Those in retail and other industries who scoff at or are uncertain of the appetite consumers have for mobile applications pay heed: Apple Inc. has announced its one billionth mobile app download.
In only nine months, Apple’s App Store has proven itself a hot commodity. It features more than 35,000 applications available to consumers in 77 countries, enabling developers, including retailers, to reach tens of millions of iPhone and iPod Touch users.
“The iPhone is an amazing phenomenon, not only because it already represents an important portion of the smartphone audience, but really because it is an indicator of what the mobile environment will look like going forward,” says Nic Covey, director of insights at Nielsen Mobile, a service of The Nielsen Co. “The iPhone shows the types of things consumers want to be doing on their mobile phones. Retailers looking at this billion-download success should now realize they should be thinking about a mobile app strategy, and not just as it relates to the iPhone but as it relates to the smartphone market at large.”
Retailers with iPhone and iPod Touch mobile apps include: 1-800-Flowers.com (1800Flowers), Amazon.com, Apple (with two, App Store and iTunes), Delight.com (Delightful), eBay, Fandango, GiftCertificates.com (GiftCards), Godiva, Sears (Sears2go), ShopNBC, Shortcovers (a division of Indigo Books & Music) and Shutterfly. TheFind and Slifter, shopping search engines, also offer mobile apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. And Drugstore.com has a mobile app for BlackBerrys. Target and Wal-Mart have released iPhone mobile apps for special one-time promotions but do not maintain app storefronts.
So not counting TheFind, Slifter and the one-timers, that’s a total of 14 retail mobile app storefronts—a stunningly small number for what is a red-hot opportunity, says Dave Sikora, CEO of Digby, which designs and builds retail mobile apps. It built the apps for 1-800-Flowers.com and Godiva; Apple spotlighted both in a full-page advertisement in Sunday’s New York Times.
“A mobile app is one of the most incredibly intimate ways for a retailer to interact with and stay close to their customers,” Sikora says. “The early players have realized that having a button on the mobile desktop, not some cheap hyperlink to a regular web site but a rich application designed for that device, not only creates greater brand affinity and better customer service but drives more transactions.”
This summer, Apple, No. 7 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, will give developers even more tools to develop apps when it introduces the iPhone OS 3.0 software update, offering more than 1,000 new developer application program interfaces. The new APIs will enable, among many other things, peer-to-peer connectivity, app control of accessories and push notifications. Push notification technology enables a mobile app to send an alert (via sound, visual badge or text) to users, regardless of whether an app is running or not.
The new APIs also will enable something of special note to retailers: easier purchasing processes within apps. Most of the existing retail mobile apps enable complete transactions. The new APIs will diminish the complexity of programming transactional capability.
Apple has a big lead on builders of other smartphones and mobile operating systems in terms of making such add-on features available. Google launched Android Market in October; currently there are 2,300 apps (Google declines to disclose the number of app downloads). It’s important to note that there are far fewer users of phones run by the Android mobile operating system (such as the T-Mobile G1) compared with users of Apple mobile devices. And Research in Motion Ltd., which last year unveiled the BlackBerry Storm, a smartphone similar to an iPhone, earlier this month unveiled BlackBerry App World.
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