Nikhil Pahwa
The Financial Express
There is no such thing as a quiet launch for a transnational company like Nokia. As it rolled out its Ovi Store in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain, the US and the UK, the Ovi Store website was hit by a flood of traffic from all across the world. Curious to see what the competitor to the iPhone App Store was going to look like—even if it hadn’t yet launched in India—I too logged in to find the website struggling to stay up, and often not accessible.
Application Stores like the Ovi Store are marketplaces for mobile software, some serious, some kooky: At the iPhone App Store, available are software which can be used to play music, and emulate the keys of a pianos on the mobile phone touch screen, racing games sense the tilt of the iPhone to determine the direction and acceleration, or even those which reproduce the sound of a kiss or a fart. Business applications include expense trackers, currency converters and contact managers.
Mobile application developers owe a lot to the iPhone. Until around a year and a half ago, they were struggling for success, developing free or paid email readers, mobile Instant Messengers, or multi-purpose mobile applications that allowed searching the Internet, downloading video clips, reading email and news, booking movie or travel tickets. Their reach was limited; the propensity to buy was low, and even if free, money had to be spent on marketing them. With the launch of the iPhone App Store in July last year, all of that changed.
Since its launch, iPhone App Store has developed into a large and lucrative marketplace: according to US based VentureBeat, the iPhone Application stores has over 25,000 applications, has witnessed over 800 million application downloads. Significantly, the software development kit used for making apps has been downloaded over 800,000 times: the interest from the developer community is primarily because many of these applications are paid, and the developers get to keep 30 percent of the money, or monetise their application with advertising.
0 comments:
Post a Comment