How do software developers for Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry and webOS compete with the iPhone 99c software setup which is currently dominating mobile software sales?
We have a strange situation at the moment where a software title that is priced at 99c in the iTunes App Store can be as much as $15 on another platform. It is obviously due to the numbers involved because there has never been a single repository for the other platforms and this has led to a spread of sources selling software. The fact that the makers of the other platforms have for years ignored the potential of the third party software market has not helped. I remember writing about this at least 4 years ago and posed the question of why companies like Palm and HP do not make more of an effort to push third party software in the literature which comes with a new device. At the time, I suspect that stability was the main reason and we were seeing lots of titles cause issues on lots of devices- why would a company want the expense of extra technical resource enquiries for products they did not even develop?
The world changed and these same companies are now desperate to entice their users into purchasing software because this is seen as the perfect way to show how much a particular smartphone can do. There are without doubt a huge number of people who would be willing to buy software at the right price once a good marketing campaign has made them aware of the possibilities, but the pricing will need to come down.
We are in a chicken and egg situation at the moment; not enough consumers are aware of the third party software markets and so reducing a Windows Mobile title to 99c, for example, will just kill the revenue flat. Also, why would someone do that when all of the other developers are still charging historically higher prices for similar software?
I think the App Stores will make a difference, but somehow suspect that Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry and webOS titles will be priced higher than similar iPhone titles for a while yet. If a platform does fly (webOS?) then that may change things significantly.
