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VisionMobile :: blog

Distilling market noise into market sense.

The 100 million club: the bigger picture of mobile softwareNovember 19

[Research Director Andreas Constantinou, discusses the latest update to VisionMobile's 100 million club, and the bigger picture that emerges from our research, including de facto standards and software that's truly mass-market]

We ‘ve just released the updated version of our 100 million club: the watchlist of software companies whose products have been embedded on more than 100 million mobile handsets.

In this H1 2008 update we ‘ve identified 25 software products from 23 companies which have shipped on more than 100 million handsets cumulatively as of June 2008. The watch list  provides the basis for three key observations (especially in comparison to our 2007 update):

- Firstly the 100 million club is a testament to the commercial and technological complexities inherent in the mobile industry; there are over 6 billion handsets having been shipped up to June 2008 and around 1.2 billion handsets estimated to be shipped in 2008. Yet our research shows that only 4 software products have reached the 1 billion deployment mark, 9 products have exceeded the 500 million mark and 25 products in total have shipped in more than

The Mobile Application Store phenomenonNovember 14

[Apple's App Store, Android Market, RIM Application Center.. application stores are the latest fad of the mobile industry. Research Director, Andreas Constantinou, analyses the recipe of the mobile application store phenomenon and the movers and shakers of this virgin market]

The success of Apple’s App Store has been well documented; more than 5,000 new applications, $30M revenues in the first 30 days of operation, 200 million downloads in the first 100 days.. the facts point to a rediscovered revenue source that the mobile industry is eager to capture. [Update: John Doerr at O'Reilly has shared some research that shows App Store applications growing by 170% each month between August and October 2008 and then plateau'ing to about 6000 apps in early November].

Many industry observers will point to the on-device storefront as the reason behind the success of Apple’s App Store. Others will point to Apple’s single OSX platform that allows developers to target more than 10 million devices globally with a single application build. But our research shows that it’s far mo

Electronics Weekly Blog AwardsNovember 3

We ‘ve been shortlisted in the top-10 blogs for the Mobile Communications category by Electronics Weekly Magazine. We ‘ve been listed next to Engadget Mobile and Mob Happy - and we ‘re honoured.

If you are one of the 1500+ regular readers of our blog, click here to send an email to Electronics Weekly and vote for us. The closing date for voting is end-of-play Friday 21 November.

Thanks for your support!

- Andreas

Mobile software is dead. Long live.. mobile softwareNovember 3

[Mobile software has always been a tough business and is getting tougher. Research Director, Andreas Constantinou, explores how the value is migrating from embedded to downloadable software].

OK, I ‘m exaggerating. Mobile software isn’t dead, and it will never be. You need software to turn an expensive brick into a walking talking phone. Mobile software is critical to the function of both the handset itself and the mobile industry as a whole. But the revenue potential of mobile software is changing in a very symmetrical way: it’s migrating from embedded pre-load software, to downloadable, post-sales software.

The business of software
The business of embedded mobile software is a very tough one and it’s getting tougher. There are 100s of vendors that have emerged in the last 10 years offering embedded software like multimedia & graphics engines, operating systems, browsers, middleware and core applications, application environments, on-device portals and active idle screen solutions (see our Mobile Industry Atlas for who’s who). These vendors have based their business on a built-it-and-it-will-scale model. The assumption here is that by shipping your software on millions of handsets the business model of per-unit royalties will easily scale, as in the simple equation.

Revenues $$$ = high-per-unit-royalties * many millions of devices

However, revenue scalability is far harder to co

Who will win the race of mobile application runtimes?October 20

[Flash Lite, WebKit, Java ME, Silverlight, Qt, Lua, Python… Research Director Andreas Constantinou takes an analytical look at the new battleground for mobile application runtimes and the struggle for dominance.]

Flash Lite and Java have been quietly penetrating the mobile handset market. Both application runtimes have in a sense shown that openness is not an exclusive privilege of open operating systems, but of the majority of mobile handsets.

A new set of application runtimes have also surfaced in the form of WebKit, Silverlight, Qt and Lua - shifting the battleground for software platforms from the OS level in 2002 up to the application runtime level in 2008.

We have explored the wide range of application runtimes before - but we have recently analysed how the key contenders compare and contrast. The next table lists the commercial, product, licensing and technology terms for seven leading runtimes. I will be discussing this analysis with a panel of industry execs at the Symbian Show on October 22nd in London.