Its a mobile world and things change quickly. But at this exact point in time if you are not on the iPhone and you have a general consumer application, you are not where the market is.
In mobile gaming ComScore report 17% growth last year and while 3.8% of phone users have downloaded a game, on the iPhone 32.4% have in 6 months. iPhone users accounted for 14% of all mobile downloads in 2008, bearing in mind the app store was only available for 6 months of that and grew rapidly as the year went on.
Developing for a potential market of millions of other phones is wasted when user behavior dictates that the actual market for not only games but all types of apps is mainly with iPhone users. The complexity of developing for a plethora of other platforms, screen sizes and devices and of dealing with multiple carriers adds huge costs, and for what outcome?
In a great analysis Pete Burrows from Business Week quotes Pelago CEO Jeff Holden
late last year, he crunched the numbers and came to a shocking conclusion: that the 13 million owners of iPhone owners had already downloaded as much software as—are you sitting down—1.1 billion other cell-phone owners
Growth in the last couple of months now has that at 1.6 billion other cell-phone users or 6.4 times the size of the entire U.S. mobile phone market.
That doesn’t mean the App store is perfect, pricing pressure from low quality apps is still restricting developer margins, innovation or quality. But as the market becomes more sophisticated and users more discerning, there is every reason to think that this very competitive market will actually produce a great staircase of innovation vs price options for consumers and still allow business to produce good returns. Another business week article in mid Jan looked at what it called the Apple App Store Monster and contains some big numbers.
Update 4 Feb 2:00 pm. Just came across a Fortune blog on this top with an in-depth app analysis by category. It shows there are now 18,700 Apps available.
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