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Airtel has joined the race with other competitors like Nokia, RIM and Samsung to tap mobile applications market in India.
According to the company officials, the apps store will go live on February 10 with over 1200 various applications making the first Indian telecom company to attempt for a successful business saga like Apple.
Earlier, Aircel had announced a tie-up with software major Infosys for its mobile applications platform and the company is plans to announce its app stores by the March-end. This is an indication of the vast potential that this mobile space offers.
Mobile apps have been a global hit ever since Apple launched its App Store in 2008. And since then, it has announced around 100,000 various categories including games, business, news, sports and health. It has also seen over three billion downloads since last month.
The other competitors in this field include Nokia, BlackBerry and Google’s Android. Google’s Android has already surpassed 20,00 apps just after a few months of its launch. Similarly, BlackBerry’s app store has over 4,000 apps till now.
According to the research firm Gartner, the app stores market had incurred over $4.2 billion in revenues globally last year and it is expected to touch $29.5 billion by 2013. This vast business potential has prompted the big handset makers to go for customized apps for the 500 million plus cellular users in the country.
Bharti Airtel’s President for mobile services, Atul Bindal said, “Bharti’s advantage comes from the fact that we are completely handset and operating system agnostic.”
Now, Analysts believe that developing apps that are independent of handsets and operating systems are more challenging, which not work well for Bharti and Aircel.
When asked about the revenue share agreement between Bharti and its developers’ community, the former denied the details. It is said that the handset makers and the developers share between 50-80% of the revenues abroad.
According to sources, Bharti Airtel has edge over other players in this space because of its billing model. Apart from that, it is also going to offer apps in affordable rate. Some of the apps will also be offered free of cost.
“We can also tweak the apps and customise them for each region. There will be a lot of local content and the ability to micromanage gives us the edge. With over 120 million customers we have an understanding of their preferences, consumption trends and other market data which we can convert into meaningful product and services,” Mr Bindal added.
Some of the much talked apps from Airtel include Qibla, RockeTalk, CATGURU, Britannica Trivia Challenge, Green Charging, Wattpad, Sanjeev Kapoor’s Temptations, SMS Directory 2.0, NetQin Mobile, Qeep, Qik and Snaptu. Users can take nice experience through these apps that are available from Airtel.
