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12 Predictions Regarding Mobile For 2012 And Beyond (Assuming The End Of The World Doesn’t Come)

GetJar found and CEO Ilja Laurs knows mobile. Having started GetJar in 2004 and then pivoting it into the world’s first app store, he has watched mobile titans rise (Apple) and fall (Blackberry). Every year he makes a list of his predictions for the coming year in the world of mobile. Here is his list of predictions for 2012. Agree? Disagree? Be sure to let us know in the comments.

Apple loses to Android 2012
iOS currently enjoys the #1 target platform for developers, but as Android smartphones and tablets start to heavily outnumber iPhones and iPads, developers will switch to Android as their first, and often only, choice.
Android explodes in the emerging markets, and destroys the feature phone market by 2013
The price of Android smartphones continues to drop almost daily, and soon prices in the $30-$50, range will all but kick feature phones out of the market. Most notably this will mean the end of Nokia’s domination in low end devices in emerging markets, their last bastion since losing the smartphone battle.
Google continues to restrict Android, and will close the platform by 2013
Once meant to be an open platform, Android will someday become closed. Already there isn’t much about Android that is open. Google controls the UI, services, and app distribution while restricting competing business models and technologies on top of imposing a 30% tax on developers. Now that Android has so much traction, the opportunity of running a closed platform is too lucrative for Google to ignore.
Android experiences a major fork that changes the entire ecosystem
Android has a forking problem. Honeycomb was only for tablets, and companies are putting skins on top of the Android OS left and right. Because of restrictions on Android imposed by Google, larger players will continue to fork Android to build their own silos. Amazon’s already doing that with the Kindle, and the rumored Facebook phone will do the same thing. As it becomes more of an issue, we’ll start to see more and more forks.
Windows Phone 7 gains traction
Google has already acquired Motorola Mobility, which is scary enough to OEMs. When Google starts to close Android, it will become a serious threat to OEMs. They will start hedging their bets to ensure their own survival, causing support for Windows Phone 7 to grow much stronger than before. On top of that, Nokia will finally start shipping large volumes of Windows Phone 7 phones. Carriers are also invested in more competition amongst OEMS, meaning even more support for Windows phones.
Carriers start lose ground on voice and text services, completely lose them by 2020
Over the long term, free services like Skype and Google Talk will provide all of the communication services needed by the average user. Carriers will only run data networks with little or no consumer facing services.
Carrier and OEM app stores lose traction and disappear by 2013
Carriers and OEMs lack the skill, resources and scale to truly reach a critical mass. Unable to come up with competing services, they will lose developers who will be followed by consumers. Google will accelerate the process by heavily discriminating against third party app distribution.
Platforms and OEM begin subsiding phones by 2015
As Android levels the market, it marginalizes once very high smartphone hardware profits. On the other end, the evolution of apps and mobile services allows for stronger economics and extends the lifetime income of each user past the point of sale, eventually shifting the margins from sale to post-sale. Closed platform providers are in a position to capture most of that value by creating monopolies for the most profitable segments and taxing the remaining ones. They will have a huge incentive to subsidize devices to accelerate platform adoption and attack competing platforms. Amazon is already running this strategy by selling the Kindle Fire for less than it costs to produce.
NFC payments will take off and become universal by 2015
As the penetration of NFC enabled devices reaches critical mass, merchants and users begin to adopt the technology really fast. Apple and Google are the frontrunners, but there are more than a few companies waiting in the wings, including Carriers and startups.
Paid apps continue to fade out
As apps become transition from content into media, selling apps makes as much sense as selling websites. A lot of small disposable, consumable apps that sell for a buck or two will continue to exist, but the majority of developers will continue to move into freemium and other complex business models.
The number of apps reaches 10 million and continues to grow
If you look at music, there are 100 million music tracks in the Gracenote database. The richness of the music industry is built on $25 billion in annual revenues. The app economy is expected to generate $30-50b annually in just the next 3 years, so there is quite a lot of room to grow for apps.
Mass migration to cloud
Gone are days when most users only used one PC. With the number of screens exponentially multiplying around us (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, smart TVs, smart car navigations, etc.), the only way to keep up is by migrating all user data (photos, videos, emails, documents, address books, etc.) to the cloud. To mobile platforms, cloud services are a very powerful way to lock the user in by holding their data hostage.

http://www.ardhi.mobi Ardhi indie

1000% Agree
Alex Kerr

This is a bullish set of predictions and the man is clearly a fan of Android

While I respect Ilja’s experience, and success with GetJar, he is hopelessly wrong on some points.

