The Future is Here For the Mobile Application
When Apple thrust the iPhone onto the general public, consumers and reporters alike praised the company for coming up with yet another attractive product that appealed to the eye. This wasn’t your ordinary cell phone, people buzzed. This has a large, clear screen. This is streamlined. It is, dare we say, pretty.
Months later, pretty doesn’t come close to describing the impact the iPhone has had on the market. After all, everybody knows how to churn out a pretty phone these days. No, Apple has changed the game in one clear and obvious way.
Think about it. One year ago, did you even know what an “app” was? Yet today, turn on the television during prime time and you’ll see 30-second commercials hitting you over the head with the term as if it’s been with you since birth. “There’s an app for this,” Apple tells you, “and there’s an app for that.”
No, the iPhone is not just eye candy for the want-to-be-hip crowd. It’s the holy grail for software developers.
It’s for good reason. Last week, Apple announced that it just surpassed one billion downloads of mobile applications that run on the iPhone — in nine months. That’s more than three apps for every living person in the United States. And it’s pretty safe to say that a huge segment of that population still has no clue just what the heck an app is.
Not surprisingly, Apple’s success has prompted other players in the mobile phone game to ante up. Nokia, which remains the worldwide leader in mobile phone market share, will soon launch its marketplace for applications. BlackBerry, Samsung and Motorola all are feverishly trying to make themselves known in this arena as well.
Of the non-Apple combatants, analysts tend to agree that Nokia stands to have the most impact on the state of mobile application development [http://www.forum.nokia.com/Resources_and_Information/Explore/Application_Areas/Enterprise/] When Nokia debuts its Ovi Store application marketplace in May, the company promises that users will discover thousands of applications waiting to make their way onto Nokia phones.
The Finland-based company is also banking on the idea that granting application developers access to the world’s leading mobile platform will be a huge driving force in expanding that number even further. Case in point: A company spokesman recently told eWeek that an invitation-only event held in Silicon Valley for iPhone developers lured in standing-only crowds of eager tech-heads wanting to migrate their Apple apps to the Nokia platform.
In the end, says Nokia, it’s all about the money. The world’s market leader has access to quite a lot of it, and the world’s wireless application developers are eager to claim their fair share.
