Mobile Development News

Today (tonight, this afternoon, this morning -- where are you?) we're going to do a comparison between some recently published numbers by Nokia and the commonly published QUALCOMM numbers. Nokia uses some speculative numbers and QUALCOMM isn't publishing as many numbers as they used to. But, we'll do what we can to compare them. If you get anything out of this it should simply be that there is plenty of opportunity to make real money in mobile. And I'm not just talking real money for a single developer. These numbers can affect the bottom lines of the largest of companies and are only growing.

Alright, where to start? Well, first there is Nokia's claim of 340 million Euros of developer revenue just this year on just Nokia devices and there were 180 million such devices around at the end of 2004. Well, those numbers are time synchronized so how about we look at some other numbers.

Java devices are on 180 operators around the world. Compare this to 56 operators supporting BREW devices. Or how about this? There are 635 Java device models. Well, QUALCOMM isn't publishing that number anymore. Doh. But BREW has brought in 350 million USD total.

So, how to compare these?

Well, when I started writing this I thought maybe some of QUALCOMM's old numbers would help, but they are all too old to compare to Nokia's current year numbers. So, I'll just throw out some more numbers. I thought my conclusion was going to be that although there were far more Java devices, the per device and per operator numbers would be lower. This is probably true, which would imply if BREW can grow to be as large the numbers might be bigger. But that's impossible to tell at this point in time.

There are over 43,000 mobile Java applications available with 23 million downloads a month. A typical BREW carrier has maybe 500 applications, with some of the foreign ones having thousands. (My estimates based on earlier data and observed catalogs).

Most of the numbers are much higher on the Java side, but on the BREW side you seem to get a higher concentration within the applications. A lot of this has to do with the much more secure system on the BREW side. Since it's secure, developers can have a high level of confidence that they'll make money when someone downloads their applications. On the Java side, you have so many free applications and alternate distributions for applications that there isn't nearly the captive audience. This puts far more of the marketing effort squarely on the developer.

In any case, check out the latest numbers from Nokia and Qualcomm. Keep support on all sides and you'll maximize return on your assets.

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