Mobile Applications and Fragmentation: A Growing Concern for Developers and Operators

Strategic Insights -

Mobile applications have gained a new level of importance at the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, with a dedicated hall for developers to showcase new services and platform providers to attract developers to their respective platforms and stores. In the last 18 months, almost every type of company with a stake in the mobile content industry has launched an application service. However, despite the growing number of application stores, the platform ecosystem has shown no signs of arrested development, with multiple operating systems and manufacturers contributing to fragmentation.

Key Takeaways:

  • The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), a partnership between mobile operators, has been formed to create the largest application distribution ecosystem, providing scale to developers and more choice to customers.
  • The WAC aims to enable developers to write an application once and deploy it anywhere, but its success is uncertain due to competing interests and the growing fragmentation of mobile handset and operating system specifications.
  • Independent third-party application stores, such as GetJar and Mobango, have shown strong signs of growth, with GetJar serving over 800m downloads and Mobango claiming a 500% growth in 2009.
  • Smartphone strategies continue to fuel fragmentation, with multiple operating systems and manufacturers contributing to the lack of a dominant platform.
  • The mobile content industry is expected to see strong growth in Latin America, with Central and South America contributing 7% of the global mobile content market by 2013.
  • Latin America has also become a key market for mobile TV, with analogue TV chipset company Telegent Systems shipping 50m mobile devices carrying their technology, including 30% to Latin America.
  • Mobile music is also seeing significant growth in Latin America, with Nokia's Comes With Music (CWM) device/service bundle reaching 10m downloads in Brazil and Mexico in the first six months.
  • Mobile games have also found a significant opportunity in Latin America, with leading publisher Gameloft reporting a 10% revenue growth in 2009 outside of North America and Europe.

Statistics:

  • 3 billion mobile subscribers are expected to be served by the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) initiative.
  • Over 60m downloads per month are generated by GetJar, with a user base of 20m active monthly users.
  • GetJar supports over 2,300 handsets and features almost 70,000 applications.
  • Mobango claims a growth rate of over 500% in 2009, with 23m downloads in December 2009.
  • 7% of the global mobile content market is expected to come from Central and South America by 2013.
  • 6.5 billion euros in mobile content revenues are expected to be generated in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico combined by 2013.
  • 50m mobile devices carrying Telegent's mobile TV technology have shipped, with 30% going to Latin America.

Sources:

  • Mobile World Congress 2010
  • Screen Digest
  • Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF)
  • GetJar
  • Mobango
  • Telegent Systems
  • Nokia
  • Gameloft
  • MEF
  • WAC
  • Research In Motion (RIM)