Thomas Howe

When people mention consumer oriented voice applications, I only have two responses that feel honest. I either shrug my shoulders or cringe. I shrug my shoulders because I really don’t know what consumers want from a phone that they don’t get now. I realize that they want easier to use phones, better cameras, style and price. Yes, of course. All you have to do is look at the success of the Motorola Razr to see the power of style. What I mean is that I don’t know what extra functionality that is particular to phones is important to consumers. To me, I think we’ve got the basic phone functionality covered, just like countless other consumer devices such as blenders, shoes and mailboxes. I just don’t know… so I shrug.

My other response, the cringe, normally comes when I see others who don’t know either, but their ignorance is not stopping them. I see their attempts to make telephony better for the consumer, and I feel like they by-and-large fail at it. There are a few success examples I could name (Skype, for one), but even then, the basic innovations aren’t with voice. Skype’s basic innovation is ease of use paired with toll-free calling; in the marriage of the computer, chat and voice. Skype would not have been successful without toll-free calling, and would probably not have been successful without chat. No voice innovation involved.

Imagine my delight with the iPhone store! Finally, a place where developers can write applications for phones without the huge barriers put up by large operators. I have not been disappointed, as it busts past the 1,000 application barrier in a matter of weeks. The perfect sandbox for phone applications. Of course, we are very early in the process, but let’s take a look at what we have for phone applications:

• The top five categories are : Games (262), Books (119), Utilities (95), Entertainment (89) and Productivity (65). Even when you discount that the Books are hard to count as applications, you have to admit that at least 80% of the applications have nothing to do with phones.
• There is no “phone” or “communications” category whatsoever.
• I would expect to see phones in the productivity category, where we have Speech Cloud Voice Dialer, Jott and TalkingPics (maybe). But they aren’t there.
• It looks like phone applications are stuck in the “Utility” category (I suppose phones ARE utilities), where we have: AsteriskC2D, SpeedDial, VoiceDial, Favorator, Note2Self, Telegram, Rotary Dialer and PhotoDial. IfByPhone got themselves in the “Business” category, which might be a good placement for them, as it seems to have the highest number of high-cost applications.
• Of the top 25 paid applications, 21 are games.
• Of the top 25 free applications, all of them are consumer based.

My takeaways?

1. Less than 2% of all the iPhone applications are phone applications. Even those that are “phone” applications are personal productivity enhancers like dialers, with the exception of IfByPhone and AsteriskC2D.
2. If I was a RIM product manager, I would be banging the fact that there are practically no Enterprise applications for the iPhone. I would also hope that no one in Apple was listening to me.
3. As a general developer, if you want to write an application for the iPhone, write a utility, as games are crowded and books are low value.
4. As a telephony developer, keep your eyes glued to ifbyphone – they are first out of the gate.

Does this make me feel any differently towards consumer facing phone applications? Not one bit.