Vodafone Unveils New App Store; Will Share Location-Based Data
European telecoms giant Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) is joining the app store gold rush. The operator announced today that it is providing developers with software that will allow them to create apps that will work across the myriad number of phones that its 289 million customers use. In the past, app developers had to configure their content on a phone-by-phone basis, making it time-consuming and difficult to get widespread traction.
Like Apple’s App Store, whose runaway success has kicked off the rush among its rivals to provide similar services, Vodafone will split the revenues from the sales with developers, who will get a 70 percent share, according to Reuters. Vodafone willl also handle the billing for the apps that will be charged directly to a customer
This is a welcome announcement and potentially a great new channel to market for developer particularly if they can provide micro-billing and reduce the complexity on coding for different devices which has been nightmarish for games publishers in particular.
Still there are a lot of unanswered questions here. Having spent 5 years selling premium content to carriers (I was briefly Vodafone Group account director while at I-play) I've seen Vodafone change strategy off and on for several years. The thing that would concern me as a developer as well would be what is the support structure going to look like? Will developers have a contract with Vodafone Internet Services or will they need local contracts with individual opcos as well? who will they sell their content into? Group or local?
in the end what happened in games was that only a very limited number of publishers were able to ever get deals done with Vodafone and that lead to the three horse race between glu, EA and Gameloft. Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself on apps….
P.