Mobile Developer Economics 2010 from Vision Mobile #wp7dev

Tim Anderson points to this blog post (and associated report) from Vision Mobile on developer mindshare for mobile development. The report was in my inbox a few days ago, and contains bags of interesting insight into this emerging market – I recommend a read as it’s a big big report and you’ll glean a lot of insight.

Thinking of partners – as it is WPC – one of the standouts for me was in the summary of market-related insights:

For any kind of long term (never mind long tail) commercial viability, some things will need to happen to ensure a partner ecosystem can thrive. I suspect that – apart from the notable successes of some iPhone apps  - some of the commercial opportunity is in the form of marketing dollars thru agencies as a standard bill of materials for a product push: “banner ads, t-shirts and of course an iPhone app”, which isn’t likely to be sustainable over time in a more competitive market place. I’m not entirely convinced that Apple is thinking too hard about that ecosystem because of the initial deluge of apps.

This is also highlighted again in “Discovery Bottleneck” talking to the lack of effective marketing channels for apps.

I suppose that the point here is hype: this is not a mature market, even if it sometimes gives that impression, and the models (both business and technical) and the opportunities are part of a (perceived) gold rush, not some established norm. Spin forward another couple of years: what does the opportunity for a mobile development partner look like? What’s the technical backdrop? For Windows Phone 7 developers then those skills are applicable across the other aspects of “3 screens and a cloud” too with a much bigger addressable market.

Now, we’ve got to actually get Windows Phone 7 out the door and in doing so look to figure out some of these market issues too. Meantime, I think we’re addressing the mobile-specific technical questions (also mentioned in the report) such as the development environment, debugging, emulation and so on very well, with the surety that those skill investments are relevant across the entire platform and client, web or mobile spaces.

In the past few days we’ve released the next rev of the Developer Tools, and also a training kit here.