Is There Gold in Them There Cell Phone Hills?

Posted by Johan Cyprich on 13 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: Business

Apple’s iPhone is a very well marketed technology device. Its touch screen revolutionized the cell phone’s user interface. I’ve been told that there is a great deal of money to be made in creating iPhone applications, but I have to wonder if that’s true.

There are currently 3.3 billion active cell phones in the world. Luxembourg has 158 cell phones for every 100 people. Apparently, many people there must have multiple mobile phones. A market of 3.3 billion customers seems like a good one to make money with. If you get a 1% market share selling a $20 USD application, you would make $660 million.

Can You Make Money?

The problem is that most cell phone owners aren’t aware that they can install applications on their phones. Cell phones can run either Java or .NET applications, or in the case of the iPhone, a mobile version of OS X. Most cell phone users are only interested in buying clever sounding ring tones and a few of the more savvy ones will buy games.

As far as I can tell, no company has made significant profits with cell phone applications. In spite of the tremendous market size, the average cell phone user doesn’t spend time online looking for applications to buy for their phone. A better market to write software for are the 650 million Windows users who do actively look for software to buy. Your $20 application sold to 1% of them would generate $130 million in revenue.

imageCell phone manufacturers and the phone companies who sell them need to better educate their customers in what their phones are capable of. There is a very good potential to make money there if people only knew that they could extend the functionality of their phones with useful applications.

Cell Phone Development Tools

I need to do more research to see if building iPhone applications are worth while, or even building mobile Java or .NET software. With .NET, Visual Studio 2005 / 2008 has development tools and various emulators to test the software. If you want to write mobile Java, you’ll need to learn how to build applications using environments like Nokia’s J2ME tools. For the iPhone, Apple has the iPhone Developer Program. It requires a Mac to write iPhone apps, but you can also develop them on Windows using the iPhone Binary Toolchain Installer for Windows.

You can download free cell phone applications at GetJar.


Related posts:
    Wireless Networks and Children
    Searching Google with Your Phone
    An Introduction to Social Engineering
    Free As In Internet Freedom

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