MONETISING MOBILE: App store owners talk

"One of the big challenges facing developers is it's now getting a really crowded space. Do you want to be the two thousandth Twitter applications on iTunes? Probably not."

He thinks the next wave of mobile apps will be "moving from this dumb phase" to smarter apps, where they're more context-aware.

O2 Litmus is making a bunch of APIs available to help developers to do this. One example being an API that lets apps query if someone has a flat-rate data tariff or not - and automatically adjust their behaviour.

Ray de Silva echoed Parton's comments, although he said Vodafone is taking a different tack.

"Vodafone is really looking to supercharge the whole charging element of its proposition as part of this enabling layer," he said. You may need to read that twice.

Vodafone is currently improving its conversion rates for people buying apps - up to 90% in some cases, which he said is "unheard of". So smarter back-end payment systems are important to back up the smarter apps, in short.

Intel has an app store for netbooks. Dietrich Banschbach from the company gave his views on what kind of apps work well on those kinds of devices.

"If you take the definition of what mobile is beyond phones and smartphones, it's a small device like a netbook that can be carried around," he said, while pointing out that Intel's MeeGo partnership with Nokia will cover netbooks, smartphones, tablets and even in-vehicle entertainment systems.

The MeeGo 1.0 OS has just been made available to developers - a few minutes ago according to Banschbach.

Rupert Englander from Nokia was up next on the panel, talking about Ovi Store, and the demand from people for app-capable phones.

"If you look at consideration of purchase now of mobile devices, consumers are putting the capability of the device to have apps as one of their primary considerations, beyond the brand of the phone or the OS per se," he said.

Englander said that there isn't much app usage on Nokia's Series 40 devices. "Our skew is heavily towards what you'd expect: Our Symbian Series 5 touch devices," he said.

"We over index massively on those touch Series 5 devices."

The final panelist was Patrick Mork from GetJar, who was asked what kind of consumers are downloading apps.

"In about 12 days, GetJar is going to hit a milestone which is one billion downloads from over 200 countries on all platforms and over 2,000 devices," he announced.

"Apps is a global consumer proposition. This is not about iPhone, or people in New York City or London or Mumbai. This is a global proposition."

He cited Facebook as an example: its mobile site shortcut - not an app - has been downloaded from GetJar 60 million times - four times the number of downloads Facebook's iPhone app has notched up.

The panel was asked if apps will die out as people move to more of a browser ecosystem. "I think there's room for both," said Kiruluta, pointing to RIM's BlackBerry widgets.

"People over-think it too much sometimes," she said, and Mork agreed, while saying that there are reasons why native apps won't be squashed by mobile web competition for some time - for example, games making use of native hardware.

Who will solve the app discovery problem? How can people be pointed to the apps they're most likely to be interested in?

Vodafone's Da Silva said personalisation is one important trend, even though "there is no one silver bullet".

User ratings, recommendations and smart contextualising will be the key, he said, with the latter including predicting what app people might like based on their previous behaviour and the time of day they're browsing.

Mork was asked about app developers paying for placement on these stores. It gets developers to bid for premium visibility on its store, and then they pay for the number of downloads of their app.

"In reality, the fact is most stores need to take that approach," he said.

Another question: is Apple the next AOL? In that it will get a huge audience for its closed, friendly walled garden, then die when consumers get more knowledge and want to venture out to find their own content?

"I think Apple is far too innovative a company and far too entrepreneurial a company to go in that direction," said Mork.

"They do learn and innovate continuously... There is always a risk that people get complacent, but the culture they have built there, and the speed of innovation - not to mention the feud with a small company called Google - will keep them from going down that [AOL] road."

How are app stores promoting the apps of developers that put extra effort into using specific APIs or platform features?

Kiruluta said RIM is looking to promote these apps on its App World store, and is running a competition for Super Apps, which will also be plugged. But she also pointed to word of mouth: the reward for doing these apps comes from people recommending them to friends.

Parton said that "no developer in this country gives two hoots that operators are offering APIs," he admitted, saying operators need to demonstrate the value for developers of using these APIs, and also show the demand coming through.

"There are incentives: we can run competitions and will run competitions. But you have to see that longevity... It's not great if it's just a PR spike and cheques given out. It's about the marketing commitment."

The last question asked about privacy - when developers are able to access billing information about a user from their apps.

Parton says operators have to respect the law - which can vary between countries - but the main thing is to do everything with explicit permission from the people using the apps.

"At the point of download, we tell them which APIs an application is using, and they have to tick a box saying they're comfortable," he said.

Da Silva agreed. "There is certainly potential for consumer harm... but the reality is it is in the control of the user." Although he admitted that some smartphone platforms are doing this better than others.