MOBILYSIS: - Ahead In Mobility

With nearly 85,000 applications and 2 billion downloads, iPhone app-store looks like a mega pool of money. But is it that simple? Surely not. A deluge of market players in the iPhone application development business portends a raging price war. Market players range from business giants to freelancers and each one seeks the biggest piece of pie. So, where does the differentiation lie? Change in Costing? Surely, if the player is big, slashing application cost won’t hurt much. But for smaller players that might lead to an end of the game. So does that mean packing up of bags? Not really.
At this moment I can feel a déjà vu .Years back web technology made a foray in the market and climbed the podium emphatically. Web technologies have rendered power and enthuse to all mortal beings in the technology business, what has glorified web technology is web analytics. So do we get a sense of MOBILYSIS (Mobile business analysis)? Can that be a differentiating factor in mobile business? Can mobile analytics provide better understanding of the current market requirements? Let’s delve a little into that.
The pie-chart below shows the market penetration of iPhone based on region. Does it take long to interpret the data? Nah!! North-Americans are the end users in the primary mobile-app market. But that wasn’t rocket-science or was it? In aught, data interpretation is subjective. One might target Asian market as well to gobble up the entire available piece of pie in the region. But that’s left for players to think.

Let’s move a little further. Before we go about studying consumer behavior let’s pin point as to who are the potential customers. The bar graphs below shall make that clear.

iPhone 3G(8GB) costs 99$ iPodTouch(8GB) costs 199$. Bewildered!! Well that’s up to micro economists to explain. Plain vanilla data interpretation is enough to recognize the potential consumers. “Behavior of consumers in the age group of 13-17 and 25-49 needs to be studied well”. Well!! that’s not a sound conclusion for astute business leaders to make. What if I tell you that sale of iPod is ten times to the sales of iPhone. That might help to put things into proper perspective. Now, that it’s easy to target the potential customers, it should be interesting to move ahead.
What if one wants to make a blistering entry into the mobile app market? Remember I hinted about costing before? Let’s talk about that a little. Bottomline and topline is what businesses think about. Well! I’d suggest keeping them aside for a moment. What if consumers associate mobile application with few players, one of them being you!! ‘Sales by volume’ is what we should be talking about. Create applications, put them on app store for free, grab the market rather gobble it up. Bottomline will look ugly as the investment will be huge (this again is subjective to the enterprise) and toplines will whine for months at stretch. Though it might be a fancy thought, it can be tried by big market players. The graph given below should endorse the words above.

A major decision is yet to be made. Which mobile application development platform will suit an enterprise’s profile?

Let’s analyze the bar graph above. Enterprises that wish to play a safe game would target first mobile platform in the graph above. More venturesome enterprises will take a more lofty stance and would target platform number three i.e. Apple. 333% growth in sales in a period of one year is emphatic. iPhone is already on its way to reign the mobile market. To stay away from it is a crime! Are we ready to rake in the moolah!!! Market players have squared down on this particular platform and have shown superb agility.
By now we know what to target, whom to target, and how to target. But will that suffice? Sure enterprises don’t want to create applications and dump them in their backyards. So what do they want?? Sell them of course. Let’s take a look down.

The graph above shows how an application grappled with bottoming sales before they leaped to a 53% increase in sales. Reason? An advertisement in Fortune magazine. Cool stuff by sales guys and that’s how you grab the market.
Examples shown above are mediocre as compared to actual in-depth analysis possible for mobile app business. Analytics provides an enterprise with the opportunity to stay ahead of the peers, take wise decisions and create brand image. But the domain is not limited. Enterprises can offer clients with long term mobile analysis to create market differentiation.