FEATURE APPLICATIONS
Spoilt for choice
While there are some who believe the devices space has become a two horse race in terms of platforms, with Apple and Google’s Android as the only runners, the software side of the mobile experience is in a state of flux, and 2012 may still be too early to place confident bets.
By James Middleton
ince mid-2008, when Apple cut the rib- bon of its genre-defining App Store, the concept has swept the mobile industry and become the primary means for consum- ers to discover content. Today there are more than 500,000 available apps in the Apple App Store and over 370,000 in Google’s Android Market, while Windows Phone Marketplace, Nokia Ovi Store and BlackBerry App World follow behind at some considerable distance. There is also a substantial customer base. According to Gartner, smartphone sales ac- counted for 26 per cent of overall handset sales in the third quarter of 2011. Then of course there’s the nascent but not insignificant tablet space. Overall there’s a strong ecosys- tem in existence, with plenty of opportunity for developers, who create the applications that are the lifeblood of these ecosystems, to flock to the biggest store fronts. And this is the problem. Application stores,
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now swollen with content, have become somewhat daunting, especially for the many first-time users migrating to the smartphone space from the feature phone market. For developers, the big risk is getting lost in the crowd, buried beneath dozens of other apps that might be cheaper or similar in nature,
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offer more novelty value, or whose develop- ers simply got luckier. Moreover, the bigger a store gets, the harder it is to police, and the more likely that a sub-standard or even downright malicious app will make it through the vetting process, damaging the experience on that platform for everyone. According to Lee Epting, director of content services for Vodafone group, consumers are prioritising quality over quantity: “They’re saying, ‘give me choice but don’t give me too much choice’. It’s a daunting prospect to have to scroll through thousands of apps to find one quality item and then buy it in the hope that it’s ok,” she says. Vodafone isn’t the first carrier to try and po- sition itself as a filter between the thousands of available applications and the bamboozled consumer. But it recently went a stage further, with the launch of a branded experience in the Android Market that introduced carrier billing and also opened a separate, curated app store, designed to showcase a selection of apps from multiple platforms and stores, all of which have been tested against Voda- fone’s network. “What we’ve found when we check these apps, is that there’s lots of stuff getting into
the Apple App Store that we don’t think Apple would be happy with. We don’t know why, maybe they dropped the bar,” Epting says. “But when we quality check these apps they fail our standards, mainly for using APIs not required for the app. So we’re more stringent than other app stores.” In its branded App Select store, a stan- dalone experience pushed out via widget and web to new and existing users, Vodafone will focus on showcasing the top 100 apps from any shop. There will be no archive, with con- tent being refreshed every three months—and, if an app is not moving, it will be cut. Fur- thermore, all content is localised by market. If Vodafone is correct in its assessment there is a new generation of smartphone agoraphobics who, unsettled by the wide, open plains of the internet and its application stores, are clamouring to be let back into the walled garden. It could be argued that the growing adoption of HTML5 as a rich web technology will exacerbate this problem as many see an HTML5 site as a cheaper alterna- tive to a full blown mobile application. “The app store model is certainly a bubble, but this time it’s clear that the shift isn’t temporary,” says Mark Doherty, strategic solutions manager »
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