Mobile applications are often the subject of some seriously ostentatious advertising and promotion. Apple regularly quotes its most recent “billion” landmark, and the Wholesale Application Community announcement at MWC last week was the very definition of grandstanding. But in the older market of platform agnostic app stores, things are quickly getting very interesting. Todays announcement that PocketGear has bought out competitor Handango is only the most recent of several interesting developments.
What’s the PocketGear story?
PocketGear and Handango are both mobile application and content stores – and now they’re the same store. They share certain qualities in common – each works across a broad variety of handsets, mobile OSs and operators. Each had more than 140,000 apps available for sale and download, and had multiple partnerships in place with OEMS and operators worldwide. The biggest different was the Handango only handled premium apps, while PocketGear offered both free and paid applications. Between them, they carry apps and content from a truly colossal number of developers – PocketGear claims their newly combined pool comprises 32,000 developers.
What’s the deal?
No mention of how much money was involved, but the current PocketGear CEO and President Jud Bowman will stay in his position, and the soon-to-be-former CEO of Handango, Alex Bloom, will become Chief Operating Officer of PocketGear.
What do we think?
It means that the operators, developers and publishers who currently have deals in place with PocketGear have suddenly found those deals have gotten better. I can only imagine there’s a considerable amount of cross-over between the two app stores content. But even if this doesn’t boost PocketGears app content by a ludicrous amount, it certainly reduces the amount of competition out there. It’s one less platform for the value chain to worry about – all Handango developers are now part of the PocketGear Developer Programme.
So then I thought about the major deal announced between Sprint and GetJar announced recently… and the conversation I had with Fabbio Pezzoti, Founder of another open app store, Mobango. His opinion was the the mobile operators behind the WAC app store will never really get their game together. I agreed with him at the time, and I still do. I don’t think that competition for the Apple Store will really come from other OEMs or operators. It will come from a community of independent app stores that are expanding and consolidating constantly.
