How to market and distribute mobile app

You've developed a great mobile app for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Palm WebOS, WM7 or any other platform and now you want people to download it whether it's free or paid for. Yet, even the world’s greatest mobile app will deliver no results unless you make people aware of its existence. Over the past year Golden Gekko has produced a basic guide based on 5 years of application development and distribution and over 50m downloads to date on how you get the most out of your mobile app through various different distribution channels.

The white paper is available in 2 different parts that will be published on the blog over the next month. The parts are:
1. Mobile App Distribution - Mobile Distribution Channels including Mobile Advertising, Messaging, Appstores, Search, Communities and Operators - Download
2. Mobile App Distribution - Other Distribution channels including Web, ATL, BTL, PR and sharing/viral - Download

Use links above to download white papers.

Mobile apps one of the 3 biggest drivers behind mobile data growth according to McKinsey

When McKinsey talks business leaders and government officials listen. Therefore it was interesting to hear McKinsey Partner Venkat Atluri talk about the main forces behind mobile data growth on the McKinsey High Tech podcast a couple of weeks ago. Mobile applications were mentioned as one of the 3 key contributors of mobile data growth together with highly compelling devices and high speed networks. Although the research and interview doesn't bring any new insights to our industry it's amazing to hear that a business area that barely existed 3 years ago is now acknowledged as the driving factor behind the 100 Bn USD telecom industry.

Listen to the podcast here:
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/hightech/HT_mobile_data/HT_mobile_data.html

Golden Gekko talking about iPad apps on Swedish Television (TV4)

This week Golden Gekko attended Mobile Future and Mobilgalan in Stockholm and our sales and business development director Michael Eriksson had the opportunity to appear on the Swedish television channel TV4. The short appearance where he demonstrates the Mango iPad app is in Swedish and available here:
http://www.nyhetskanalen.se/webb_tv?videoId=1.1901850

The Beauty of Fragmentation

Having developed mobile apps for over 5 years we have an enormous amount of good and bad experience from different platforms and fragmentation. So can there actually be good things about fragmentation?

Good

• Working within standardisation is a slow and complicated process. To innovate, technology companies must sometimes divert from the standard
• The agreed standard is not always the simplest or smartest way to do something. Therefore platform developers constantly strive to improve the future standards by implementing them as proprietary components before the standard has been established
• Proprietary technology creates de facto standards – Microsoft Windows, iPhone OS and Adobe Flash are great examples of this
• Differentiation is good – we want different screen sizes, keyboard inputs, sizes and colours. Not everyone wants a black or white iPhone

Bad

• Applications have to be tested on all different variations of e.g. the Android or Symbian OS, display resolutions, user input methods (Touchscreen, QWERTY, etc) and hardware configurations
• The cost of optimising and testing the applications is substantially higher for Android, Symbian, Web Runtime and J2ME due to fragmentation
• The development phase is longer due to the time consuming additional device optimisation and testing that is required

At Golden Gekko we constantly work on improving our platforms and tools to get around these challenges and instead leverage the positive differentiation of fragmentation.

But the title of the blog was the beauty of fragmentation and not pros and cons or how to battle fragmentation. The following graph from Tweetdeck illustrates the enormous variety of Android devices now being used to download and use apps from the Android Market. Beauty or Beast? You be the judge.