Toward a Telecom Store Not App Store

Main Theme

There is no doubt about the positive effect of 3rd parties in the telecom ecosystem to drive innovation and flexibility required by market dynamic to capitalize on the Operator most treasure arsenal, customer base and operator service/network.  Adding to this Gartner forecasted that over 185 billion applications will have been downloaded from mobile app stores, since the launch of the first one in July 2008 and revenue surpass $15.1 billion in 2011 (Source Gartner), Smart phone numbers to reach1 billion by 2016 (source androidauthority ); Operators had  headed different direction with this goal in mind and the most wide stream adopted was the App store direction mainly driven by Apple success in this market and huge revenue generated  with minor successes reported  here and  here and failures specially in Vodafone case here which is phasing out there app store opened earlier(its worth mentioning here that most of the App store/distribution channel available now other than the major players "Blackberry App World, Nokia Ovi, Google Market, Palm WebOS, Windows Mobile Marketplace and Apple iTunes" are focusing on indirect revenue generated from Adds free and fermium alike application distributed through their respective platforms )

Source Gartner

  Since Apple is a "walled garden" a very close ecosystem out of the reach of all operators; most of them headed toward Android based system which shows higher flexibility and open source mind set, so all the race is in the fraction that left by  Google Market.

Source androidauthority

App store landscape

Despite number of launch of app stores here, here and hereAnd  not to forget the shy attempt by number of big operators and handset manufactures which had been later sponsors by GSMA called WAC (Wholesale Application Community)  to create an operator led App store which really didn't fly; Based on the above and the fact that only market open for real  competition is the Android (the stress is in real since there is Jail broken and HTML5 workaround emerging as alternative to the iOS ecosystem), and  Forrester prediction that by 2016 the three big players (Apple, Google and Microsoft) will be accounted for 90% market share of applications its very fair to reach a conclusion that App store is a furious competition market with very little chances to get through on it.

What is the telecom store? It's the API not the App

I'm sure a lot of non technical readers will wonder about the API terminology which stand for Application Programming Interface and I'm even more sure that this explanation will add more question than answers,Wikipedia definition is "An application programming interface (API) is a protocol intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other",  in plain English words API is a methodology to  expose any software/system capabilities to out side entities if its another program or hardware. I hope a picture is started to emerge now to start showing my case, which is creating an open ecosystem based on collaboration between operator and capable  3rd parties by  opening the main operator assets (services, customer, network) and capitalizing on the customer/operator trust relationship; needless to mention that this hard earned trust from the customers toward operator  should not be compromise at all, so our argument here  we are not asking to explode this relation but to improve it by offering more tailored innovative service that answer today consumer needs and expectations; like any other opportunity its comes with its own challenges which is in this case is to balance this very thin line between opening and flexibility and customer privacy and security. I believe RCSe is emerging as excellent candidate to fill this gap specially after been adopted by the G5 operators ( The G5 comprises Telefonica, Vodafone, Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia)

Conclusion

App store is a very lucrative business and has its own players already established (iTunes , Google Play and Microsoft ) with the highest brand recognition and customer trust forrester report  "mobile App internet recasts the software and service landscape "estimate that the three player will be accounted for 90% market share (source Forrester); Telecom app and/or App store are two concept that not just can coexist but a must for the industry good sake, it shouldn't be a merely  glamour interface for finding and downloading apps but a complete and personalized experience building on the major operators merits.  The Telecom store I believe an opportunity to leave the dummy pipe status and create a new sustainable revenue streams that customer will be happy to pay for and defiantly a happy customer is less likely to churn.