Mobile Applications Outside of Mobile Application Marketplaces
Mobile Application Developers are Creating New Avenues for Mobile Applications
A majority of individuals who own Smartphones and are familiar with the mobile application industry are aware that Apple’s iTunes Mobile Application Marketplace is the most popular and revenue generating mobile application marketplaces in the industry today. A recent study conduced by HIS Screen Digest revealed that Apple generated 82.7% of the total global application store revenue in 2010 and also increased its revenue from $768.7 million in 2009 to $1.8 billion in 2010.
Although Apple clearly currently has dominance in the mobile application marketplace and mobile application development, other companies have not been discouraged from finding their own avenues for distributing and developing their mobile applications into the booming mobile application marketplace. In fact, a number of new mobile application distribution/development ideas have been being discussed recently and in the following, we will further elaborate on these new ideas which mobile application developers are generating to compete with other mobile application developers and major mobile application development marketplaces like Apple’s iTunes Mobile Application Marketplace, Google’s Droid Marketplace and RIM’s Blackberry App World Mobile Application Marketplace, just to name a few.
Kinoma: Kinoma is a new mobile application development platform that allows mobile application developers to write applications for a variety of different mobile operating systems. The mobile applications created with Kinoma are integrated with hardware at an OS level allowing the mobile applications to perform well even on slower Smartphone devices. An example of a mobile application build using the Kinoma technology is Kinoma Play which can be used either as a standalone mobile application or as the main user inferface.
WAC: WAC or also known as The Wholesale Applications Community is an operator-led global wholesale mobile application store where HTML5 mobile applications are arranged through the operator’s mobile application stores, not the consumer-facing ones like Apple’s iTunes or Google’s Android mobile application development. Although not a lot of mobile service provider support WAC mobile applications, a few that do are: China Mobile, MTS, Orange Smart, Telefonica, Verizon and Vodafone. WAC is also designed to support Java feature Smartphones as well as Android, but not current not the i-OS.
MobiUS Web Browser: the MobiUS Web Browser from AppMobi aims to expand the access of the WAC Mobile Applications outside of its initial implementations and bring WAC mobile applications to Apple’s Operating System. The MobiUS browser will support the open API’s for WAC, PhoneGap and its own AppMobi XDK. This will allow the Smartphone’s browser to have entry and control of various smartphone features like the accelerometer, camera, sound, vibration, phone and much more. These mobile applications will also be capable of performing many more features compared to native mobile applications such as access to in-app payments, push notifications and analytics.
Zeewe: Zeewe is a new, free HTML5 Mobile Application marketplace for Apple’s iPad, iPhone, Google’s Android, and also personal computers. This is the newest mobile application idea and in its first few weeks it has already attracted close to 100,000 visitors. Although there is not much information yet available for Zeewe, mobile application developers feel confident that it will continue to build momentum in 2011.
Openwave: Openwave’s mobile applications are built on its “amplicity” platform which has been designed for deployment by its operators, as opposed to consumer-facing mobile application stores. Sprint is the first U.S. mobile provider to support this service with expansion to other providers expected later in 2011. A large majority of mobile applications built for this platform will use standard web technologies such as HTML4, CSS, and JavaScript.
What the future holds for the mobile application industry and mobile application developers is still unclear but one certainty is that there is tremendous room for growth in this booming industry. Even though there will be large corporations such as Apple, Google, RIM and Microsoft that will dominate the landscape, there will still be plenty of room and opportunity for smaller mobile application development firms to also succeed.