Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android smartphones might be driving the global mobile app engine, in India it will be the cheaper feature phones that will rule the roost. According to industry estimates, smartphones account for only five per cent of the total user base of over 560 million users, while over 30 per cent of the mobile population uses feature phones that can run basic Java apps.
Carriers like Airtel, Vodafone, Aircel and RCom understand this potential and have launched their own application stores for their subscribers. I met Sujoy Ghosh, manager new product development for Bharti Airtel’s mobile services business for a demonstration of their app store and talk about the progress made so far and the road ahead.
Airtel had announced its app store called App Central on February 10 at MWC as one of the many carriers that backed an Ericsson-backed initiative to prevent carriers from becoming dumb pipes while handset manufacturers and operating system developers raked in the moolah by selling apps.
It makes sense, especially in a country like India where smartphone users are exotic species and consumers are not comfortable using plastic for making online payments. Current mobile app stores are tailor made for smartphones and few that offer paid apps in India use credit cards for payments in prices that are either in Euro or US Dollar.
Subscribers lapped up Airtel’s app store, which became an instant hit. “App Central hit its first million download mark in 12 days and 2.5 million in the first month. As of today, we have over 5 million downloads,” informs Ghosh.
Most of these users have never used a smartphone or downloaded an app. A majority of them don’t even have a PC at home and usually access the Internet at school/university or at cyber cafes. The Nokia N70 features among the 10 most popular cellphones used to access App Central, a phone that has been discontinued by Nokia for at least a year. This last fact in itself reflects a lot about the target consumers for carrier-driven application stores in India. The good thing for carriers is that such users are in majority here.
Airtel is not new in the mobile app business. The carrier’s WAP portal, Airtel Live, uses to host mobile games and apps. “Before App Central, we used to have our games and apps along with ring tones and wallpapers. Most demand was for the latter and users who’d have liked to download apps would not find them easily. App Central offers those users a new place from where they can download apps,” says Ghosh.
App Central has about 1,650 apps at the moment and the portfolio is being increased every week. Interestingly, unlike app stores for smartphones where over half the apps are free, only 25 per cent of apps on App Central are free. What’s more, Airtel keeps 70 per cent of the revenues and passes on the remaining 30 per cent to developers, again an inverse of the smartphone app stores phenomenon.
“We provide lot of add-on services that non-carrier based stores don’t like carrier billing rather than credit card based billing and even customer care support. Whenever anything doesn’t work the way it should, Indian consumers don’t send an email to the app developer, they call our customer care lines,” he justifies. Adding, “We also help developers by assisting them with pricing of their apps.”
Developers can price their apps in any one of the 15 pre-defined price points from Re 1 to Rs 199, with an option for duration-based subscription plans ranging from daily, weekly and monthly subscriptions. The average price of downloaded apps from App Central is Rs 25, which I believe is quite high and a sign that given an opportunity, even mid-end feature phones users are willing to pay for apps.
The challenge for Ghosh and his team at Airtel would be to be able to convice the massive developer community in India to develop useful, locally relevant apps for App Central, rather than remaining an offshore development hub for smartphone apps for American and European customers. It won’t be easy, considering the revenue share model and the comparatively smaller audience (for the time being). However, Ghosh indicates that they are already working to tackle the problem and will have some more details to share very soon.
The system detects a user’s phone make and model and shows only those apps that would work on it so that the see doesn’t download an app that would later not work on his phone. Users can also see their purchase history and can redownload the apps they paid for in case they switch phones. Airtel subscribers can access App Central by sending APP as a text message to 54321.
We will be putting Airtel’s App Central through its paces in the coming days, follow us on Twitter @cellpassion where we will answer your queries and give our opinion about App Central, among other things.
Petatrends 
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