The Big Winners & Loosers in the Mobile App Market

With the global smartphone market estimated at $2 billion and the iPhone (a product that did not exist 3 years ago) accounting for 40% of Apple’s revenue, it is an understatement  to say its future is anything but bright. According to research2guidance, the market is set to reach $15 billion in 2013. Which players appear set to be the winners and loosers of this boom? As things stand Apple is far ahead of the pack. A January report from the research firm Gartner found that the app market in 2009 was 99.4% Apple’s. Despite this, other stores, particularly Android, are currently growing at a much faster pace.

According to eco (the German Association of Internet Businesses) handset manufacturers seemed poised to continue their hegemony over the smartphone app market despite more and more cellphone carriers, such as Vodafone, planning their own app stores.  But they might be simply too late to the party. With handset manufacturers in pole position, OS platform providers such as Microsoft come in second.  With this in mind it would seem that the combination of creating your own handset and platform is all it takes to challenge the market leaders but one must not forget what made the Apple App Store a success in the first place.
One of the important things that made the iPhone and its App Store a success was their ease-of-use, i.e. high usability and great interface design. Compared to other mobile platforms the iPhone was intuitive and did not have a labyrinthine menu layout. The capacitive touch screen coupled with the interface design of the OS allowed for revolutionary Human-Computer Interaction that was seamless. The app store also well and truly brought e-commerce to mobile phones with an interface design that allowed users to browse apps as if they were music on an iPod. Android would pack a lot of the same functionality but on a more open platform that could be tweaked by handset manufacturers as evidenced by HTC’s celebrated Sense User Interface design. So, really, challengers should strive for a great interface design in addition to whatever features they may be planning to differentiate and market their offerings.