A couple of recent articles about China Mobile got my attention.
But they had now failed to agree on the launch of Apple’s App Store in China, something that the cellco sees as a threat to its own place in teh value chain. "Wang said China Mobile should operate the application store itself in order to maintain its advantage," the source at CMRI said.
However, the Google platform scored many other points, notably gaining increased endorsement from China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, which announced plans to adopt a more open business model.
While I understand why China Mobile wants to control the application store (they don't want to become a dumb pipe), this business model is too expensive for third party developers to distribute their applications world-wide.
It is very important to recognize that there are two reasons why mobile-Java application market is not growing - device compatibility issues and expensive business development cost. The first problem is technical problem, and the second problem is business problem. Both problems are very expensive (software development cost and business development cost), and are making very difficult to create profitable business.
Google may be able to solve the first problem (although it may be difficult because of the nature of open source), but Google is not interested in solving the second problem.
Unlike Apple, Google is going to let wireless operators to control the application store. While this business model is much more attractive to wireless operators like China Mobile, this is going to be very painful for third party developers like us, because they need to spend a lot of money and time to convince those wireless operators sell their applications one by one - spending a lot of time and money in flying, meetings, writing proposals, dining and entertaining.
On the other hand, selling application for iPhone is quite easy. We just need to develop an application and submit it to Apple. Once it passes Apple's test (which takes a week or two), Apple will distribute it to all the iPhone users world wide regardless of wireless network users are using. There is no business development cost!
The biggest contribution Apple made with iPhone to this industry is neither the innovative device nor the iPhone OS, but this elimination of this business development cost. Once developers experience this simple and easy process to distribute their applications over Apple's iTune store, it is going to be very difficult to convince them to support the other model.
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