[Gartner] Yesterday I was in Glasgow talking with people about the state of mobile industry. One of the topics that came up - naturally enough - was iPhone. iPhone is a wonderful device and has redefined people’s expectations of the mobile web experience, but I worry that too many developers are carried away by a fatal fascination with iPhone and forget to do some basic arithmetic.
If you’re a clear thinking developer your calculations will centre around an equation that involves the number of iPhone users in the world, the average number of apps each user downloads, the number of other apps you’ll be competing against in the store, the channel effectiveness (how many of the users can your channel or appstore address) and so on. If you’re considering an ad funded model you’ll also factor in the likely app lifespan, i.e. the number of times a user runs it before getting bored, downloading something else and abandoning yours.
Let’s think about just one term in that equation, the number of iPhone users. Talking to people yesterday, one thing that struck me was that the fascination with iPhone and stats like the billion apps downloaded from the store tend to blind people to one important fact. There just aren’t that many iPhones in the world. This year our predictions show iPhone will be significantly under 2% of handset sales. Apple may be influential but it’s far, far away from the shipment numbers of the gorillas in the mobile market like Nokia, Samsung and LG. Even in the smaller smartphone market in 2008 it was number 4 behind Symbian, RIM and Microsoft.
Just say no to the fatal iPhone fascination
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