Why telcos may finally be moving past app store envy

Remember the early days of mobile content, before the iPhone, when you’d fire up your mobile browser and see your operator’s “portal”? Those portals are still around, incredibly, but not for much longer.

Juniper Research has just put out a report about mobile content business models and, according to the UK analyst firm, just 6 percent of content downloads now come from these portals, with the rest being attributable to third-party stores, chiefly Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play store. Frankly the 6 percent figure is surprisingly high – report author Windsor Holden told me the portals in question belong to “China Mobile and two or three others”, and even those are “going to wither away over the next few years”. And the real money isn’t even in app sales. In selling apps, the standard developer-OS vendor split is 70-30, meaning the carrier needs to try to wrangle some share out of that 30 percent cut. Is that just wishful thinking on the operators’ part? Not necessarily.