I'm sure you've heard of Apple's App Store for the iPhone. But have you ever heard of an independent mobile app store called GetJar?
No? Well, that's not surprising. The tiny company now based in Silicon Valley has done virtually no marketing. And yet in the nearly five years it's been around, the company has managed to build the second largest application store front for mobile phones in the world, likely making it the biggest mobile app store you've never heard of.
The privately held Getjar claims it has nearly 57,000 applications in its store, making it second only to Apple in terms of total applications. Apple just announced this week that it now has more than 100,000 applications in its store.
Google's Android Market, which launched earlier this year has more than 10,000 applications. Research in Motion's BlackBerry App World has just more than 2,000 applications available today, according to estimates.
Since Getjar's virtual store went live in early 2005, about 650 million applications have been downloaded. And momentum has been growing. For the month of October, Getjar executives say the company saw its users download 55 million applications, which is a 267 percent increase over the same month a year ago when 15 million mobile applications were downloaded. And the company says that it has more than 300,000 registered developers uploading applications to its site.
Meanwhile, Apple's much-hyped and heavily marketed iTunes App Store, which is nearly twice the size of Getjar, as of September had more than 2 billion app downloads since the store was launched in July 2008. And executives at Apple recently said the company had 125,000 developers on its roster. By comparison, the Android Market has had an estimated 40 million downloads since it went live earlier this year.
GetJar got its start not as an application store but as a beta testing Web site for mobile developers. GetJar founder and CEO Ilja Laurs had started the site to allow developers a way to test their applications on a variety of handsets.
"Originally, we were trying to help developers who couldn't get access to certain phones for testing," he said. "But then developers came to us and asked if they could use the site to also distribute their applications."
And so the GetJar application store was born in early 2005. At first, the site attracted mostly hard-core mobile application fans. But over the years, word of the site has spread, and users all over the world come to GetJar to download different applications.
Unlike most of the other application stores that have been announced recently, GetJar's store offers mobile applications for almost any phone.
"With the GetJar store, consumers don't have to worry about whether they have an Android phone or a Java phone," said Patrick Mork, vice president of marketing for GetJar. "They don't need to know which model Nokia they have. We take the fragmentation out of the equation by auto-detecting what apps can run on which phones and offering consumers those applications."
The way it works is that GetJar is able to detect the type of phone a wireless subscriber is using when they connect to the GetJar mobile Web site. It can also detect the type of phone used from the regular Web site using a wireless subscriber's phone number.
A screen shot of a GetJar download page for the Facebook shortcut link.
(Credit: GetJar)Based on this information, GetJar is able to direct app shoppers to the applications that will work on their phones.
"If there is a BlackBerry app available and you are using a BlackBerry you will get that application," Mork said. "But if you're on a feature phone, you'll likely get a shortcut link."
This is yet another important differentiator for GetJar. Unlike device or operating system specific app stores, such as Apple's App Store or Android Market, GetJar also provides millions of consumers using basic feature phones an app-like experience, even if a specific application hasn't been developed for their particular phone.
For example, GetJar has worked with Facebook to provide a downloadable shortcut link that leads to the Facebook mobile Web site for wireless subscribers who are not using a smartphone for which a special Facebook application has been developed.
While the link is not really a native application for that specific device, the link appears on the phone's menu and provides access via the phone's browser to a mobile Web site. For consumers, the experience is very similar to that of a native application that has been downloaded to a smartphone.
"Facebook didn't have a strategy for developing applications for Motorola Razrs and Samsung Instincts" Mork said. "So they teamed up with us to get around that problem by providing short cut links. It's really not an app. But the beauty of it is that it allows any company to play in the app game from a shortcut."
And for brands, such as Facebook, the shortcut increases their mobile presence. Before it started working with GetJar, Facebook would get between 100,000 and 150,000 downloads per week from its mobile site. After the shortcut, links were available on the GetJar site and on Facebook's site, Facebook started to see 1.5 million mobile downloads per week, Mork said.
But GetJar does have some limitations. One major limitation for consumers in the U.S. is that GetJar cannot offer applications to most phones operating on Verizon Wireless's network. The reason is that Verizon uses a closed platform called BREW on many of its phones. And there is no way for third-party application developers to create applications for these devices without going through Verizon's BREW approval process. But BREW is a legacy platform for Verizon, and newer smartphones on Verizon, such as BlackBerry devices and the new Android phones, will be able to access applications from GetJar.
GetJar also doesn't explicitly serve apps to iPhone users, again because the iPhone platform is closed. But iPhone users can use the GetJar store to discover new applications and GetJar can redirect those users to the Apple App Store, where they can download the applications.
Yet another limitation is that GetJar does not offer developers the ability to charge for applications. The company has not yet figured out how to bill for these applications. Instead, application developers can monetize their applications by incorporating advertising into the application or using the app on GetJar to up-sell consumers to a more robust application in a different application store.
