S60 device sales are booming, but what is happening with application sales?
3rd party S60 applications
- July 24th, 2006
Here’s a very interesting post from Michael Mace: Why are mobile application sales dropping?, followed by a long - but even more intresting - follow-up discussion.
Well worth a read.
(via Ivan Kuznetsov)
ps. in the follow-up discussion, many people wanted the platform vendor (Microsoft / Palm OS / S60) to provide a “full software store built into every device”. Hmm… I wonder how we could utilize Nokia Catalogs the best way?
I think Nokia Catalogs is a good thing to promote new apps, but you should someaway promote this app, perhaps in the first start of the device or something so.
The other problem I see is app related, or better app price related. Java apps, specially games, are available in a 3€ average (via premium SMS). This way, the seller gets a little more than 2€, as you have to take out taxes, the cost of the retuning SMS and the benefit the operator takes also of the premium SMS price. And I can see really good games you can just buy with a seller taking just 2€, and seller isn’t always the developer, neither big ones as Vivendi or Gameloft are always the developer.
So for a very small amount per sale, you can get quite good games, I think the big volume of this market compensates the short price, but perhaps the short price is what gives you a big selling numbers.
So we can see here handango as the seller and the developing comunity appart. I don’t know how much handango gets for each sale, but I can see really a very short list of app under the 5€ price, let’s take Handy Weather as an example, 15€. I can get weather for free with the built-in browser in tons of sites. That’s just an example, but perhaps with a shorter price, sales could be much better, and now that symbian signed makes it a little harder to crackers to hack apps, perhaps it’s time to be aggressive in the price.
We have software much more featured in the same price tag of symbian apps on a PC, and games very well finished for just 3€ in the java market, so developers, give it a chance.
I’ve to add two little things. First, for the channels that supply the nokia catalogs (now, nokia and handango) perhaps they should encourage more comunity involvement a la web 2.0, with some promo codes for future buys or something so, that way we could have people favourites in the different app types and perhaps also include in the detailed description we can see in the catalogs not only the app description but also this users opinions, and not just a simple rating.
The other problem I forgot to comment is that as I said nokia need to push the catalogs application, but not only this, It should promote that their phones can handle 3rd party applications. Ok, with the n-series they’re using the multimedia computers tag, but for the average users, that doesn’t have to mean that you have a whole world of apps open for you, but only a simple slogan, if it isn’t followed but some explanation about it, perhaps an extra manual with a selected bunch of apps you can install and a little description about them and about the phone capabilities.