Mobile Computing News

Photo: Apple

With the app store, Apple all but introduced an entirely new marketplace for developers to sell their wares. An early gold rush set in with some developers raking in millions of dollars from single apps that often cost a mere $2 and even $0.99 in the most extreme cases.

These developers helped fortify the iPhone’s dominance in the high-end smartphone category and every other mobile OS has now realised they need a similar bustling industry.

The developer’s conundrum

The developer’s conundrum is quite simple: devs want a platform with mass scale to build for that is not saturated by other developers, so as to ‘guarantee’ the mega returns that were experienced in the early days of the iPhone. But the paradox is this – consumers are becoming savvy to the need for a bustling app developer community around a mobile OS platform, but app developers want consumers to be there before they commit – a classic chicken and egg scenario.

The incentive

As such, the onus falls on the platform provider to entice developers to jump onto the bandwagon if they want to stand a chance of even competing in the smartphone market. Here we’re talking specifically Nokia, webOS and Windows Phone 7 Series, since iOS (Apple’s mobile OS) and Google Android are now proven entities.

Photo: Nokia

Microsoft has tried this recently by waving money in mobile games developers’ faces so that they port their popular iPhone games over to Windows Phone 7 Series. This, from early reports, has seen moderate success, since the incentive doesn’t necessarily exceed the effort to do this porting. And Windows Phone 7 Series is still unproven.

Our recommended solution

Another solution, one we haven’t seen practiced but could work, is a riff on Microsoft’s solution. Instead of getting developers to port their games for money, give an incentive to developers to develop original content by having a competition of sorts wherein each device shipped ships with those apps already on it. Bake the price of the game into the wholesale price of Windows Phone 7 Series device so that each game shipped earns each developer a dollar. The prospect of 10-50 million dollars from one remarkable game will incentivise the very best the industry has to offer. And the green lining? Well, those mobile apps and mobile games that don’t ship stock standard with the phone will be available on your market place day one, too.

How’s that for some early momentum? Think about it: team Windows Phone 7 Series, webOS and Nokia Ovi. It could work. 100,000 plus apps on Apple’s app store is a lot to compete with, but a small fraction are any good. If you had a bunch of very good apps early on for your mobile OS platform, perhaps people will take note.