Incelligence

“Where is Kevin Costner when you need him?”

incelligence — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:21:02 +0000

One issue we hear about over and over again from companies is mobile app discoverability – or “How will users find our app and if we build it will they come? “. It’s a good question and we think we have a good answer.

1) PROMOTE YOUR MOBILE APP!!! (yeah, we’re using caps because we’re yelling). Complaints abound about having an app developed and then no one uses it. You can’t just come up with a great idea or content you want made into an app and expect people to “get” it. You have to tell them it’s available (loudly and often) and where they can find it. This is true no matter if its end user paid app or a free marketing app.

If you have heavy website traffic, post your apps availability on your home page, or on every page of your site. If you do print ads, reserve some space in those to tell the world about your app. If you’re a brick and mortar operation, put up a banner in your store announcing your app, etc. It’s not difficult and it’s not expensive, especially if you’re making it a part of your normal promotional/marketing activities and it lets people know about your app when they are thinking about you!

2) Keep it simple. (ok, so here’s the blatant self-promotion part). End users don’t want to search through app stores and carrier decks to find your apps. Wouldn’t it be so much easier for your customers if they could just get YOUR app directly from YOU? Now they can.

Contact us about our MobileReach Program. MobileReach provides an end-to-end marketing solution including mobile app design, development and delivery. We’ll create your custom mobile app from your content and enable Direct-to-the-Customer distribution through our proprietary “text to download” mechanism. You can host the app yourself, or we’ll host it for you in the cloud. But one way or the other, all your customer sees is your app, coming from you.

Has Apple held back the mobile apps market?

incelligence — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:23:22 +0000

The new ruling from the U.S. Government allowing iPhone users to legally unlock (or jailbreak) their iPhones is a step in the right direction. For the mobile app market to really develop into something akin to the PC software/application market, users must be able to put whatever type of (legal) apps they want on their devices, without a corporate “big brother” acting as a gatekeeper.

Currently virtually every other handset in the market place allows users to put “non-approved” apps on their handsets. For example, every Java “Feature” phone allows the downloading and installation of J2ME apps – regardless of their origin. Blackberry phones do the same for Blackberry apps (and J2ME apps), and the same is true for Symbian OS-based phones as well. Even the new Android phones flooding the market have an option that the user simply has to select to allow the download of non-Android market apps.

Sure, the argument from Apple has always been that they’re just trying to guarantee a common user experience across all apps on the iPhone, and by doing so they can assure that the quality of iPhones will remain high. That may well be, but selling people a device and then telling them what they can and can’t have on it is a little too 1984-ish for our tastes. As Jennifer Stisa Granick, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF’) civil liberties director said: “Consumers should be allowed to use and modify the devices that they purchase the way they want. “If you bought it, you own it,”.

It’s just too bad that the government has to get involved to make Apple do the right thing.

Life after the iPhone

incelligence — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 20:00:07 +0000

With all of the press and hype around iPhones, you’d be among the majority if you think that the iPhone is the predominant platform out there for mobile applications. Steve Jobs would certainly like you to think that!

Reality is that even today, iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches combined are way less than 10% of the total available devices for mobile applications. In June of this year, Apple announced that 100 Million iOS devices have been sold to date. Sounds like a big number, right? Well, compare that with the 1.3 Billion cell phones that are sold every year! So in the couple of years its taken to sell the 100 Million iOS devices, well over 2Billion mobile devices have been sold. Even if you look only at the smartphone market, the iPhone is still not the dominant platform – not even close. In Q1 2010, Apple sold about 9M iPhones and in that same quarter total smartphone sales exceeded 54M. That makes the iPhone about 17% of the available new smartphone sales. In terms of installed base, they are far under that percentage.

What does this mean for anyone considering building mobile applications or thinking of adding mobile applications into their marketing mix? It means that if you focus only on the iPhone, you’re missing the biggest part of your market. The iPhone certainly deserves kudos for jump starting the mobile applications market by making it easy-as-pie to get one on your phone, but the other smartphone makers and wireless carriers have been scrambling to catch up, and making good headway. Today, mobile application stores abound for Blackberry, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and others, and in fact you could argue that because there are so many application store choices vs. the iPhone’s one, the tide is flowing in the other direction.

So, pay attention – don’t believe the hype, and be sure to include in your plan a way to cover the other platforms in your mobile app strategy. The other 90% of your target market will be very glad you did (and you will too.)