This is a good move by Symbian. With anybody and everybody jumping in to the app store game, it’s going to be quite a headache for developers to make sure their apps are in all of them and accessible to everyone. This goes back to my previous post about how discovery is still a problem, and will be exacerbated by the proliferation of app stores. It will be crucial for developers to get their apps in as many of them as possible, so users can find them easily.

IIRC, this is similar to what Qualcomm used to do/still does with BREW apps — it would centrally approve applications, then make them available to all its different operator customers’ stores.

Interesting stuff, assuming it’s within developers’ budgets.

Granted, the revenue path is better in the Apple store than others (assuming you can get your app approved by the great gatekeeper), but it remains that fewer developers are really raking it in than many people would believe.

This is largely because although Apple, and to some extent, the other players, have solved the distribution issue, but they haven’t cracked the discovery nut. Maybe browsing is a little easier on the iPhone, with its large display and easy scrolling, but that’s not exactly a solution. Browsing in the Ovi Store was so bad that I haven’t been back since I played with it at launch. And the problem of “Top Downloads” and “Most Popular” lists remains exactly the same: once apps get on those lists, it’s difficult to get them off.

It’s important for developers to realize/remember/remind themselves that app stores are just distribution channels — not marketing strategies. It’s no different than any other product scenario: getting that product in a distribution channel alone isn’t enough to generate and drive sales. People see stories like the guy who’s made a lot of money with an iPhone birdwatching app, but fail to read far enough to realize that he only got the big boost after his app got featured in an Apple TV ad.

So for developers: get your app in the various stores, and make sure users can find them easily with the search function in each one. Then get your marketing efforts going. You deal with fragmentation of the stores by being in all of them, and push users with “search for it in your app store”.

The takeaway for app store providers: get the distribution right, but if you really want to drive downloads and developer success, do it not only with the usual suspects like revenue-sharing levels, but give them some real marketing help, too.

Update: See this post over at GigaOM for some good insight into the long tail of iPhone apps, courtesy of AdMob data (AdMob being a great way to both publicize and monetize your apps, right Russell? ):

I suspect the success of a particular app relies on one of three things:

* You are already a huge, successful company, expanding on an existing product. See: AIM, Facebook, ESPN.
* Apple decides your app is worth promoting on the front page of the App Store.
* Your app is really good, and all your users rave to their friends about it.

What Olympic mobile content have you seen that’s any good? Share it in the comments.

I should add, actually, that I’m not looking at this stuff much, thanks to NBC’s annoying tape-delay of the events in which I’m most interested. They tout their “live” broadcasts of certain events in the evening prime-time slot — but these events are actually only live in the eastern US. When you live in Pacific time, like me, they show them delayed by three hours, beginning 4+ hours of coverage at 8pm every night. So I have to actively avoid the results so as not to ruin the element of surprise when I tune in to see the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. But that’s just me

Anyway, pass along anything good you’ve seen, and maybe I can give up on NBC completely.

If you have an idea or opinion you’d like to share, drop us a line. In the meantime, enjoy what Chris has to say:

I’ve been an avid reader of MobHappy for many years and have found myself guessing (as Russell and Carlo religiously do at the start of each New Year!) what might be ahead in the mobile future. My particular area of interest, as a founder of a mobile advertising agency, is mobile media so my ears always prick up whenever I read posts about AdMob or any other firm driving the development of this new media. I’ve always believed that mobile advertising will surprise us all. That, because of its unique characteristics, intimate relationship with its user and of course mobile nature, mobile advertising models will develop that will be unlike anything that we have seen in previous mediums.

Don‚Äôt get me wrong; mobile banners and text based ads will develop into a healthy subset of the mobile media pie; in the advertising game one finds that if there is space for media it generally gets filled. You only have to look at the petrol nozzle cover when you’re next filling your car up at your local station to see this up close.

But what I am most excited about are the advertising models that will define the mobile medium and distinguish it from others before it. And it‚Äôs crucial that mobile does distinguish itself, particularly from the web, if we are to convince advertisers to divert some of their digital budget to it. We need to tell advertisers why mobile is more effective, or more responsive, or more economical either alone or in conjunction with other media. Advertisers love simplicity; give them a list of compelling logical reasons why mobile can help them reach new consumers, more efficiently and they’ll sit up and listen.