But GetJar does allow developers to promote their applications, and the company has developed a marketplace so that developers can bid for top promotional spots on the Web site. GetJar gets paid based on how many users download these applications. Most other application stores today do not offer developers a way to promote their applications, which makes it difficult for smaller developers to get their applications noticed.
While there is no question that Apple dominates the mobile application market today, Mork admits that Apple's push into applications has been a boon for GetJar, and likely for other app stores.
"It's undeniable that Apple has had a positive effect on our business, especially in the U.S.," he said. "But we don't really compete with Apple. Still, it's clear that the mass market is just starting to catch on. And that is largely thanks to the success of Apple and its App Store."
LAS VEGAS--It seems there are going to be as many ways to run a mobile application store as there are stores themselves.
RIM's BlackBerry App World is a model of how mobile OS vendors are trying to balance consumer needs and carrier needs.
(Credit: Maggie Reardon/CNET)One of the big topics this week at CTIA 2009 has been mobile applications, as Research in Motion unveiled BlackBerry App World and Microsoft talked about its forthcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The dam has truly broken with mobile applications; for years, most consumers seemed indifferent to third-party applications, but now they are viewed as an essential part of any smartphone, just like they are on a PC or Mac.
Most of the credit for that trend has been prompted by the success of Apple's App Store, as both Apple's friends and enemies in the mobile world will readily admit. But few competitors are attempting to pull off Apple's my-way-or-the-highway approach, preferring to integrate the wireless carriers in a nod to the entrenched power those companies have in the mobile world.
Some might argue that's because they don't have devices with the consumer cachet of the iPhone. But it's clear after talking to several companies on the sidelines at CTIA that they think there's a way to make sure they offer quality software to their customers without cutting the carrier almost completely out of the equation, as Apple has done with AT&T.
Still, the burning question is whether the carriers and handset makers will permit software companies to do what they do best, or whether they will continue to try to put their stamp on mobile application development in order to avoid their possible fates as "dumb pipes" or widget makers.
"There's a big measure of trust there," said Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, which was created by a foundation of carriers and handset makers to develop software that provides a common underpinning for developers to write mobile applications. "We have to trust that the companies that build the devices and the operators that package this know what they are doing."
The idea of mobile application stores is not new, but the faster networks and more sophisticated devices available these days have created a way for users to download applications directly to their device, bypassing the PC altogether. There are various ways that mobile companies are approaching this new reality.
Apple's approach has been covered exhaustively. But Apple has a unique advantage compared with its competitors: its applications only have to support two devices that are essentially identical (the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G), and for the most part Apple works only with a single wireless carrier per country. Therefore, it can have a central application store and guarantee that those applications will work on any iPhone, and at the same time not have to worry as much about ensuring its carrier partners have unique ways to sell the same phone.
Billing strategies
But while RIM, for example, is launching BlackBerry App World with the money flowing outside of the carrier's control through an exclusive relationship with PayPal, co-CEO Jim Balsillie made it clear that he would find a way to make sure the carriers have a chance to participate in the billing for those applications. "Different carriers have different billing strategies, so it's quite frankly a bunch of work," he told The Wall Street Journal.
Microsoft is likewise steering a middle ground, with plans to let carriers offer their own "store within a store" inside Windows Marketplace for Mobile and giving users the option to choose how they want to be billed: directly via credit card or through their monthly wireless bill.
The idea that the carrier owns the billing relationship with the end user for almost all of the mobile experience is virtually sacrosanct for everyone but Apple and AT&T. But there is a concern among some in the mobile industry that carriers will extend that relationship to demand a role in creating software and services for end users marked with their own brand.
Verizon did nothing to assuage those fears by announcing plans to join the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) this week, essentially signaling that it plans to make sure Verizon-stamped software appears on future handsets regardless of what operating system is running underneath the layer presented to a phone's user.
To be fair, there are valid reasons why carriers are so concerned about the types of applications that run on their networks. Modern wireless networks are more fragile than one might think, as demonstrated by the problems AT&T encountered when iPhone-bearing geeks descended on Austin, Texas, for SXSW 2009 and brought local AT&T data service to a crawl.
Still, Aaron Woodman, a director in Microsoft's mobile communications business, thinks carriers fundamentally understand the shift that has taken place in the mobile industry over the last several years.
Form vs. functionality
For years, the business of selling mobile phones was about making sure you had phones that looked good and ensuring distribution ran like a clock, Woodman said. But over the last decade, business phone users started to demand features in addition to style, and that trend has exploded with the consumer demand sparked by the iPhone.
"People all of the sudden were walking in and asking for core level of functionality, and that started to change the conversation from about sourcing devices to functionality," Woodman said. "That functionality is going to be very difficult for operators to provide with significant help from others. Expertise and experience (in one area) doesn't yield expertise and experience in another area."
