Posts Tagged ‘Mobile Commerce’

What with the modern day Gold Rush happening at Apple’s iTunes App Store, it’s spawning imitators.

Or, ‘enhancers’…

First you have apptism, hoping it provides a better way to search for and find iPhone applications. apptism provides all kinds of search and rating criteria to help you in your sojourn. Similarly, we have iphonexe. Both link potential buyers directly to the iTunes App Store (hear that sound coming from One Infinite Loop? It’s ‘Woot!”!).

Next we find device-specific (or ‘brand-specific’ or ‘platform-specific’) alternative marketplaces.

The most well-known of these is Google’s Android Market with content specific to devices running Google’s Android operating system (at the time of this writing, only the TMobile G1). However, Google has made known that it will give a slice of marketplace revenue to its carrier-partners. Some see this as even more egregious than Apple taking a cut of App Store revenues, so several non-splitting shops have set up storefronts – specifically, SlideME and AndAppStore. SlideME, in specific, looks to address what it seems to feel are inequities in the application revenue model.

Let’s not count Research In Motion out here. Makers of the once-top-of-the-heap Blackberry are going to create a Blackberry-specific store called, appropriately enough, BerryStore.

Where’s Howard Stern when you need him? His “Dead or Alive?” segment might be useful for this news: Palm is working with PocketGear on the IBMishly-named Palm Software Store.

Update 01.09.09: Palm just announced the new Pre phone, featuring an all-new (for Palm) development model.  And, with it, a re-named application store called the App Catalog.

And, in another late-to-the-party effort, Microsoft apparently wants a piece of the action for it drowning Windows Mobile platform

Some believe the path to success runs through a Walmart approach, addressing many phone types.
mobango, for instance, is a true alternative marketplace – relaunched in October 2008 with free content only (for now?) and an associated social network for content sharing.

Nor are the carriers being shy about getting their slice.

O2 is getting into the game. This wants to be a multi-platform store – including Java as well as OS-specific applications.

Same for TMobile.

My question is: Aren’t all these alternative markets competing for the same space Handango has been in for years…with only moderate success? It seems to me that Apple is finding lots of success with its ‘captive marketplace’ approach – a repeat of the iPod/iTunes model. With a fanbase like Apple’s, maybe that’s no surprise. Similarly Google, with its more open model but heavy impact of Google’s name value, will be serving apps into the space it created. When you remove the industry’s two thought-leadership devices from the field, you’re left with the old-school, way-too-disjoint-and-fragmented market where every buy-button has to have a caveat near it advising where the app will and (mostly) will not work. It might also be said that such marketplaces will highlight the abysmal state of mobile phone software and, indeed, drive users to Apple and Google (and thus to those marketplaces). Therefore, in my mind, these alternative marketplaces don’t have a bright future.

Incidently, and in a tip-of-the-hat to professional journalism, Wired Magazine has covered this topic, albeit less extensively, here.