Smartphone Landscape – 2008-2015.

SmartPhones, AppStores

Apple made history, by introduced its Appstore and iPhone back in mid 2008. this subsequently led Google launch its Playstore for Android and lot of android based smartphones. While apple makes money from its appstore, google's monetization around Googleplay is not very clear. so over the years, adoptions of Apple phones have grown very significantly in US market, while Android has gained its share through OEM strategy in emerging markets like India, Brazil etc. Both Apple and google, has continued its effort to provide better tools around appstores/SDK etc as fight has been about making sure these appstores and apps are adopted and they could in turn sell more smartphones/tablets etc. Apple has focused more on devices, software etc, google is vehemently defending its online search business model. 

Google's Dual Play

Even though google launched Android based smartphones (Nexus and OEM Smartphones) and Android Appstore of its own, its business model predominantly is based on online paid search. As google dominates search market, it also has dependency on how web content is created,curated and organized, so that their massive indexing engine could gather lot of data from websites to provide organic search results and promote paid search at the top.

In coming posts, I will explain, how this has led to different strategies from apple, google, facebook and others for fighting for mobile user's eyeballs.

So google adopted dual strategy. On one hand they have their appstores and on the other hand they wanted to make sure, web content grew continuously. They didn't care if this content is mobile content, as long as it was rendered in browser on mobile phones.  

Mobile Web, Responsive/Adaptive Designs

As of 2009-2010, while the native app revolution had just begun, it was very clear that google was playing catchup to apple. So, it was in google's interest to make sure, they encouraged lot of folks to build responsive mobile apps(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design). As technologies and standards around mobile web started to catchup around 2010. However, biggest question always remained, how much of mobile O/S functionality(provided to native apps) were available to web apps.

Native Applications.

When I started my last mobile SaaS startup back in 2010, to help brands and businesses to easily build their native mobile eco-systems using our industry first mobile first platform back in late 2010, lot of people challenged my hypothesis and said only handful will ever adopt native apps. Argument was, mobile web is already solving the issue. However, In 2012, Facebook, Linkedin and few others moved completely towards native apps from web apps and argument about native vs web-apps was put to rest subsequently. According Yahoo’s Flurry(Aug 2015), there are more than 1.5M native apps, average of 3hrs20 minutes spent per day in native apps by an average user.

As rush towards adapting native apps continued, most of the businesses and brands spent lot of resources in creating native apps, mobile back-ends and have spent lot of time/money in maintaining it across android and ios.  So, while most attention was given to building and maintaining native app infrastructure, it created few unique problems around app discoverability and monetization.

As Native mobile grew as dominant channel very quickly, forcing lot of marketers to take mobile first-approach. For companies which already had existing products, it became a challenge re-engineer their backends/data layers and lot of solutions very provided around this issue. Within short period, the mobile data (both app data and user-generated data) inside these apps grew at an exponential pace.  So, lot of the content inside these mobile apps live on their own in walled gardens. Also Most notably, native apps couldn’t talk to each other or be part of an eco-system on user's smartphones. Almost living by themselves with some clumsy non-working ad solutions for monetizations.

Apple helped put genie out of the bottle and there is no going back on Apps strategy. As marketers are forced to move from using mobile as add-on channel to revenue generating channel, they are forced to come up with innovative ideas about how to monetize mobile channel.

That creates a unique challenge and huge opportunity.