The “Assembling the Android army” series of posts is where I provide completely unsolicited advice to Google and the Open Handset Alliance on strategies and tactics for growing the base of Android developers, to better cement Android’s place in the mobile platform marketplace.
Just about every seller, no matter what they’re selling, wants customer loyalty. Sometimes, this loyalty is forced upon the customer, what we sometimes call “lock-in”. The two-year mobile phone contract is one form of lock-in. Having proprietary data that cannot be exported or converted is another. Offering bundles rather than a la carte selection, as with cable television providers, is yet another. All of these “feel bad” and engender customer ill will.
What you really want is for customers to lock themselves in, by finding enough things that work better on your platform than on any other, so they are willingly sticking by your platform rather than switching continuously.
At the end of the day, the Android army is all about building such a sticky platform, whether it is by extending the operating system itself or, more commonly, by building applications that people find sticky.
Some people tend to focus on the “killer app”, asking where Android’s “killer app” is, compared to, say, iTunes integration the iPhone. A “killer app” is merely a sticky app with a wide audience. It is an application that cause people to stand by your platform, one that is popular among a large audience.
“Killer apps” are great when you can get them. Nextel’s “Direct Connect” is a fine example of a mobile “killer app” that has helped keep Nextel around, Sprint notwithstanding.
However, that’s not the only way to go.
Every application that is created for a platform has a chance to be “killer”. But it also has a chance to merely be sticky for a smaller audience: killer within a niche, if you will. In many ways, it does not matter if you get one million committed users via a single “killer app” or one million committed users by a thousand sticky apps – either way, you get a million committed users, ones who will stick by your platform so long as their mix of sticky apps works best on that platform.
Contests like the Android Developer Challenge or venture funds like the iFund are mostly to try to find and promote “killer apps”. Like a baseball team signing a slugger for an outrageous sum, these programs live and die by the long-ball.
Building an army is different. Building an army is a matter of getting those thousand sticky apps built and promoted to their specific niches, with the hope that, maybe, one of those apps might become “killer”. Building an army does not necessarily need long-ball programs, but does need the leaders to “sweat the small stuff” so the army can assemble and stay committed.
As the “Assembling the Android army” series continues in the coming weeks, we’ll explore various pieces of “small stuff” and see how they can help recruit, assist, and empower Android developers.
