Keep your iPhone strategy, just add BlackBerry and feature phones
What? Not everyone can make a living with iPhone apps?
No question there has been a rush to the iPhone app store, especially given the media hype and the impressive numbers we’ve all seen quoted. So given the iPhone app love fest, we read with interest an article at FierceDeveloper that went so far as to say “dump your iPhone strategy.”
One of the interesting sections was some of the numbers quoted by the author and industry expert Konny Zsigo around the cost to enter the mobile space on all the ‘other’ devices. A game for example on the major carriers was quoted at $50,000 to build and $100,000 to port. Add in BlackBerry, QA and the certification process and you are up to $250,000.
Our product, Cascada Mobile Breeze, addresses this exact issue – we significantly bring down that cost to one single development effort with one language (HTML/JavaScript/CSS), for all devices. (Oh, and keep an eye out for some upcoming news on our device support…)
That $250,000 development cost assumes one has to create an app in each language, and then port it to the different phones and screen types. The reality is that a highly optimized game can be expensive and may require that level of effort, but not everything is that complex. For example, there are utilities, puzzles, content readers, social networking apps, news, weather, and sports apps that do well and can be created easily in Breeze.
We are seeing more and more movement toward this approach in the industry – use web technologies to build mobile apps – and there is a reason. It is much more cost effective in terms of the skill set and time required. Plus with the app stores popping up everywhere, there is a better marketplace to sell these apps. The market for mobile apps has expanded dramatically in the last 6 months with the BlackBerry App World and Nokia’s Ovi store in particular, and it is only going to get better.
So while not everyone will experience overnight success with their mobile apps – iPhone or not, with the development tools available and the increasing demand from business users and consumers for compelling apps, there is no time like the present to get into the mobile applications business – we’ve taken care of the hard part.
Tags: BlackBerry, Breeze, Mobile, Nokia