Android Angle

Mark Murphy

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There's Not An App For That. Yet.

Identifying and Filling Android Application Market Gaps

By Mark Murphy on Mon, 08/31/09 - 1:23pm.

Apple's marketing campaign for the iPhone has been brilliant, as is their wont. The aspect of it that I find most compelling, though, is the “there's an app for that” campaign. In one fell swoop, they demonstrate to possible buyers the breadth of the App Store catalog and give worthy iPhone app developers a boost.

Android could use something along those lines. However, given the highly fragmented Android ecosystem, I cannot realistically expect much in the way of marketing campaigns.

In blog posts and news articles, there has been a lot of comparison of the relative size of the iPhone App Store and the Android Market. In terms of raw numbers, that's not terribly meaningful: if the App Store has 10x as many apps, it might just have 10 workalikes for every Android app. In reality, that is not the case across the board, though by all reports there are certain segments in the App Store that have a fair bit of product overlap.

However, too much attention is paid to the store sizes. I am not terribly interested in competing with iPhone — I am rather interested in fulfilling the needs of customers. The relative size of the markets gives iPhone a slight nod at possibly meeting more needs, but it is rather likely that there are numerous niches in which either Android has the better solution or neither platform offers much of anything.

Android's distributed nature does give it one advantage: more “feet on the street” trying to sell Android devices, particularly into businesses. That's what I'm hoping we can tap: to learn from the salespeople, integrators, and consultants what they are seeing that Android cannot deliver. What apps are missing that cause firms to dismiss Android devices? What firmware capabilities are missing that rule Android devices out of consideration? What development tools are missing that prevent enterprises from feeling they can competently get their internal applications running on Android, or that prevent existing ISVs from considering Android ports of their products?

Of course, it would also be nice to have some form of reverse channel, so that when the ecosystem fills those niches, that the salespeople, integrators, and consultants have a prayer of finding out about them. Right now, for too many things, smaller firms are stuck with dumping their app in the Android Market (and perhaps elsewhere), blogging about it, and praying the right people find out.

If those who are trying to get Android sold and deployed can tell us what is missing, we have a far better chance of filling those needs, instead of just guessing.