If you are into selling consumer mobile applications then you should take a look at Handango’s latest statistics for 2006.

I was curious as to why the top sellers by revenue and by units sold didn’t include any Symbian devices. In previous years Sony Ericsson UIQ and one or two S60 devices usually made the top 10. So what’s happened? I think it may be a combination of the following…

• New Symbian 9.1 devices didn’t ship until mid 2006. People held off buying obsolete hardware and software.
• It’s not just about new applications - older applications also sell. The Symbian 9.1 binary break caused less applications to be available for the latest devices. From my experience, people mainly buy software in the first few weeks after they have purchased a device.
• I wondered if it was anything to do with differing developer activity across the platforms. If you look at the statistics there were 1575 Palm, 838 Blackberry, 3627 Pocket PC and 3303 Symbian new titles during 2006. However, if you dig deeper you will find that most of the Symbian ‘titles’ were actually themes or variations on dictionary type applications. There were actually only between 200 and 300 new native Symbian applications produced during 2006. Hence, I think fewer developers are developing for Symbian than for other mobile platforms.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Symbian, Series 60, UIQ, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.