The year 2008 is the beginning of a gold rush of mobile applications.
The iPhone app store has over 20,000 apps and there are numerous stories
of developers ’striking it rich’ through good timing and luck. My focus is on Google’s Open Source operating system, Android. Launched in October 2008 with the T-Mobile G1, it has sold at least 300,000 units last year.
The Android Market
The Android market, the most popular place to download applications, was launched with the phone in October 2008. The mechanism to process purchases was not in place, so all the apps were no-cost. As an experiment I created a simple utility application in January called “WhatIsMyIp?” that displays the IP address that T-Mobile assigns to the phone. There were 1500 downloads in the first week, and 1000 downloads the next week. After two weeks I took down the app from the market.
On Feb 20th, 2009 the market began to publish paid apps. This has been a highly anticipated event for Android developers as they too can try for a piece of the pie. Since the market did not let me convert the app from free to paid, I renamed the app to ScanMyIp and uploaded it again with a $1 price. For the 3 days the paid-apps have been available at the time of this writing, there has been no purchases of this app. Spending a dollar and going through the checkout process needs to provide more value than this simple utility.
Learning from iPhone
Since the quality and value of mobile applications varies widely, its very important for customers to get a taste of what they are buying. Its popular to create a free ‘lite’ version and a paid ‘full’ or ‘pro’ version of the app. The Android Market has one difference to the App Store in this area - all applications come with a 24 hour money-back guarantee. So even without a lite version, there is a small window to try out the app. Now that the iPhone application market is maturing, people are looking at how to create lasting value from a mobile app. Pinch Media says the average shelf life of an iPhone app is 30 days.
The model I am using for the real android project, IceCondor, is to use the lite/full version of the app in the app store, in addition to a web-service that supports the application. The web service works like flickr in that a certain amount of usage is free, and with a yearly or monthly fee, usage becomes almost unlimited.
Another difference between Android and the iPhone is that Android allows for the Internet model of application distribution. Its possible to provide a link on a web page to directly install an android application. You can charge or not charge, how ever you like. Its the installed based of the Android Market app on every phone that makes the Market so valuable.
Business Blog Pavillion
My name is Don Park. I am a Portland-area software developer and entrepreneur with a focus on mobile applications. I’ll be at the Business Blog Pavillion on the floor of the Business Leaders NW conference on Wednesday Feb 25th from 1pm-5pm if you would like to discuss any of this further. Follow me on twitter at @donpdonp.
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