subject: Smart Phone Application Market - Where the app market is headed to? [print this page] Smart Phone Application Market - Where the app market is headed to?
We are living in the time of smart phones. Have you paid attention to TV commercials lately? Everyone wonders why there are so many ads about the apps that you can run with smart phones.
If you are not in this mobile application era, these commercials might seem a little weird. If you do a little research on the web, you will find the answers. The expected size of the mobile applications market is huge. If you think about the size of the new consumers that will come with new gadgets that will be capable of using applications, you will understand the push for mobile application market. As in many businesses, the first company to establish their name in this new growing field will most likely be the winner of this huge market.
Take a look at the case of RIM, the maker of BlackBerry smart phones, which is trying to increase its footprint in this market. Starting late gave RIM a big disadvantage. Addition to this disadvantage, some developers were not happy with some of the rules. Two of these rules warrant the most attention. (Other side of this debate supports these rules to eliminate the useless applications and keeping the app store clean.)
The first one is that you have to pay for each submission. The cost for each submission is not that much, but overall might have some effect, especially on the free app space and new app versions.
The second rule has to do with pricing. The minimum price for any app is $2.99. This rule might have an effect on the customers. Most people are happy to pay $0.99 for an app, but when the minimum price is $2.99, this limits the number of customers dramatically.
We cannot know the whole impact of these two rules but they were not the rules that people were used to up until then. Most app stores did not charge for each submission and the minimum price for the apps was a lot lower than $2.99.
With Jengun, we are one of these small application development companies. We design BlackBerry calculator applications to help people to solve their daily problems. We design calculator apps and from the feedback we get from our customers, we are pleased to know that we are helping them.
In long run will these rules have any effect, positive or negative? We will all see how the whole thing plays out. Now new companies coming into the app market, including cell phone providers, will make the app store market a lot more competitive. Usually competition is good for customers, but in this case there is a third party in the game, who is app developers. Most app developers are doing the apps as hobbies or as a second job. If the competition starts to hurt the app developers, some believe that smaller developers will start to leave the market. At the end, most of the smaller developers are not making any significant amount of the money from the app business at all.
While everybody is benefiting from a growing market and new technology, people should think about what is fueling the growth of the market- app developers. If we hurt these small developers, in the end this might hurt the number of new apps, prices and quality of future apps as well.
