The winners of the Android Developer Challenge are on display in the Android Gallery. Has there ever been such a flurry of apps built for non-existent handsets?

Actually, yes. Remember when we all downloaded the early MIDP SDK from Sun and ran our apps in the emulator? I don’t recall the prize money being quite so high. In fact, I don’t recall any prize money. I guess we wanted to play, although we already knew that the MIDP was about to appear on a range of handsets, which it duly did.

Since then, things have moved on considerably. The apps in the gallery are richer, more featured and … yes … even more beautiful, if that counts - and it does.

I feel vindicated that many of the example apps in the opening chapter of my book are in the gallery. I don’t mean that I gave them the ideas, but that the earlier vision for ‘Next Generation Apps,’ now called Mobile 2.0, is materialising in front of our eyes. Although, this was already the case in the rapidly growing iPhone apps store where location- and picture-enabling has become the defacto ‘design pattern.’

Still, here we have all of these wonderful apps and the only way to make money from them is to get a handout from Google, which, for some, is actually a viable ‘business model.’

I just saw a tweet fly past my eyes that asked about the killer app for iPhone in a particular category. Are we still talking about killer apps as a design goal? In a recent survey of Micro-ISVs, the mode (i.e. most common) revenue figure was…?

Guess…

Yes…

Exactly zero.

Having been involved with various software ventures in Web and mobile, I already knew the answer. Most of us do. Often times, the problem is the market, or lack of presence in one. We can’t get people to find out about our ‘killer app’ and so it languishes in a maelstrom of feverish developer enhancements to fix the problem. Yes, we imagine that if only we had feature X and Y, our app would become more appealing, not realising - or being honest - that no one cares about the app because nobody knows about it. We suffer the ‘imaginary user’ syndrome.

This, of course, is business mistake 101. No marketing = no sales. Nonetheless, it is the mode of Micro-ISV activity. Why is that? Well, because it’s so damn easy to make software products these days. I know, that doesn’t mean that they’re any good, but the barriers to entry are low indeed. However, the barriers to revenue, especially in mobile, are fairly high.

So, we will expect to see thousands of iPhone apps (there already are) and thousands of Android apps, most of which will go nowhere. But we continue to dream of the killer app. And the good news is that with the likes of iPhone app store and, soon, perhaps, O2 Litmus, we might stand a better chance of someone being in the right place at the right time with the right idea, which is what we call the killer app.

There is no killer iPhone app. The ‘iPhone ecosystem’ is the killer. The device, the early adopters (and now hoards of smart followers), the flat-rate tariff, the apps store, the Apple marketing machine, the SDK, the … well, the list continues to grow. (Soon the prepay iPhone.) I’ve talked about the importance of ecosystems (I call it the ‘Mobilisation factory’) endlessly in various workshops and yet it largely gets ignored. It always comes back to that same issue - what business are we in? Parker pens thought they were in the pen business. When it was pointed out that they were actually in the gift business, things turned around.

Yes, we continue to dream of the killer app for mobile and perhaps we move one step closer each day. Operators take note! Most of this is happening out there, outside of your control. And - take note in triplicate (gosh, do people still say that?) - show us the (prize) money! It’s the food of dreams.

Technorati Tags: Android, Micro-ISV, iPhone

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