So what advertising models will define mobile? We’ve heard about many in this blog over the years; mobile content download interstitials; idle screen; peer-2-peer SMS. I suspect these models will have some success but I am not sure they will define the medium. Of course I don‚Äôt have a crystal ball and the medium is moving too fast and in too many directions for me to pin a tail on any one approach. I can however take a stab at the general direction I think it will head.

We recently published a large research study that examined the attitudes and usage of mobile advertising across 1000 British consumers aged 18-64. Naturally there were lots of interesting findings but what took me most by surprise was that a significant proportion of users and non-users of the mobile internet want to receive a text message in response to clicking on a banner or text ad in WAP page. They don’t want to be taken to a WAP destination site, receive a java or video download or receive a voice call back. They simply want a text in their inbox with more information about the product of service that they were curious enough about to warrant them clicking the ad.

This is analogous, on the fixed web, to receiving an email in response to clicking on a banner ad. This would be a curious phenomenon, but imagine for a moment if you had to lug your PC around all day; perhaps then it wouldn‚Äôt be so odd. If you had to carry your PC around all day, certainly your browsing behaviour would change especially when on the move. You would likely ‚Äòsnack‚Äô on content far more rather than deep surf. And if you saw any banner or text ads you would likely not click on them as you would not have time ‘on the go’ to look at the advertiser’s destination site. You might not have time to bookmark the destination site or make a note of the offer. No, in such a scenario you would likely prefer an email sent to your inbox. You could then read this email back at the office or at home and assuming the email had links in it, you could explore the advertiser‚Äôs web sites in more detail.

I suspect that the reason then why so many of our respondents said they wanted to get a text when they click on a banner is that they simply don‚Äôt have time, on the move, to look at the advertisers. But by clicking it is implicit that they have demonstrated interest in the offer and so want to store details about it in the simplest and most efficient way possible and that (to the consumer anyway) is a text message sent to their inbox with links to the advertiser’s WAP site.

Mobile phones are not going to get any smaller but they will get smarter and faster and we’ll rely on them more and more to consume, manage and organise our media on the go. Based on this and coupled with our research findings, I suspect that mobile advertising will develop to accommodate the unique context that mobile users find them selves in. The challenge for advertisers is how they might reach their consumers effectively if they are only browsing mobile media slots for ten to twenty minutes a day. And if they reach them how do they manage the apathy to click through to WAP destinations? To help advertisers address these issues I suspect we will see models that will combine the best of display advertising – high impact, attention grabbing rich media – with that of direct marketing – concise, targeted and relevant. SMS will play an increasingly important role as it becomes tightly integrated with display advertising. If operators can join the ends together, then we will reach advertising nirvana; the ability to deliver a relevant, personalised SMS to a consumer in response to clicking on a display ad would make most brand managers giddy. (Ok, I concede that this may only be nirvana for customers on contract tariffs only‚Ķ..:-)

Let’s hope then that this gives many of the mobile advertising product managers who read this blog food for thought. I suspect trials in this area would produce fascinating results and if they ever get off the ground they may very well be the seeds of the advertising model that will define mobile media.

In other words, I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I’m tired of wasting my time.

He goes on to say that browsing on a mobile sucks without a decent, capable browser — which isn’t news, certainly not to Russ — and that without one, users aren’t interested. Bad news for Mowser, but, fair enough. I’d agree to a large extent: when the mobile browsing experience is awful, users aren’t going to bother. Again, I don’t think that’s news.

But that’s a far cry from “The Mobile Web is Dead” stuff that Russ’ post generated in the tech blogosphere. The other half of Mowser, Mike Rowehl, chimes in with his reaction to the reaction, and as usual, he pretty much hits the nail on the head: yes, the mobile web has problems, and Mowser had its own obstacles. The failure of the latter doesn’t automatically indicate the failure of the former.

