At this week’s Nokia World 2010 event in London, Purnima Kochikar, Nokia’s developer chief, announced to the audience during her keynote speech that there is a real “hunger for Java applications” out there in the world, and people are willing to pay for them.
Although the Silicon Valley tech press is caught up with iPhone and Android because they’re the focus of the Valley’s developer ecosystem, that group is “about to get a lot more competition,” Kochikar warned, because today Nokia is launching the first touchscreen SDK (software development kit) for feature phones – the phones that still have the largest install base on the planet.
Last year Nokia shipped 364 million Series 40 devices, which run the Java platform, a number that equates to, Kochikar noted, nearly 1 million phones sold every day.
With today’s launch of its new Java SDK for Series 40 Touch and Type, the company aims to connect developers to the emerging markets where Java still dominates.
Bringing the Internet to the Rest of the World
The SDK is the first of its kind as it brings the benefit of touch to a new group of consumers, that being feature phone users. It even allows developers to port their existing Nokia smartphone apps to the Java platform with ease. It’s the platform, says Kochikar, that will bring the Internet to the rest of the world.
To illustrate this point, Kochikar mentioned an app called VuClip that lets users watch video clips on their mobile phones. The developers of the app were expecting it to sell well in Europe, but were caught a bit off guard when they discovered most of the paying customers were coming from emerging markets instead.
“There is a hunger for apps on these devices and people are willing to pay for the right experience,” Kochikar explained.
For developers, building apps for feature phones allows them to not only focus on the sort of success that comes in dollars and cents, but success that can be measured by impact, too.
“Think globally, act locally,” was the tagline being touted today. Already developers have built apps for emerging markets that allow Africans to check for counterfeit medicine and apps that help Chinese migrant workers. The Java SDK for feature phones will allow more of these kinds of “impactful” apps to be built, ported from smartphones to feature phones and perhaps most importantly, monetized.
Nokia’s close connections to its operator partners and its developer presence in markets worldwide means developers can build apps in the local language, allow users to pay with their local currency and use any checkout mechanism the developers prefer. And thanks to Nokia’s support for operator billing, available now in 127 countries and 91 operators, potential customers in these markets can actually buy the applications, even if they don’t have (or want to use) a credit card.
Good News for Developers
The good news for developers here is that when customers are allowed to buy apps using operator billing mechanisms, there’s a 13-times increase in the number of transactions over credit card billing. That means, simply put, developers will sell more apps. They’ll also be able to distribute free apps and sell items, upgrades and other features using in-app purchases, a feature now in beta testing but expected to launch publicly by Q1 2011. Those purchases, too, can be tied to operator billing mechanisms.
Also good news for developers, the 70/30 (developer/Nokia) split on app revenue is being changed as of Oct. 1. Before, the 70% revenue cut earned by the developer was minus operator billing fees. That fee could vary wildly from operator to operator, making it hard to project future earnings. Now developers will receive a flat 60% cut instead, while Nokia takes 40% to even out the discrepancies on the developers’ end. For some developers, this will lead to as much as a 50% increase in revenue as Nokia effectively subsidizes some of these applications.
If the potential to sell to nearly all the feature phone users in the world via operator billing mechanisms and with an increased revenue share doesn’t attract a developer’s attention now, then maybe nothing will. But developers who are ignoring Nokia are ignoring large numbers of users – Nokia has 175 Symbian devices, 45 million touch-enabled smartphone users, and 50 million-plus customers expected for the company’s new devices. That’s a sizable market, and one that developers should consider, says Kochikar, even if Silicon Valley doesn’t.
Disclosure: Nokia paid for this reporter’s travel and accommodations to Nokia World 2010.
