A look from the developer and users perspective of three mobile app stores

1. App Stores - Global
Opportunities?
Kieran Gutteridge - CTO
Bristol July 2009

2. Agenda
• What are app stores?
• User perspective
• Developer perspective
• Consequences

3. Smartphone Sales
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=985912

4. What is an app store?
• Device specific retail presence
• Allows consumption of digital goods on a
device
• Facilitates a considered decision, download
and possible purchase
• Allows a content provider access to a
extent of market for a given device

5. Woolworths
Pick n Mix, Gifts, Games, “one size fits all”
Reasonable method to transact
Vanilla product offering, not consistent with an increasingly sophisticated
digital, mobile marketplace

6. Why the need?
• Carriers decks have existed since application SDKs
• User need: extension to capability and utility of
their device
• OEM need: diminishing B.O.M., margin and returns
on hardware - movement to software in the value
chain
• Operator need: extend beyond basic, commoditised
telephony services and seek new revenue streams
• Developer opportunity: participate in the evolving
ecosystem of application development

7. Popular app stores
• Apple App Store (July 2008)
• Android Market (Aug 2008)
• Nokia OVI (May 2009)
• There are others
• Blackberry app world
• Skymarket
• App Catalog

8. But I want it now!
WIFI
However
OVI
Android Apple
Cellular
Data
Carrier
Phone
Computer
Where ever

9. User Perspective
Apple
easy
Android
transaction
OVI
Ease of
hard
Carrier
local
global
Extent of geo coverage

10. Dev Perspective
Android
easy
Accessibility
Apple
of store
OVI
hard
Carrier
local
global
Extent of geo coverage

11. Dev/User Perspective
Android
easy
Apple
OVI
hard
Carrier
local
global

12. Let's solve problems
that interest our users!
• Payment is not interesting for a creative company or the
user, territorially restricted models force a large % of project
resource to be expended to achieve scale and distribution
• Unified payment allows super distribution, with a much
smaller team
• Software should be able to scale territories easily, games are
the obvious example
• More interesting problems for a developer; such as scaling,
porting to other platforms, language variety, customization;
time and effort can be spent marketing to users rather than
dealing with middlemen

13. Discoverability
• What if you want to launch on multiple
handsets?
• Multiple points to market in trying to
establish a brand presence
• Education of users for different retail
stores

14. Discoverability
http://www.shazam.com/music/web/pages/getshazam.html

15. Questions?
• kieran.gutteridge@intohand.com
• @kgutteridge