Evidence against the iPhone Mobsession
I have rapidly established a reputation for ‘iPhone bashing’, which is nothing to do with not owning a suite of Apple Products or disliking Steve Job’s hair. Oh no. For those of you that are not aware, my main ‘beef’ is with brands who do not consider other platforms simply because its a) too hard, b) too expensive/not as cheap as iPhone or c) just want to tick a box that says ‘We have an iPhone app’.
There is a wealth and breadth of great (and some not so great) operating systems out there that can offer brilliant, rich and engaging experiences for their users, that despite having a substantially larger market share than Apple, continue to be overlooked. For a long time I have wanted to put together a presentation to demonstrate this very point, but Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review has pulled it out of the bag.
When it comes down to offering consumer utilities or CRM extensions, it is important to closely consider which platform to employ, but whether you should even consider the mobile web before apps! The iPhone is just 4% of the UK mobile handset share, so can you really justify spending a vast amount of your marketing budget on an app that might reach only 4% of your target audience (assuming your brand is a national brand with a fair reflection of the British population). The most likely scenario is that you cannot.
As mobile moves from ‘bit-part’ to mainstream, the importance of understanding this audience, their handsets and how they interact with brands via their mobile will be of the utmost importance. Mobile ’strategists’ and planners will, like social media this year, start cropping up at agencies all over the world, and become an integral part of the planning and creative process. And this here, this is your first free piece of advice, condensed into a succinct yet effective presentation from Ewan. Enjoy.
p.s. still need more convincing? Martin Wilson and Tomi Ahonen can offer further support 
4 Responses to this post
graeme said on April 21, 2010
Thanks for sharing Carl – I’ve also been meaning to put a bit of a rebuttal together for the iPhone bandwagon, as I think your point c is the one that is motivating a lot of brands at the moment (currently being followed by the ticking of an iPad app box). I keep coming back to Tomi’s Virgin Australia festival guide – available on something like 90% of handsets in the country (I would point to the link, but it is hidden deep in the 8000 odd words of his How to do clever mobile advertising post here http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/03/how-to-do-clever-mobile-advertising-in-2010-dont-copy-web.html – and i’m sure you’ve read it anyway)
uberVU - social comments said on April 23, 2010
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by carlmartin: Blogged@mobsessed :: Evidence against the iPhone Mobsession (feat @Ew4n, @tomiahonen + @indigo102) – http://bit.ly/au6eoK – #isyndrome…
Carnival of the Mobilists #221 said on April 26, 2010
[...] shattered iPhone graces Mobsessed.co.uk’s Carl Martin’s post Evidence against the iPhone Mobsession. He argues that since there is a scant 4% iPhone ownership in the UK, money spent marketing iPhone [...]
mobiThinking said on April 27, 2010
This isn’t iPhone bashing its realism. It’s a nice handset, but it’s just a small proportion of mobile phone sales globally – about 2.2 percent in 2009.
I suspect the root of this mystery i.e. why some companies direct marketing/development funds into native apps for the iPhone (or other niche platforms), when it seems more logical to the rest of us to invest in mobile Web and/or SMS that addresses all customers whatever their handset, is partly media hype and partly lack of education. The iPhone gets so much coverage and benefits from much misinformation (including misinterpretation of skewed statistics from metrics reports from mobile ad networks) that marketing folks think it has a much larger share of the market.
My understanding is that this native app thing is a Western phenomenon.
In Japan – where as we all know mobile is light years ahead the operators retained tight control over devices and standards so fragmentation has been kept to a minimum and marketers and developers target everyone easily regardless of their handsets. Casting a wide and inclusive net pays dividends: McDonalds Japan has 16 million registered users on its mobile site – that’s more than 12 percent of the Japanese population – the company’s mobile site generates more than 100 million mobile page views per month – and 4.5 million use McDonalds Japan’s mobile Web based coupon service.
Why did the west stop following Japan’s lead on mobile?
From the global perspective Apple shipped 39 million units (that’s the highest estimate) in total in 2008 and 2009. Let’s assume that every one of them uses the mobile Internet that’s still only 7.8 percent of the 500 million global mobile Web users (and that’s probably conservative estimate considering official stats give China alone 233 million mobile Web users).
If marketing folks knew the true stats would they still focus budgets on native applications for a single platform, instead of investing in mobile Web and SMS to service all customers whatever their handset? It is a mystery to me why this occurs in mobile, but not in any other medium… how many brands would run a TV ad that only worked on one niche type of television?
These stats come from here: http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats
The McDonald’s stats are from here: http://mobithinking.com/guide-mobile-Web-Japan