T here is a fly in the Indian telecom “minutes factory” ointment. Operators used to churn out voice minutes at lower cost and prices, and consumers used to keep buying more of them. Not anymore. Indians seem to have lost interest in talking. The time each one spends every month on voice calls has dropped from 505 minutes in June 2008 to 401 minutes in June 2010.
Funnily, the same customers are spending more time on their mobile phones. But voice calls, says Informate, a telecom research company, form just 9 percent of the 271 minutes spent by an average Indian mobile user on his phone every day.
Much of the remaining time is spent browsing the internet, on social networks, listening to music or playing addictive games. Third party mobile applications, or “apps” as they’re known more popularly, are increasingly the preferred way to do most of these things. According to research firm Gartner 4.5 billion apps will be downloaded around the world in 2010, adding up to a revenue of $6.7 billion. Gartner, adds that by 2013 that revenue might shoot up to nearly $30 billion.
Major Indian operators like Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance and Aircel have launched their own app stores to take a slice of the still nascent app market. They figure positioning themselves between their subscribers and independent app developers will allow them to demand anywhere from two-thirds to three-fourths of app prices.
They may have a surprise coming.
A Bumpy Road
Most operators have opened up their own branded app stores, powered behind the scenes with white-label technology platforms from cross-platform solution providers like Cellmania, Getjar, Arvato or Infosys.
But unlike voice or SMS where they had a natural monopoly over subscribers, the competition is going to be much fiercer in the apps world.
“There are four critical elements that determine app store success — tight integration with handsets for better user experience and app discovery; the ability to do full-price and micro-transaction billing; a revenue share that is favourable for developers; and a very wide ecosystem for newer and fresher content by the day,” says Vishal Gondal, the founder and CEO of Indiagames, India’s largest game developer. “The operators have only taken parts of the app store model that suited them while ignoring the others. That’s not the right way.”
With the exception of easy billing, Indian operator app stores are handicapped in all the other areas. Apple’s iPhone app store has over 280,000 apps because it’s designed to run on just a handful of iPhone, iPod and iPad models. This allows app developers to fully harness the specific features of each model — screen sizes, processor speeds, data transfer rates, camera resolutions — while creating their apps.
In contrast, Airtel’s app store supports 780 phone models; which means app developers end up coding for a common minimum set of phone features, making the app either too slow for people with cheaper phones or too boring for those with more expensive ones.
Building and nurturing content ecosystems is another area where operators have never succeeded around the world. Infosys is trying to plug that gap by offering a combination of a new product, Flypp, and its services to become the “ecosystem manager” for mobile operators. Infosys’ expertise, says Deepak Swamy, a senior Infosys executive attached to this new product division, will lie in “helping bridge the digital divide” between developers writing apps for over 4,000 phone models and operators targeting consumers with different profiles and needs.
That expertise will come at a cost. Swamy says Infosys will charge both operators as well as developers for playing the part of an ecosystem manager, though he refused to specify exactly how much. Instead, Swamy says developers will get between 20-40 percent of every rupee their app earns, the rest being shared between the operator and Infosys.
But many developers aren’t happy at what they consider dismal revenue shares. Even international app stores for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry that return 70 percent of app revenue to developers are being criticised for keeping too high a share relative to the value they add. PayPal is offering app developers 94 percent of any app revenue they process through its micropayments service.
In India developers are lucky if they get 20-30 percent of their app revenue.
Rajesh Reddy, CEO of July Systems, a Bangalore-based mobile publishing solutions company says it’s not just developers who don’t trust operator offerings but consumers too.
“In the first generation Indian VAS model consumers were opted-in to subscription plans without their consent and often left without easy ways to unsubscribe themselves. If that approach creeps into the app store model then it will destroy consumer trust, leading to a rapid decrease in consumer adoption and ultimately the death of the app store,” he says.
Monkeys for Peanuts
Developers were the lowest rung in the erstwhile mobile VAS value chain, with smaller ones often getting just 10-25 percent of the additional revenue an operator earned because of their applications. The few that managed to earn some money would often get it three months down the line after multiple follow ups. Many operators would then deduct another 10-20 percent of developer dues under the head “billing leakages”, meaning customers who downloaded the apps but for some reason didn’t pay the operator.
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