Mobile Marketing

The IPhone Impact

In my last blog, I cited a factoid regarding 17 million IPhones having been sold to date. In fact, Apple’s App Store is downloading and/or selling approximately 3 million applications every day. Of course, this is America, and where would be without over-reactive pendulum swings? Some are asking if the App Store paradigm is the wave of the future and is the Mobile Web dead? The answer, of course, is a resounding NO.

The App Store is not the future, it’s the present, and only with respect to the IPhone. The appeal of the IPhone is the App Store. To Apple’s credit, they were really smart when the copied their IPod + ITunes template when they launched the I Phone. Further, they were downright brilliant when they made each and every hardware component on that phone i.e. the microphone, speaker, screen, camera, and GPS chip available to the developer community via open APIs and a well thought IPhone software development kit. Layer on Apple’s typically brilliant marketing and voila, two years later we have 17 million phones, tens of thousands of Apps and another Apple success story.

Ok, so now let’s put this in context. First, while 17 million IPhones have been sold worldwide, there are more than 2 billion non IPhones out there. Second, let’s be real, the App Store is a walled garden and walls are always salacious targets in the same way that buttons compel pushing. Think AOL… So, as we all think about developing our mobile applications, know that it is imperative to develop a WAP applicationfirst and foremost ( I would of course, encourage the development of an IPhone app too. IPhone users are rabid consumers of applications and the mobile web). Also, cell phone manufacturers, take note: Start defining standards across your line of handsets. Publish APIs and SDKs that allow developers to write apps and/or mobile web applications. And watch the mobile web tsunami explode!