Apps World London October 22nd & 23rd
As someone who has been attending Mobile World Congress – and all its previous incarnations – for more years than I care to remember, I approached Apps World 2013 with a certain feeling of aloof distain. After all, the event this year was at Earls Court smaller venue – hall 2, less room than just one of the vast halls devoted to Apps at MWC this year. I also regard MWC as my annual ‘bump’ where I encounter old friends and colleagues and we talk about the good old days. I knew the chances of me bumping into anyone I knew here was pretty slim (and anyway can you recognise anyone under their hood?).
Yes, Apps developers and the App world can seem like foreign territory for long standing CTOs such as me who got dizzy spending billions of pounds on real network infrastructure that you could see and touch and stand and back and admire. An App can be knocked up and brought to market in a week. That’s why there are millions of them out there and probably why so few make any money. I’m told that the App market globally could be worth £75Bn this year, although no one is really sure how to measure the value. A lot of money for sure but compared against the £1 trillion of mobile revenues it’s still small fry.
MNOs wouldn’t get out of bed for the money that an App makes – and they don’t! And therein lies the dilemma for MNOs. Apps are happening all around them and are now encircling them and even forcing a radical rethink of the long standing business model the mobile operators have followed since their inception. They would like to follow the money but can’t.
Not too long ago people would not have known what an OS was let alone name the OS they are using and today they even know the version number of Android or IOs they are using. There are other OS of course but let’s not waste time on them today. Quite simply Apps have changed the way customers use their mobile, the way they think about their mobile, the way they select the device they want to use and even the operating system on the device.
I hadn’t spent long in the hall before I realised that no matter how vast MWC is and how many people attend it each year, the sea change is happening fast and the mobile economy is now all about Apps and what the customer wants to do on their mobile device. One could say it’s been a long time coming! Applications are all that matter to customers and their device must support the Apps they want to use and their network must allow them affordable access to the Apps they like using. The relevance of the network is moving in the wrong direction as far as operators are concerned and that must be keeping a lot of MNO CEOs awake at night. Anyone in any doubt as to this only had to turn up to this show.
Attending this event taught me that Corporate Apps are beginning to dominate the landscape now. I’m not sure that is altogether a good thing but I suppose it was inevitable. So there were no end of trendy brands telling us how cool and hip their App is – or will be. There are still a lot of barriers to overcome before corporate Apps really take off. Setting aside user adoption for a second, the purpose of a corporate App doesn’t always seem to have been thought through beyond an intern in the marketing dept. saying ‘we must have an App’. So they have one – but what’s it’s for? Is it intended to be an extension of advertising, a new channel, a customer care platform, a promotions vehicle? Should it have a fulfilment purpose? Is it essential to have a payment engine? I think the corporate world needs to do a bit more thinking about Apps before diving in. Security raises its head time and time again and is a worry for the corporates. Especially in the area of BYOD and an expectation that user Apps and Devices need to be integrated into the back-office IT systems somehow. One feels there is a disaster just waiting to happen here.
All of us who attended Apps World 2013 have seen the future. OK you could say the future has been here for a while now but it’s not until the future goes mainstream that one can say it’s properly arrived. There is a long way to go yet in industrialising Apps across the board and we are bound to see a process whereby the survival of the fittest Apps means more focus on the quality of an App and less so on the sheer number out there. Apps that simply launch web sites have no future and Apps that serve a useful purpose and that customers want to use will rise to the top.
The Mobile Academy, hosted by UCL and Mobile Monday London, moved their usual session to tag onto the show and provided two very useful insights that may have been telling us much about the future of Apps:
Bruce Lawson from Opera spoke entertainingly about HTML5. What the dickens has HTML5 got to do with Apps you may well ask! Who knows, there may well be another twist in the Apps story yet! (The organisers told me they were being deliberately controversial.)
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Then Tim Green from Mobile Money Revolution reminded us just how tortuous the mobile payment landscape is and anyone who thinks a great App is easily monetised would probably have gone home and kicked the cat.
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I came away thinking that although Apps will dominate the mobile economy for many years to come, picking winners and losers is not so easy and as the population grows on the Planet of the Apps, I wonder just how much money there will be to sustain the growing masses.
Credit to Six Degrees for putting on a good show – a real coup in getting Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to come along and the line-up of speakers was impressive.