Social Machinery

Last week Vision Mobile consulting released a new study regarding application stores. The report is extremely interesting since the main sponsor is Telefonica developer community and some of the findings are quite disruptive showing how mobile operators losing the battle for application developer’s heart. 

Application stores like Apple Appstore or AndroidMarket have redefined the way consumers, developers, advertisers and other stakeholders interact, creating a paradigm shift from the old way content providers used to sell and expose applications.

And even do the revamped Appstore concept is a pretty new jargon, this report give some clear hints about where this industry is heading. Moreover, it shows the two sides of the coin: winners and losers. 

According to the report, Iphone and Android are by far leading the applications development ecosystem. Both companies have an overwhelming advantage in terms of number of applications: 225.000 and 72.000 respectively. 

Interestingly, One of the major disparities is between the device installed base and the number of apps per platform. One would expect that the platforms deployed on the largest number of devices would have the biggest number of applications. Interestingly is completely the opposite. For instance, Java ME is available on around three billion handsets, but the platform has only 45.000 applications available, while Apple IOS has achieved 5 times more applications with just 60 Million devices.  Even sadder is the case of Symbian OS, deployed in more than 390 million handsets worldwide but with no more than 6.000 applications available today.

According to the study these disparities are generated from the initial mission of this two ecosystems; Symbian OS, JAVA ME has been focused on has focused on enabling  handset OEMs to differentiate, while Android and Apple has focused on enabling developers to differentiate.

Another interesting conclusion is the fact that Android OS is the most used platform by developers. 60% of application developers have worked with Android during 2010, compared to Iphone 50% and Symbian 45%. At this pace we can expect Android to reach Iphone levels in two years. Other OS platforms are far behind or practically not being used by developers like Linux, Brew or Palm OS.

Probably another reason why Android is winning developer’s mind is the easiness to use. According to developers the time to master Android Platform is around 5 months. Iphone is in the range of 7 months. At the end of the pack you can find Symbian with more than 15 months to become a developer expert.

 Also, 68% of application developers are somewhat satisfied with Application stores revenues. Nevertheless, the doubts about long-tail monetization are raised by developer’s revenue expectations. Only 5% of the respondents reported very good revenues, above their expectations, while 24% said their revenues were poor.

Mobile operators the bigger losers so far

Ironically, this report sponsored by Telefonica doesn’t give a very optimistic view on mobile operator’s availability to create ecosystems. Majority of mobile developers view network operators as bit-pipes.

In fact, 80% of application developers believe that operators should only provide data access services. Only 25% believe that operators should create mobile services and less than 20% think that operators should have their own application store. What’s even more surprising is that only 5% of respondents thought that the role of network operators should be to expose network APIs, hinting at the lack of interest towards network enablers.