most of them. Oper­a­tors do not really know what cus­tomers are going to install on their mobiles. The only per­cep­tion they have is the data traf­fic that may be gen­er­ated by some appli­ca­tions and by which they get money for.

Now let’s have a look at the mobile phone. If you install an appli­ca­tion on a non open Oper­at­ing Sys­tem (e.g. Sym­bian, Win­dows Mobile, etc.) the appli­ca­tion is prob­a­bly a Java appli­ca­tion that will be placed in a non orga­nized list in the Java Appli­ca­tion Launcher that in most cases is well hid­den inside the mobile phone MMI.

You need to have a strong will to use that appli­ca­tion since to launch it you will need at least three or four clicks.

Smarter phones will allow you to put your appli­ca­tion in the upper lev­els of your menu struc­ture mak­ing is eas­ier to find and launch installed applications.

With the App­Store, and the iPhone, Apple has solved both of these issues:

• All appli­ca­tions are put at the main level of the MMI. Some­how we can say that all appli­ca­tions are cre­ated equal.
• There is a sim­ple and unifed way to pur­chase and pay for appli­ca­tions. A user name and a pass­word is all that you need.
• All appli­ca­tions are backed up on your per­sonal com­puter mak­ing it eas­ier to man­age them.
• Devel­op­ers have a uni­fied Busi­ness Model to make money from their appli­ca­tion. You get 70% of the appli­ca­tion price and Apple gets 30%. As you can see from this model the oper­a­tor is out of the game and has no con­trol on this.
• Even if some crit­i­cism has emerged only approved appli­ca­tions will make their way through the App­Store. Yes, Apple has com­plete con­trol on that but from a cus­tomer stand­point it is a guar­an­tee that the appli­ca­tion should com­ply with some qual­ity and secu­rity standards.
• Users have the option to pro­vide the devel­oper with feed­back and that feed­back will be pub­lic and inte­grated with the App­Store itself. This is some­thing I def­i­nitely like even if you will have alway to cope with per­sonal opinions.

So it seems that Apple has done it right.

The ques­tion now is: is this approach usable on dif­fer­ent mobile phones? Can low end mobile phone have the very same approach to appli­ca­tion distribution?

My answer is yes, even if with some caveats:

• From a tech­ni­cal stand­point it is pos­si­ble to move Java appli­ca­tion out of the Java Appli­ca­tion Launcher and place them any­where in the mobile phone MMI.
• It is def­i­nitely pos­si­ble to develop an appli­ca­tion store with the same reward­ing model for both devel­op­ers and oper­a­tors and mobile phone manufacturer.
• The main issue is that we may see a lot of dif­fer­ent stores com­ing from dif­fer­ente com­pa­nies lead­ing to a frag­men­ta­tion of the mar­ket. There will be no sin­gle point of ref­er­ence for mobile appli­ca­tions and at the very same time you will not have a sin­gle, sim­ple and effi­cient way to shop and pay for your applications.

Google is going to launch his own appli­ca­tion store for Android. In this case the model is a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent from Apple. The devel­oper will get 70% of the rev­enue while the oper­a­tor will get 30%. In this par­tic­u­lar case the oper­a­tor will still be in the game.

Any­way the devel­oper will have the option to dis­trib­ute his appli­ca­tion out­side of the appli­ca­tion store ecosys­tem imple­ment­ing his own billing mech­a­nism and so get­ting 100% of the rev­enue from his application.

From a cus­tomer per­spec­tive this is going to be a lit­tle bit more dan­ger­ous. Usu­ally the iPhone is sold with flat data plan that allows to con­sume some band­with on a per month basis. Cus­tomers do not really care about how much their appli­ca­tion con­sumes in term of data trans­fer since they are on top of this flat data plan. This may greatly vary on all of the other customers.

There may be sur­prises for these customers.

I def­i­nitely think that Apple has signed a mile­stone in this area and I am sure that 2009 will see the rise of other appli­ca­tion stores for mobile devices even if I think that Apple will still win hands down.

What will be the oper­a­tor role in this is still to be seen.

Related posts:

1. Google, It’s A Plat­form Not A Mobile Phone
2. Apple iPhone And The Yet To Be Announced Google Phone
3. Why Do Not We Stop Stuff­ing Mobile Phones?
4. My fat mobile phone
5. Bat­tery killed the Mobile Inter­net star