Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We’ve collected a group of the industry’s leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry.
Oh my god! There must be well over 300,000 mobile applications available when you consider the different mobile platforms. There are soooo many great iPhone applications! There are equally soooo many good Android apps … and BlackBerry apps and Phone 7 apps. How does anyone find good apps when there are literally hundreds of thousands of them and growing daily?
I believe that a major focus in mobile in 2011 will be to better help users find the applications that are best suited to them.
Sure, app store providers have created a catalog of apps and can tell you the most popular apps by categories. Here’s the categories provided by Apple Inc. for its App Store:
1. Books
2. Business
3. Education
4. Entertainment
5. Finance
6. Games
7. Health Care & Fitness
8. Lifestyle
9. Medical
10. Music
11. Navigation
12. News
13. Photography
14. Productivity
15. Reference
16. Social Networking
17. Sports
18. Travel
19. Utilities
20. Weather
Even with 20 different categories in the iTunes App Store, that’s an average of 15,000 apps per category. Unless it just happens to be one of the top selling apps, you may not find out about it even though it might be the perfect app for you.
I think that we’ll see more effort placed by the producers of app stores (from firms like Apple, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Research In Motion Ltd. and other suppliers like PocketGear) to assist users in finding, trying out and buying applications for their smart phone. This is part search and part user profile analysis.
App search is a problem similar to Web search, but different because it’s not about finding lots of possible Web pages (often hundreds) but, instead, finding applications that the user might actually like and, perhaps, offering ways (via animation and videos) to show the person the app before they ever download it.
Another big opportunity in app search will be advertising. Just like in Web search, app search will likely provide ads from vendors who want to convince you that their app is one you should buy instead of what the app search engine presents to you or want to promote their brand as you are searching.
In any event, app search is already a challenge. It always happens in new and growing markets: app stores create wonderful new solutions but also create new challenges such as how to find the most appropriate app out of tens of thousands of possibilities.
I call on bright people and entrepreneurs to help solve this growing problem. If you have a great solution to this problem, send me a note. I’d love to hear from you.
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D. is Principal Analyst, Mobile & Wireless, MobileTrax L.L.C. As a nationally recognized industry authority, he focuses on monitoring and analyzing emerging trends, technologies and market behavior in the mobile computing and wireless data communications industry in North America. Dr. Purdy is an ‘edge of network’ analyst looking at devices, applications and services as well as wireless connectivity to those devices.