Organizations like Symbian, which controls the world's leading smartphone operating system, believe the balanced answer is to create an "app mall" rather than an "app store," according to David Wood, executive vice president for research at the Symbian Foundation.
For example, Symbian will do the dirty work of processing, certifying, and hosting the applications, but will give its various partners their own storefronts within that mall to sell Symbian-certified applications as they see fit. Microsoft's approach is somewhat similar. This way, carriers can feel they still have the opportunity to sell their software and services to end users without operating system vendors having to cede control of the user experience on a modern smartphone.
As has been often stated, the beauty of the modern mobile computing market is that established business models and philosophies from the PC market or older cellular phone market aren't necessarily relevant: several executives will (privately) admit they are essentially making this up as they go along.
There's little doubt that Apple's iPhone has shaken up this market the way Apple's Macintosh shook up the personal computing market 25 years ago. But unlike the past, several companies--not just two--are going to dictate the future of the truly personal computer.
And since different people want different things from their mobile phones, there's room for more than one approach to selling smartphones and mobile applications. There is not, however, room for seven approaches, which means operating system vendors, handset makers, and carriers will have to be extremely vigilant about evolving customer perferences in a world where consumer tastes can change virtually overnight.
The rumors and speculations that Research In Motion would launch its anticipated BlackBerry App World application store at CTIA were dead on. On Wednesday, the Canadian smartphone and software maker will make BlackBerry App World available for download. RIM's application store seems to enjoy a logical layout, sharing some similarities with the iPhone App Store (mostly in the app discovery department), but also has a dark look all its own. Vicariously step into BlackBerry's App World through our gallery of screenshots: Introducing BlackBerry App World.
This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.
Research In Motion launched its application store--dubbed BlackBerry App World--and the pricing model will immediately draw comparisons to Apple's App Store setup. That comparison, however, only goes so far.
For starters, App World's pricing model has raised a bit of a ruckus because it veers a bit from Apple's scheme. But a business audience isn't going to sweat a $2.99 application compared with a 99 cent minimum-price app. And RIM's audience is likely to even pay higher prices, if the App World can actually deliver software with a real business use. And there are so many tiers to the App World model that RIM could have said "charge what you want."
But the biggest takeaway from the App World pricing model is that higher prices mean more for developers (see FAQ). RIM needs more developers on its bandwagon because the iPhone is the shiny object in the mobile world.
Simply put, money talks, and RIM plans to use it. Matthew Miller notes that RIM's pricing model shouldn't be that big of a deal.
Pricing for the BlackBerry App World
(Credit: Research In Motion)Sure, RIM does offer free apps, but developers aren't likely to offer them. Given that developers pay an up-front fee, why would you pay RIM to distribute a free app? RIM's message with App World appears to be: frivolous and fun apps need not apply.
Will App World work?
My hunch is that App World will do well but won't be as successful as Apple's store. RIM's store is likely to be more BlackBerry-ish--the applications will be more business-focused and tool-oriented; they won't feature hot games.
RIM also has an application management issue on its hands. Apple's App Store has to support just the iPhone and iPod Touch. RIM's applications will work on these models:
- BlackBerry Bold 9000 smartphone
- BlackBerry Storm smartphone
- BlackBerry Pearl Flip Series
- BlackBerry Curve 8300 Series
- Black Berry Curve 8900 smartphone
- BlackBerry 8800 Series
- BlackBerry Pearl Series
The experience on all of those models will vary. For instance, the way a game feels on the Storm will be different than on the Bold and Curve. How will RIM navigate that conundrum? As a developer, those models mean more complications.
Other takeaways from the App World effort:
- A PayPal account is required with App World for customers and developers;
- Developers from around the world can contribute except for those from Belarus, Myanmar/Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.
- To submit an application, there's a $200 fee, which will be refunded if the software is rejected.
(Credit:
RIM)
Updated 4:24 p.m. PST with RIM's response about a March launch and more information on the app store.
BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion announced that its upcoming application storefront will officially be called BlackBerry App World. The developer site will be updated Wednesday night to make appropriate changes but will be live again by 7 p.m. PST, according to RIM. In addition, anyone interested in finding out when the store goes live can sign up for alerts on the BlackBerry App World site.
RIM opened up application submissions in January, and the store is scheduled to launch sometime in March. We asked our contact at RIM if the store is still on track to open this month, and a representative from the company's press agency confirmed that BlackBerry App World is still set for a March debut.
Download.com associate editor Jessica Dolcourt also received this additional information about distribution:
Q: Will BlackBerry App World be a downloadable mobile app for existing BlackBerry owners and a preloaded app that will ship on forthcoming BlackBerrys?
RIM: BlackBerry App World will be a downloadable application at launch. Future versions and distribution models haven't really been decided yet.
Q: Will there be a desktop version, etc.?
RIM: There will be a Web-based catalog at launch, but for the first version BlackBerry App World is a mobile app.
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