AdMob report shows iPhone growth outside of the USA, and Android up across the board
Advertising company AdMob released information about its metrics for June 2009. One of the biggest surprises was that 61 percent of all ad calls from iPhones and iPod Touches in January 2009 came from within the USA, but as of June that percentage had dropped to 54 percent. This means that the international market for the popular products from Apple are quickly finding deeper market penetration in foreign markets, which may be a huge growth space for app developers.
As you can see from the data, the UK may not be up to USA numbers quite yet, but it is certainly growing. And the Germany numbers for the iPhones is gaining some pretty impressive ground while the iPod Touches are lagging behind. How about some geo located apps for Deutschland?
The iPhone wasn’t the only device with some interesting statistics in the report, though. When measuring ad requests by operating system, Google’s Android captured 9% of the market, moving it into third place behind iPhone and BlackBerry powered deices, and ahead of Windows Mobile handsets. This third and fourth place battle can be read a couple of different ways, especially when you consider that Android has an organized app market and Windows Mobile is still working on theirs, it’s an interesting statistic for sure, but not one I’m sure I would read very much in to yet.
Developer works their way through porting an iPhone app to Windows Mobile
Speaking of the upcoming Windows Mobile Marketplace, one brave developer took it upon themselves to figure out how to port their app, Audacity, from the iPhone OS to Windows Mobile. The Windows Mobile team was impressed enough with the work that it gotten written up on the OS blog, and they’ve collected all the information on the Windows Mobile Developer Center so that others can give it a go.
While Windows Mobile may not have the market penetration as other OSes right now, but if you can port an app over to a second OS for less work than developing a second full app, why not? I’ve always been a big believer in if you can duplicate work in two places, all the better. You cut costs, increase your margins and so on, so why not gie it a try?
HTC reporting slow sales on Android and Windows Mobile Phones
All of this talk about Android and Windows Mobile may be moot if you listen to HTC, formerly known as High Tech Computer Corporation, which is saying its sales of handsets based on the two OSes are much slower than expected.
This week the company lowered its financial forecast over slower than expected sales of phones powered by Android and Windows Mobile. The lack of sales wasn’t the only problem as they also blamed China for not gettng its 3G network up to snuff yet, so this left them no real option but to down grade the projections.
Some analysts are saying that companies may need to continue to downgrade their projections due to continually dropping prices for handsets. HTC says that this really isn’t a factor in its projections, but it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be having some effect.
Of course the bigger concern to app developers is why these other OSes, especially Android, aren’t getting deeper market penetration right now. If companies are to keep developing for them, there needs to be more handsets in the hands of consumers. Hopefully sales will turn around overall for these OSes as more of them come into the marketplace.
Apple, AT&T and the FCC walk in to a bar…
Well, it would be impossible to look back on the past week in mobile news without talking about the whole Apple/AT&T/Google Voice/FCC debacle.
Of course the whole thing started with the announcement that Apple had denied Google’s application to release a Google Voice app for the App Store. As with everything else that happens in the offices of the Cupertino, California based company, no explanation was given as to why it had been denied. The rumor was that it duplicated natie features of the iPhone, but there was nothing more specific provided.
After that, all apps involving Google Voice were pulled leading to even more confusion for developers. If you were lucky enough to get a call such as VoiceCentral developer Riverturn got, you still didn’t get a straight answer after talking to an Apple representative. Essentially all you got was a whole lot of, “I can’t say…", “I can’t go into granular detail", “I can’t help you with that” and so on. Riverturn simply wanted to know what they could do to get their application back in to the App Store, and thus far they have absolutely no clue how they can do that.
Just to continue the seemingly endless confusion, Apple has now informed Riverturn, and assuredly other app developers, that they are now responsible for any refunds that customers ask for since the applications can no longer be updated. The refunds are to be paid out of pocket by the developers, but it is limited to whatever customers ask for them. Seeing as the applications that have been downloaded aren’t to be deleted, at least for now, there is no way of guessing how many customers will actually be looking to get their money back.
The entire saga shows no signs of abating now that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has sent letters to AT&T, Apple and Google to ask them how the whole situation unfolded. This is the most puzzling piece of the of the whole situation as it is not all that clear what exact power the FCC has over the whole situation. It all depends on what exactly is discovered in the end:
- If AT&T made the decision, which seems unlikely as they allow Google Voice to be used on other handsets, then it could possibly be viewed as restriction of competition.
- If it was Apple, the situation gets a bit more murky because the App Store is a store after all, and the FCC saying they must allow the app would be like the government walking in to a retail store and telling the owner what products they must carry.
- If other Google Voice apps were allowed previously, what changed to suddenly make them no longer acceptable?
- If Google somehow broke a rule in developing its app, why did the other apps get pulled?
This whole thing is probably going to take quite a while to sort out, and even after it is all settled, it still feels like you may need a decoder ring to figure it all out.
