Handango cashes in on Android
Muthu Ramadoss
Making moolah out of mobile development
By Bill Ray
Selling mobile applications can be profitable, but the Android
Marketplace is only dealing in freebies at launch - so Handango is
offering a more familiar route to market that could be essential for the
future of Google's platform.
Mobile-phone-super-OS Android should realise its first physical
embodiment towards the end of this month, with T-Mobile (temporarily)
claiming that pre-orders of the G1 handset have already sold out and
Google parading the Android Marketplace as the one-stop shop for (free)
applications.
But not all developers will be happy to give their creations away, so
the news that mobile software retailer Handango will be listing Android
applications is a welcome alternative which demonstrates the advantages
of an open platform - particularly for ISVs with the quaint idea of
making money from their efforts.
Google is hoping there'll be a range of Android handsets over the next
few years, driven by the breadth of applications available on the
platform. This premise comes from the desktop world, where we all use
Windows because it runs the software we want - try changing and you find
that the driver for your Twiddler won't work, or your Wavefinder is now
reduced to being a designer lamp. Desktop operating systems are bought
on the basis of the available applications, and the Open Handset
Alliance (nominal owner of Android) is betting that mobile phones are
headed the same way.
Handango is certainly the largest dealer in smartphone applications, a
business in which it has enjoyed a duopoly with Motricity, with both
companies hosting application services for network operators as well as
their own portals.
Handango regularly reports that the best-selling lists for smartphones
comprise enhancements, rather than applications, as smartphone users
like to customise their experience to suit their personal style.
Examples include replacement home screens, better email clients and
additional synchronisation capabilities.
Apple has, of course, closed the door on such enhancements completely,
refusing to list them in their application store with claims that
duplicating functionality confuses users. The boys from Cupertino
obviously have little respect for their customers.
Nokia takes the opposite approach: when the competition demonstrated
threaded messaging, Nokia Labs banged out a patch to add the
functionality to S60 phones within weeks. The most popular applications
for S60 are almost all enhancements - not applications as Apple
understands them - but essential to the success of the Symbian platform,
and Android.
That's not to say that money can't be made from iPhone applications -
one developer has reportedly made $250,000 in a couple of months from
his puzzle game Trism, but trivial games won't sell the platform.
Android is going to need enhancements as well as apps if the strategy is
going to bear any fruit.
Many of these will be created, and given away, by developers working in
their spare time, but everyone has bills to pay and quality software
does cost money. Handango will take about a 40 per cent cut from sales,
but it does offer an alternative channel and one over which Google has
no control. This epitomises the difference between Android and the
iPhone, though over the next couple of years it will be up to the
developers to make that difference count to normal punters. ®
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/02/handango_android/