Postcards from Perkistan

Extremely interesting news coming out of the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona. New Media Age in the UK reports that a number of keynotes sought to address the issue of an increasingly fragmented app market and the implications of this moving forward.

The list is extraordinarily large (though not surprising) for such a young industry. Apple, Orange, Microsoft, Google, Blackberry, Nokia, Samsung and O2 have all launched (or are launching) stores, and more importantly (worryingly), platforms for apps development and distribution.

The business man in me says that this makes perfect sense. Immature market, large global players trying to vie for dominant position and doing so the only way large companies know how to - by developing unique platforms and hoping they win the war (or a portion of it).

Then, inevitably, the launch of multiple platforms and stores is met with the cry for standards and cooperation (I can see the committee forming in The Hague right now…). So even before some stores have launched, people are crying out for a centralisation of the market!

The complicating factor in the most recent store announcements (Samsung, Orange etc) is that I understand platforms offering different stores, but hardware manufacturers offering stores that then offer multiple platforms (I assume) just completely complicates the market.

The long and the short of it for a start-up like us is that we simply have to pick our targets, and that number is going to be substantially less than the players I’ve listed above. We have to do analysis of our audience and each store/platform’s audience and pick the platform most likely to deliver us customers. That’s okay and relatively easy at a pure platform level. We have decided to go iPhone app in the first instance and are working hard with MoGeneration in Sydney to create a meaningful and powerful app for our users.

We always envisaged moving to Blackberry for the corporate market and then Symbian for our second (to iPhone) consumer market. Apologies to the companies involved for the generalisations of your user groups

Now we have to contend with making decisions about those platforms and then extrapolate that out to unique requirements at a hardware (Samsung) and carrier (Orange) level - crazy!

So what do I think will happen? The same thing that happens in most maturing markets. People like us (app publishers) will stay away from the multiple choices (due to cost, effort) and stick to the big guns.

It just seems like it would all be a lot simpler if the corporations just faced the fact that some kind of shakedown in the market will take place (at a competitor or standards level) and worked to leverage the apps market together now, not then.

But I’m not responsible for the Orange share price I guess!

Justin