There is no doubt that to be successful as a phone maker these days, the major players including Nokia, RIM, Apple, Google and Microsoft are seeing that app stores are almost as important as the phones themselves.’a0 If there aren’t numerous and attractive application marketplaces for your phones, consumers will go elsewhere when they buy a phone.
In that vein, two phone makers, Research and Motion and Nokia, recently made acquisitions that will make their app stores and developer ecosystem be more attractive to mobile developers.
For RIM, they recently acquired Cellmania, a firm which makes infrastructure for app developers to distribute their apps in marketplaces.’a0 If there is one thing that RIM needs right now, is help getting its BlackBerry App World more attractive to developers.’a0 The Android Market and iTunes App Store get all the focus and RIM is a huge potential market for app developers.
In another move, Nokia bought Motally, a US based mobile analytics firm.’a0 Motally provides metrics that help developers and content publishers gauge user engagement.’a0 Motally’s tools can help developers see how users interact with content by providing carriers, user location, most commonly user phones and application usage.
Nokia will take Motally’s tools in to it’s Qt framework, making this cross-platform programming language more attractive right before it’s release in a wide manner.
Developers, Developers, Developers
As you can see, mobile phone makers are making acquisitions to provide application makers the tools they need to develop and market their applications.’a0 As can be seen by Android and iTunes, who have done this well already, there is a lot of room to improve.
A recent study gave RIM the most upward momentum when it comes to the North American market.’a0 This is because of the large userbase BlackBerry has and the unrealized potential of the BlackBerry App World.’a0 The BlackBerry user class is mainly enterprise, and there is a huge amount of enterprise applications that have yet to be developed.
Are you a mobile developer – which factors do the existing application markets make them attractive?’a0 Where are the markets failing?