The app store phenomenon should be credited to one company i.e. Apple which initiated the same via its app store for the Apple iPhone. But what started as a trend with Mobile phone makers like Apple and Nokia (with Nokia Ovi). Has now shifted to Mobile operators in India. Not too long ago Aircel announced its partnership with Infosys to launch a mobile app store. Since then a ton of other mobile operators have announced their plans.
Airtel Launches Mobile App Store
Now Airtel has gone ahead and launched its app platform call App Central which hosts 1250 Apps across 25 categories for business, games, books, social networking and other needs. The apps are paid for and can be easily added to one’s phone as the billing is integrated with the customer’s mobile bill or deducted from available talk-time incase of pre-paid users. The starting price of the apps is Rs.5. As expected these are localized in nature with regional apps like Ayyappa the God to Bhakti ki Shakti being part of the offering as well. Besides for religious stuff one with also find the usual suspects like cricket and festival oriented apps for Holi, Diwali, etc. To use Airtel App Central, Airtel mobile customers can visit Airtel Live on their mobile phone and browse into App Central or SMS app to 54321 to receive the URL.
Reliance To Follow Soon..
Reliance Communications will also follow suit as far as launching an app store is concerned. It stated that its Mobile Applications Store in India available for customers through its data portal RWorld. The first version of the Reliance mobile app store would be meant for GSM network phones only but soon would be available to CDMA subscribers as well. RWorld 2.0 as its being called will have customer experiences based on smartphones, content localization and SNS generated content, contextual search for content across all Voice, SMS and Data as well as simple pricing.
Reliance hopes to have a lot of developers participating as they claim to have over 10,000 individual and corporate registered developers through Reliance Developer Program (RDP), an initiative started in 2002.
What to expect with these mobile app stores?
There are many positives that would come out of these mobile app stores by operators. One is the growth of VAS as I expect the operators to promote these stores through all media channels. The other is ofcourse power to individual developers on the mobile side and even VAS companies who can now make apps and place them on these app stores. The revenue share would also mean that more developers and VAS players would have access to the mobile subscribers. So rather than selling their app directly to the operator the app store gives developers a democratic platform to reach a wider audience. Also the billing integrated with the mobile bill is likely to help the cause by increasing the actual number of downloads as there is no hassle of a credit card.