Does the death of one startup equal the death of an entire market? Rarely. Mowser was a victim of many things, the crapness of the mobile web environment was one. The simplistic WAP-rooted mobile web might be dead — that is, if it was ever really all that alive. But more and more users have more and more capable mobile devices, and they want to access the web and online content and services with them.

This isn’t a shot at Mowser, which I think was a solid transcoder, but delivering web sites transcoded for lowest-common-denominator handsets and browsers isn’t likely to generate the best user experience for now and forever. If you’re using a really crappy mobile browser on a crappy device, the experience is still going to be generally crappy, in spite of how great a job the transcoder does. Even Russ says “Mowser was always meant to be a short term bet against Moore’s law”, with the transcoding just intended as an entry point.

So perhaps what we should take away is that the low end of the mobile market, where it’s just a dumbed-down version of some other content, rendered in a crappy browser with a terrible UI, is dead. But in my eyes, the rest of the “mobile web” — delivering content and services that delight mobile users, is only getting started.

Any thoughts?

As a footnote, Mike is looking to sell Mowser’s assets, while Russ is looking for a job, so get in touch if you know of anything.

While the iPhone trimmings are false, the clip and content is allegedly real and seems to be a very powerful emotional belief by the great man – namely that you can’t watch a movie properly on a mobile phone.

This strikes me as being somewhat technophobic and certainly intellectually snobbish, which we might expect from some like David Lynch. But as viewing movies on phones and other devices with small screen sizes (like iPods) takes off, isn’t the challenge for the film makers to take this into account and make versions of their art that do look and sound great in the new formats?

After all, going from full screen cinema to TV was a bit of a leap in user experience, but it didn’t stop Lynch and the rest of the industry from publishing on video.

Maybe it’s just the profit incentive that’s currently missing.

That’s a big tipping point.

So how did we get here? The iPhone gets a lot of credit for mainstreaming the idea of mobile web access. That’s not to say it was the first device to make the mobile web happy, or the best, but its power as a media attention-grabber is undeniable. But along with the general attention the iPhone brought, it also helped mainstream the idea of mobile-specific interfaces for sites. Granted, it’s spawning a lot of “made for iPhone” rather than “made for mobile” sites, but the underlying idea — that the mobile experience can be improved with better site design and interfaces — is the same.

The first step towards making the mobile web really happen was mobilization: making mobile access to the web possible. We’ve hit that point with decent networks and data speeds, and a number of decent browsers available. The next step is understanding that there needs to be a next step, and understanding that things will be much better for users when they’re not just having the entire web shoved at their mobile phone. As Russell’s new Mowser colleague, the ever-sharp Mike Rowehl puts it, “Now that the question of what is technically possible has fallen away, the new issue becomes what is most useful and pleasing to the end user.”

That’s the leap that has to happen — and is starting to happen. Yes, it’s still early days as not every handset is equipped with a browser on the level of Safari on the iPhone, and tariffs remain an obstacle (especially for prepaid users). But things are starting to change, making this an exciting time for the mobile web. What’s the best way forward, then? To keep on pushing, for content and service providers to keep pushing out new and great mobile services. People are paying more attention now than ever before, and they’re more open to mobile web content than they’ve ever been. The challenge is to spread the understanding that the mobile web isn’t about shoveling the entire web to mobile devices, but about building the best mobile experience.

Yes, part of that is by offering users the choice to access whatever content they want. But the real value in mobile is delivering the right content, the right experience, to the right user at the right time. One way to do that is to throw everything you’ve got at them and see what sticks — but it’s pretty clear that’s not the best way.

The prediction mentions that the US will become a big market for mobile porn, despite operators’ reticence at including it on their decks. The analysts posit that the off-deck market for adult content will boom alongside off-deck in general, but it faces the exact same issues: content discovery, lack of suitable billing infrastructure, data costs and so on.

But here’s the rub: many entertainment and communications technologies have been driven forward by the gambling and porn industries, as they tend to be much more aggressive and forward-thinking when it comes to technology and distribution than their more staid, conservative counterparts. Could it be that the mobile porn business will sort out these issues first, then lead the way for the rest of the mobile content industry?