American mobile operator Sprint has just announced a major deal with mobile application store GetJar. GetJar is the largest independent application store in the world – and counting everybody else, only the Apple Store is bigger than it. Sprint will now be offering the entire selection of 60,000 apps from GetJar to its mobile customers. Why is this such a good idea? Read on…
What’s GetJar?
GetJar is one of the veterans of mobile applications. It started in Lithuania in 2004, and has since opened offices Lithuania in California and London. Late last year, when Nokia claimied that Ovi was the 2nd biggest app store after Apple, Getjar pretty conclusively slapped it down.
GetJar has been around since long before the iPhone popularised apps. The Apple Store was the first big one that offered apps for a single device – GetJars business model is much more open. GetJar offers apps for every single mobile platform that can run an application (except iPhone, obviously), and more than that, it only offers free apps. If you download an application for GetJar, it won’t cost you a dime outside of your operators data charges. As VP of Marketing Patick Mork told GoMo News at CTIA last year, GetJar is planning on offering paid apps, but for now the main focus is on freebies.
And if you’re wondering how GetJar makes money, it’s from a “pay per download” service whereby companies can pay GetJar to get premium placement for their applications.
What’s the Sprint deal?
Sprint has announced that anyone who owns a feature phone from Sprint will now have access to the entire GetJar catalogue. WinMo and BlackBerry devices are also included. A link to the GetJar catalog is now included on the Sprint portal for these phones – subscribers can simply find it in the “downloads” category. And just because these are free apps doesn’t mean they’re crap. Amongst the apps you can get are Facebook Mobile, mobile barcode shopping app ShopSavvy, mobile browser Opera Mini and location-based social network Loopt. Getting access to the GetJar catalog makes it much easier for feature phone owners to get access to these useful applications, all in one place. It’s a great way for feature phone owners to access some of the same cool services that smartphone owners do.
This isn’t the first big mobile name to partner with GetJar – or even the first mobile operator. Virgin Mobile France partnered with GetJar last year, as did mobile maker Sony Ericsson.
Len Barlik, vice president of wireless and wireline services for Sprint, said “we are opening up the world of apps to customers who may not have a smartphone. Our partnership with GetJar means that all Sprint customers will now have access to thousands of applications ranging from popular apps such as YouTube and Google Maps to more niche applications that address their business needs.”
What we think?
Why is this so awesome? Let me count the ways:
1) It combats fragmentation. There has been a definite tendency for everyone and their Granny to launch a mobile application store. Mobile manufacturers, mobile operators and mobile operating systems all have their own stores, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll find that same app in all of them. In fact, for mobile developers, it’s really not worth their time to tweak their apps for all the different platforms. But GetJar is an established store – the more operators and OEMs that put GetJar on their platform, the better.
And GetJar is doing its best to make things easy for them – check out our report on the recent “white label” app store option that it launched one week ago.
2) It’s for feature phones. It’s not all smartphones-smartphones-smartphones, you know. The majority of people still own feature phones, and GetJar is the application service that is most perfectly suited to service them.
3) It’s on-portal. There’s a definite push to side-line operators when it comes to digital mobile services – but we’re mostly talking about Feature phones here. On a smartphone you can download your own browser and go where you like, but it’s just not that easy with older feature phones. The operators still have the greatest push – and being on-portal still gets you a lot of notice.
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