32 appstores on the WIP appstore wiki at the end of 2009! at WIP Jam Sessions

32 mobile appstores!

That’s what we finished 2009 with (see January report on wipconnector)! And luckily we do not list yet the various appstore announcements on the verge of the mobile sphere like the Ford SYNC enabled appstore or Sun Java Store otherwise our wiki would be on fire.

So 2009 was the year of the appstore glut maybe… however it was also a year that saw new forms / concepts of appstores rather than un-differentiated ones, addressing specific issues such as discovery and recommendation or specific markets which can only be favorable for developers and consumers. Have a look at the newcomers for December and judge by yourself.

If we are to judge future smartphone platform success by the number of appstores distributing their apps, Android has a slight lead with 53% of appstores distributing Android apps, followed by Windows Mobile with 50% (mostly for historical reason one could claim), Blackberry with 40% and Symbian with 37.5% are forming a second group of established players, followed by iPhone and Palm with 19% closing the ranks.

What is even more interesting is to look at the fact that about 2/3 of these appstores were launched in the last 6 months… looking at the platforms targeted by these appstores the results are in line with the previous numbers. If we look at “new appstores” only… those created in the past 6 months… unsurprisingly a lot more fragmentation kicks in as the number of new appstores players concentrating on a specific platform counterbalances the large OEM / Operators coming in this space. So newer players but… the same trend can be seen with 40% for Android and Windows mobile, 27% for Symbian and 18% for Blacbkerry, 13% for iPhone, and 5% by Palm and Limo (for widget only).

One can only be surprised looking at these figures by the similarities between a long established (struggling?) player in the mobile platform space Microsoft and the new kid on the block Google’s Android. Both of them encouraging or generating fortuitously the creation of somewhat fragmented appstores ecosystem around the platform . Sign of success or sign of failure?

New appstores in December:

Zanox : Simple concept of appstore including mobile, web code snippet, SAAS, looking to connect developers to brands and publishers. A B2B exchange place aimed at increasing on-line purchases by encouraging developers to produce interactive and addictive applications using Zanox affiliate APIs.

In a sense this appstore concept brings something rather new and interesting to developers : access to B2B marketing and advertising money without the need to build personal commercial relationships with brands and agencies… With the obvious drawback of getting a much higher share of risk and exposing themselves to copy.

Overall this is a good example of a web appstore and will be a good touchstone to see how revenue making can be associated with the mobile web.

MobileIron: Another good example of an appstore turning towards B2B to bring new revenue streams for developers. In this case by getting IS department within enterprises to select / pay for / deploy applications for their entire workforce. This kind of solution could sounds like an obvious merge between traditional device management solutions and appstores. But in an era where the enterprise mobile IT agenda tends to follow consumer mobile technology solutions, this could be a good way for enterprises to do a substantial leapfrog in their mobile IS policies.

It is also quite interesting to see how new appstores position themselves around recommendation(see very good post from Visionmobile on the subject), generating revenue from affiliation (as per our previous post on ideal appstore). 2 examples there :

Mplayit an appstore entirely built as a facebook application