Which types of apps do people use most on their mobiles? This is revealed in the Telstra 2011 Smartphone Index. It prompts this question: How did the smartphone, mobile device and app market take off, and more importantly, where is it heading?
Statistics on emerging opportunities in mobile markets are useful to us as IT and mobile phone app lawyers. They are re-shaping the financials, workflow and futures of a huge range of industries, among them software developers.
As our hyperlinks in this article indicate, since 2006 we’ve closely monitoring mobile market developments in Australia so as to give timely advice to our clients.
Strategic planning background
Smartphones, were pulled ahead by the iPhone from 2007. Tablets were pulled ahead by the iPad from 2010. As an e-reader, the iPad has competition from a range of suppliers.
Mobile devices have grabbed attention due to their remarkable sales growth relative to competing devices, simple phones or desktop and laptop computers.
In parallel social media has become normal, for non-geeks that means Facebook or Twitter. Facebook is a vortex for even business websites as they become more “facebooky”. Because of cookies and other app and browser smarts, a user’s Facebook presence more and more pops up or gets pulled into sites, whether that be via the iLike button or more.
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Apps have been with us since the 1950s. The full term, application, is a synonym for computer program. New meaning has been given to the word “app” by trends since 2005. Today we commonly talk of apps found on mobile devices. Their design genealogy recalls widgets which proliferated on computers in about 2006. As this happened related commercialised mobile technology increased their installed base, eg bluetooth and wifi.
The industry-changing capability of the mobile market became obvious years ago. Certainly it’s reshaping IT markets, moving from a position of advantage in consumer IT through now to colonise business IT. It goes wherever people find it useful to have data available away from their desk. That’s everywhere.
In 2006 it became apparent to me that access to internet content would put a stake through the content walled gardens of telcos and others.Their business model and mobile phone contracts held back the growing tsunami of unmet consumer demand for data mobility.
By 2009 I could make predictions on observing consumer habits changing in use of apps on mobiles to perform daily functions.
It then became measurable in statistics like the level to which people accessed their bank accounts on mobiles or used the iPhone map app.
In 2011 it is apparent that former market leaders, Blackberry and Nokia, have faltering. Their operating systems have been besieged by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.
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Now in mid-2011 we have the graphic above in the 2011 Telstra survey (see also the Nielsen/Telstra slide show here [PDF]), to indicate the level of change in Australia. It’s a peep hole for future opportunity.
Strategic planning foreground
Looking ahead, the bigger picture is that companies which control app platforms are positioned to control layers above. That’s been part of the mission of Facebook in opening its interface to other developers, such as this month with Skype, owned by Microsoft.
In the competition between three key platforms (the web, client-server architectures and mobile apps):
- the advantage of Google, Amazon and eBay is the web; Google with Android,
- the advantage seen by Microsoft is to be more platform agnostic, linking devices anywhere, and
- the advantage of Apple has moved to mobile devices with iPhones and iPads.
!["iPhone-app-lawyer"]("/images/stories/lightbulb/iPhone-app-lawyer.jpg")
We can view apps as a business layer above these platforms or infrastructures.
Technology buying decisions in business today include mobile devices. For example, a company with staff that travel a lot and products with bar codes, may prefer data storage in the cloud and mobile devices.
There are technical reasons as to why the platforms and infrastructures are integrating. As is explained in a recent book (1) on app development:
“The days when a Web page was a single page of HTML code are long past. It is true that some such pages still exist, but more often the “page” either includes other components such as JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets or is some code that dynamically creates the page. This is true of Web pages, iPhone Web apps, and Facebook apps. (iPhone apps may include HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets, but they also include iPhone and Cocoa frameworks that are usually written in the Objective-C language.)” (2)
Mobile app law in Australia
Clearly businesses, including app developers and software owners, have much to think about and keep monitoring for survival of their ventures.
- Contracts and business structuring – to architect your venture with a matrix of contracts with your suppliers (eg programmers and designers) as well as to assess the implications of contracts with other apps (eg those seeking to access your app’s functionality in theirs), app stores and device vendors
- Confidential information – locking down your ideas under contract law (eg via a non-disclosure agreement, NDA) and under equity law
- Copyright – contracts to ensure it is clear that ownership of copyright is held by the right person or legal entity
- Trade mark – trade mark applications for the app name and logo
- Consumer law advice – eg to avoid designs or representations that might be misleading at law
- Patents – a search is prudent in some cases to ensure patent rights are not infringe; not a problem is you make no money, but if your app becomes wildly successful actions may be launched for legal, licensing or other strategic purposes against you. See for example iPhone pinch pinched?
(1) Jesse Feiler, Get Rich With Apps! Your Guide to Reaching More Customers and Making Money NOW (McGraw Hill, New York, 2010).
(2) Pages 17-18
iPhone Web apps are sophisticated and enhanced Web pages, but it is worth noting how the pages themselves appear on the iPhone. Apple separates Web pages that are not designed as iPhone Web apps into two categories:
· Compatible with Safari on iPhone. These Web pages are presented by Safari according to the standards of the Web, which determine how any browser should present them. In accordance with those standards, if part of a page cannot be displayed, the situation is handled properly. The most common parts of Web pages that Safari on iPhone does not display are plug-ins, Java and Flash. If part of a page cannot be displayed, there is no crash or collapse: the rest of the Web page displays properly, and an icon replaces the Flash animation or whatever is not supported.
· Optimised for Safari on iPhone. Those Web pages have no unsupported features (Java or Flash, for example). In addition, they may use iPhone features and services such as e-mail and telephony. On other types of devices, these pages simply skip over the iPhone features, and they are normally coded to detect when they are o are not being displayed on an iPhone.[1]
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