Julien Blin, Principal Analyst & CEO at JBB Research, USA, discusses one of the latest trends: governments investing in their own mobile application stores to bridge the digital gap between private companies and government information.
Last week, according to the Ministry of Public Administration and Safety, the Korean government announced its plan to launch the World’s first mobile app store in the first half of this year. After the carriers, handset vendors, software companies, etc… Governments are now jumping on the mobile app store bandwagon. Here is why it makes sense.
1. Korean government set to launch world’s first mobile app store. According to an article published by the Korea Times, the Korean government plans to launch its app store as an internet site, and later on as a mobile app store. By doing so, the Korean government intends to “lower the barriers” to private companies wanting to offer government information. That being said, it remains unclear how it will be done.
2. U.S, UK, and French governments also jumping on the mobile app store provider bandwagon. Korea is not the only government jumping on the app store provider bandwagon. In fact, in February, the U.S. government announced its plan to create an online portal of mobile apps that will extend new services to smartphones.
Let’s not forget that in January, the White House also created its first mobile app for the iPhone which provides users with news, blogs, and steaming video. Additionally, the NASA and the U.S. Postal Service unveiled their own iPhone apps. In Europe, the U.K and French governments are also set to be out in front.
In fact, the UK government recently launched a website called Data.gov.uk, providing non-personal information available to developers in order to help them create mobile apps, while the French government recently launched a mobile app portal offering 24 free mobile apps in the areas of law, culture, education, employment, consumer affairs, disability, health, senior citizens, tourism and more.
3. Governments can leverage tons of public info to create mobile apps and become mobile app store providers. It makes complete sense for governments to jump on the mobile app space bandwagon as they can leverage tons of public info to create mobile apps and become mobile app store providers. For instance, in a country like Korea, since the creation of the government information database in 1999, more than 300 million sources of public information are being held. This is a tremendous amount of data.Leveraging such data to create myriad of mobile apps such as rail timetable apps, bus timetable apps, makes complete sense.
But most importantly, I believe that governments should focus their efforts on creating “green” mobile apps in order to help fight global warming and change customers’ behaviours. In my opinion, a location aware mobile application, which could help mobile users share rides in order to help users save money and ultimately help reduce gas emissions, would be a terrific idea.
4. Governments set to play a key role in driving local content in mobile app store space, especially in emerging market, and ultimately, further drive popularity of mobile apps. Other mobile app providers (e.g. Nokia, Apple, RIM, etc.) should work closely with local governments and local mobile app developers/content developers to better provide localized mobile apps.
They should also make sure to make their mobile app store interoperable with government-powered mobile app stores. In my opinion, this will become critical, especially in emerging markets like Africa, South America, China, Eastern Europe, where local content is key to drive higher adoption of mobile apps or mobile data services in general.
For instance, as highlighted in one of our reports on the Chinese mobile entertainment market, one of the reasons why the iPhone sales have been disappointing so far is due to the lack of Chinese-language mobile apps. Google and Nokia are set to be out in front when it comes to providing local content for their mobile app store.
In fact, Nokia’s Ovi Store, which will be available in China in 2010, will offer deep, localized, meaning Chinese-language content, while Google is already partnering with local content app developers and content providers to offer local content in South Africa.
In my opinion, both Nokia and Google, and other mobile app providers need to go one step further by partnering with local governments in emerging markets like China, India, Africa (South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Algeria, etc.). By doing so, this should help them drive the popularity of their mobile app stores and help local carriers carrying their mobile app stores drive their mobile entertainment content/services adoption, which should help them boost carriers’ data ARPU.
Granted, very few people have access to mobile app stores in emerging countries like China or Africa due to the small penetration of smartphones in those emerging markets (e.g. 7.5% of the handsets sold in China were smartphones in 2008, according to IDC). This is a key restraining factor, which will only go away as smartphones and mobile data services become more affordable over time.
In the meantime, there are already various wireless companies (e.g. startups) in emerging markets that help local governments mobilize their content. A Kenyan startup like Symbiotic is the perfect example of this. Local governments and leading mobile app store providers like Apple, Nokia, and others, need to work with local content providers like Symbiotic.
5. Emergence of Google Chrome type mobile browsers set to play a key role here. While very few people have access to mobile app stores in emerging markets, I personally believe that the mobile web could become a driving force to help develop local content. The mobile web has become strong growth in emerging markets like Africa or China.
Ultimately, I believe that the emergence of Google Chrome-type browsers capable of pushing more capable mobile widgets or web-based mobile applications through a mobile browser could alleviate the emergence of localized content/mobile apps.
It makes complete sense for local governments to become mobile app store providers as it should make mobile apps more relevant, localized and stimulate mobile apps sales, while offering governments a new revenue opportunity.
In my opinion, such strategy will become critical, especially in emerging markets like Africa, South America, China, and Eastern Europe, where local content is key to driving higher adoption of mobile apps or mobile data services in general. At the end of the day, it is set to be a win-win situation for end users, mobile app developers, handset vendors and leading mobile app store providers like Nokia, RIM, Apple, and others.
