Handmark's Reddick on the future of applications, app stores and the smartphone battlefield – page 2

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FierceMobileContent: Do you have platforms that you're focusing on right now? iPhone? BlackBerry?

Reddick: We would say that you have to cover Android, iPhone and BlackBerry, at a minimum. It's crazy to think that this market is going to consolidate onto one or two platforms in the next 18 months. And so what we do is cover those three platforms, and more.

And what we do here is that when we publish an application, we publish it on Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, webOS, BREW, Java and WAP--simultaneously. We don't think that a publisher should be limiting themselves to deciding which handset OS or platform to focus on. We think that if you're going to focus on mobile, focus on mobile. And don't try to qualify your app in that you can only get this on the iPhone, or you can only get this on BlackBerry. That's a poor way to go to market.

FierceMobileContent: Are app stores becoming a commodity? Will they be as important in the future as they are now?

Reddick: I don't know if becoming a commodity is the right way to describe it. Having a way for your customers to easily discover what they can do with their device or the network is a requirement. So Nokia or Motorola or Sprint--any entity that wants to drive their network or their device, it's top of mind for them right now that there has to be a way for people to discover, purchase, download and use applications. And the high bar that Apple and the iPhone set I think is great for the industry. It's just there's more than one way to do that.

FierceMobileContent: Let's talk about BREW and Java. AT&T and Sprint recently announced they would support BREW, after long being supporters of Java. What does this mean for the industry?

Reddick: In some ways I think they're trying to simplify a part of their business that accounts for a high volume of handsets and users with a low volume of usage, so far. So you can't ignore the low end of handsets in the market, because you're going to have a massive amount of users there still. I think that both AT&T and Sprint, are looking for ways to manage their cost of serving this end of the business. I don't know the exact business terms behind the decisions they made, but I suspect they were finding a lot of complexity in managing a Java environment that they wanted to outsource without abandoning the low-end market. ... But developers are increasingly more interested not in just how many users does a platform have access to, but how intensive those particular users are with their data services.

FierceMobileContent: Based on your view of the market, where do you think things are headed? How will things shake out between carriers and device makers?

Reddick: Even after a decade in the industry, for me personally, I feel that we're still at the beginning of a mobile application revolution. On the distribution model, whether it's the carriers or the OEMs that are going to win, I don't think those are the only two players that may ultimately succeed. I think if you look, longer term, at the way the Internet evolved, you don't have your PC manufacturers as your primary source for applications. The network that you're using is not necessarily the primary source for your applications. There are a variety of places you can get your applications. And it's going to have a lot to do with segmentation, and what's the best value proposition for selling a particular application--putting it in a big-box store or a specialty store or elsewhere. So I think there are a lot of outcomes there.

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