Mobile Application Development Market – Pros and Cons of Fragmentation

The number of companies offering mobile phones whose features can be added by downloading and installing application is going on increasing. On the other hand the number of people using the mobile applications is increasing by leaps and bounds. People just want more and more. They want to optimize the use of the mobile device that they have. As a consequence of this the demand of mobile application development has increased many folds.

The demand of the mobile device user and the supply by the mobile application developers has jeopardized the market. Earlier it could be said that there are handful of mobile application developers but now it is not so. There are a number of mobile application developers in the market. Moreover the applications are usually such that if they work on one mobile device they fail to be compatible with the operating system and the platform of another mobile device. So the platforms also vary. This sort of market wherein one player cannot dictate terms to the market and there are multiple players is called a fragmented market.

A fragmented market has got both pros and cons.

Let us first see the pros of the fragmented market of mobile application development. The biggest advantage of this evolution in the mobile application development has shifted the balance in favor of the application buyers. They can now buy the application at a much cheaper rate than what it was available at earlier. The other advantage is that no application development service provider can command monopoly over the market.

A closer study of this fragmented market has revealed a lot of disadvantages for the mobile application developers and the businesses. As mentioned earlier the operating systems and platforms vary from brand to brand. This implies that the business will have to get the mobile application developed separately for every platform or brand of mobile device that is available in the market. We can conclude that because of this the expenses of the business could be quite high.

When the platforms are different, the technology used for developing the application also varies. If the application development service provider wants to survive in the market, he/she need to be adept at the technology used too. The application developers need to know multiple coding languages to develop applications for different platforms. On the other hand since the technicalities vary with the platform, the market segment that visits that application also gets split. This leads to decrease in the revenue generated for the application developer.

The digital distribution channel has to be paid a part of revenue generated through the application. The market fragmentation has lead to a number of digital distribution channels and when the application has to pay them his/her income is going to get reduced.

If the negative aspects of the fragmented market are to be dealt effectively, there needs to be common and standardized way of mobile application development.

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About the Author

Spinx is a Professional Mobile Application Development company; we are expert iPhone App Developer, iPad App and Blackberry Apps Development services.

Author (spinxwebdesign). Submitted on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 Time: 2:12 PM

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