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Two reasons why Apple sells so many iPhone apps (and why Nokia and co. understand only one)

Apple has had remarkable success doing what every other mobile phone company has failed at: getting non-techie users to install applications on their phones. By the dozen. The iPhone App Store stocks over 65000 apps and has sold over a billion of them. Some of the best-selling apps are paid ones, and almost every iPhone user has installed an app. Apple made tens of millions of dollars through app sales, but these apps have also strengthened the the iPhone brand and made it even more desirable. Every other mobile phone company now wants in on the applications rush and is scrambling to build its own application store (under different names).


But there are two essential parts to Apple’s success. And building an app store only addresses one part of it.

The first part is the App Store strategy (if done right), which is to make it drop-dead-easy for users to search and download (or buy) applications on their phone.

But Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Palm and others need to also build excitement about the phone itself: that it’s an app-ready phone, that you should buy our phone because then you can do so many cool things with these apps. This is the critical second part, and it seems to be lost on everyone.

Nokia attempted something weakly similar with the N97 and its widgets. Nokia promoted the N97 as a widget-ready phone, advertised the widget-based experience and tried (badly) to demonstrate all the crazy stuff you could do with those widgets. If it had merely launched a (well-stocked) widget store without all the heavy phone-specific advertising, no one would’ve even bothered with them.


Apple executed this spectacularly well:
- The original iPhone had no support for apps and no apps available. It captured the early adopter market by virtue of its gee-whiz touchscreen interface and the great Internet experience.
- A year later when Apple launched the App Store, it launched the next iPhone (3G) along with it and promoted the phone as being App-ready. “What’s new about this iPhone?” “It can now run all these hundreds of applications that you can download or buy. Oh, almost forgot – it also does 3G.”

Now people see iPhone as the phone that runs all these thousands of apps. If Apple had instead launched the App Store in isolation, it probably wouldn’t have caught on so well. The device and its apps go together.

One final point: this works with Apple because it’s turned its disadvantage – a single phone – into a strength. If you have a whole product lineup – like RIM, Nokia, Microsoft – it’s hard to anoint any one phone (or all of them) as the App Phone.


August 26, 2009 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Uncategorized ·  Leave a Comment


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