> Android explodes in the emerging markets, and destroys the feature phone market by 2013

This is total fantasy and there is zero chance of that happening. For two main reasons; firstly Android is nowhere close to being efficient enough on low end hardware (even with gradually dropping price of hardware). Due to the lunacy of it’s virtual machine architecture and the hideous wastefulness of processing power and battery life as a result, it needs Ghz+ processors, plenty of RAM and so on, to even get out of bed in the morning. My goodness, Microsoft software would be proud of it’s price/performance/power ratio (and I do not mean that as a complement). Android IS selling well in developing markets, for Android, but it is nowhere close to Nokia’s dominance (just as one example) who sell over a million low end phones a day. And this is the second point – competition. Nokia S40 phones (again, for example) are smartphones in all but name. They offer much better price/performance than anything Android is close to offering. And billions of people in the developing world know and love Nokia and it is by far the dominant player in both featurephones and smartphones there. It is also now in the process of upgrading S40 (via their Meltemi project) to be a fully fledged smartphone platform, with Qt as the SDK (I expect Java Mobile will continue too due to it’s strengths) and with touch screens and the like. Developer support for both Qt and Java Mobile is actually increasingly strong. Nokia has far greater power and reach than any of the Android ecosystem including Google. Does anyone really think that Nokia will just sit there and let Android take away it’s dominance at the low end? Not a realistic suggestion! (regardless of what happened in smartphones).

> Mass migration to cloud

This is also absurd, even in the rich industrialised world. Latency issues in mobile data mean this will not happen (specifically, MASS migration) for years if ever. People like their data local, their apps local, and will not put up with the appalling latency that can happen when stuff is accessed over a mobile data connection (even wifi). As for the emerging and developing markets – no chance!

Android is a good platform, and I welcome it. But the current bullishness about it’s future from certain observers is not warranted and I think people should be very cautious about what is round the bend for the platform. Don’t think it’s current sales explosion relative to it’s earlier very weak sales, is any indication of long term success.

Just to give you a reality check, total activations to date are around the 190-200 million mark (Google figures). Knock off a bunch of those due to upgrades to the same user, gives you around 150 million Androids in use today. Well, there are about 5 billion phones in use in the world. So Android has 4.85 billion phones, or 97% of phones currently in use, still to replace
http://www.facebook.com/people/David-Hanono/577420957 David Hanono

This person is definitely Android biased. I really do not think that Apple will fail in it’s coming offers they are too strong. I do agree with some of his predictions especially with what he says regarding carriers as we move to a more of a data or IP based way or making calls. I also agree with NFC since that is rapidly coming.
George

I think the latency problem will be solved quite soon, at least we will see a lot of improvement and that has been improving a lot over the last 20 years. In fact, a couple of break-throughs in the last 10 years have made the market for mobile apps even possible. Also- I think only a very small percentage of people (engineers and other cognocenti such as yourself) even know that the frustrating latency is inherent in the current generation of relevant technology- and they will migrate to the cloud anyway- and this will force more improvements – possibly an acceleration. There was probably a period of time when horses continued to be much more efficient than cars because the horses were not stalled by bad roads and could go into rough terraine more easily. But people kept buying cars- much more than what could be justified by the roads of the time and the roads got paved because of necessity.
http://www.cameronwall.com.au/ Cameron Wall

I agree with you Ilja, and your not biased toward Droid…the simple fact is that you have spend some considerable time as I have in the basic data & feature phone market, and that is where the developing world is today. The amount of momentum building in Asia in Mobile is phenomenal to say the least, it is the first personal screen many have ever had and guess what it will be Android and later iOS in many cases.

Media giants will give away tablets’ with dedicated content channeling (much like we use toll reader in our cars), the tablets will be sourced out of Asia for around $50 USD and subsidized. The carriers will become data pipes and exchange back-haul contracts with each other with perhaps enterprise cloud services contracts with the big corp. players.

Also keep an eye on tablet screens reducing and mobile screens expanding to a happy universal median that will allow streamlined Ad serving by IAB’s MRAID etc. It is going to be a fun year in portable media to say the least, I only with there was more talent around!
CellBubble

Agree with much of this although really it is just ramblings of a generic nature. Clearly the guy is an Android fanboy otherwise he wouldn’t have placed his prediction of iOS losing to Android as his first prediction, which against many of his other predictions is less relevant and least likely in 2012. Talk about playing to your own agenda! There are a host of reasons why developers prefer working with iOs and will continue to do so. I would pick the adoption of NFC technology as easily the most significant trend for mobile in 2012.

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12 Predictions Regarding Mobile For 2012 And Beyond (Assuming The End Of The World Doesn’t Come)