But the UK mobile software developer isnt betting the house on iPhone just yet.
UK mobile software developer Symsource has created a new in-house studio to develop consumer apps and work with brands.
It’s called The App Team, and its first release is Ghost Race, a location-based iPhone training diary for runners, hikers, cyclists and other keep-fit consumers.
The app maps the user’s exercise route on Google Maps and saves the stats, and then lets them ‘race’ against their previous performances on the same route. Hence the title – ghost races in games involve racing against players’ own previous best times.
“It’s a bit of fun, but it’s also a serious trainer,” says VP of business development Tim Ocock, who says Symsource is mulling putting more social features in a future update, such as the ability to upload and share ghosts online, and find virtual running partners.
Ghost Race is also an example of an app that might be ripe for sponsorship by a brand. “If you’re a running shoe company, here’s something that isn’t just a video clip of the latest sports star advert embedded in an app,” he says.
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“It’s something users keep on their phone day-in day-out. If someone came to us and said they’d like to sponsor it, we’d be open to that...”
Symsource’s background is in making Symbian and Java applications, although it has since added iPhone and BlackBerry to its skillsets. Ocock says the company isn’t pretending it will make its fortune from pure iPhone development though.
“If you’re a one or two-man company and can put out a fairly simple game that becomes a hit, you can make some money on the App Store, but you need to get $100,000 to make a good profit,” says Ocock.
“But $100,000 is well under a month’s revenue from our normal business, and we have a staff of 25 to feed. It might take two to six months to make even a simple iPhone app or game, so it’s clearly not sustainable for a business our size to be doing only iPhone apps at the moment.”
However, he admits that iPhone has all the buzz when it comes to apps at the moment – a source of frustration for a company whose heritage is in Symbian development.
“People are saying ‘I didn’t know you could get apps unless you got an iPhone’, which is entirely reasonable because for years, we’ve been banging on about what a missed opportunity it was for other platforms not to have an accessible channel with fair pricing,” says Ocock.
“Even now, Ovi Store only gives you about 37% of the gross price of an app if you’re a developer, whereas iPhone is 70% of the gross. But in the not-too-distant future, we can see things getting a bit more cross-platform, as BlackBerry App World and Ovi Store pick up more users.”
Symsource has worked on a number of branded iPhone apps already, although often the company is brought in by a mobile marketing agency.
“A lot of these smaller agencies built their businesses based on WAP sites and SMS campaigns,” he says.
“Now they’re turning to firms like us because their clients are asking them to build iPhone apps, and they don’t have that culture of software engineering. We’re working with five to six different agencies, and there’s another two to three we’ve worked with in the last year.”
Are branded iPhone apps big business, though? Ocock points out that while the Holy Grail of mobile marketing has been to “get something installed onto a device”, iPhone has both upped expectations and provided a challenge with the sheer number of available apps.
“There are new metrics now,” he says. “100,000 Java downloads a year ago was pretty impressive, but 100,000 downloads of a free iPhone app is now pretty easy to achieve. But while it looks good on paper, how many people are still using it six months or a year later, and how many followed through and actually bought a product?”
Meanwhile, Symsource is following the progress of other new smartphone platforms, such as Android. Some argue that Google’s mobile OS is presenting a threat to Symbian, but Ocock thinks the impact is being felt most by Microsoft.
“It’s Windows Mobile more than any platform that is losing out to Android,” says Ocock. “If you look at the licensees who are building Android devices, they are the companies who were typically building Windows Mobile devices – HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. Half their roadmaps are suddenly Android devices.”
