A question that I’m often asked on panels is what role do Mobile Operators have to play in the Developer community and why should anyone care?

It’s clear that Mobile Operators have a poor reputation in the Developer community, much of this negative sentiment due to their historical behaviour and an irritating habit of over promising and under delivering.

I suspect many Mobile Operators move into this space with the best of intentions, but the day to day challenges of big companies get in the way,like changing management priorities and reorganisations disrupting both the teams running the Developer programs, and their corporate sponsors. I think another important factor is they still think like Telco’s and not like a software company.

We conducted a comprehensive Developer research project from across the world over the summer. A typical quote was:

“I still don’t ‘get’ why Operators even have development communities – all the information we require for development comes from the Apple Dev site for iPhone, Microsoft sites for WM, Symbian / Forum Nokia for S60 etc”

Common problems cited from trying to work with Mobile Operators were:

• The Operator is greedy. They either charge too much for APIs, or take too much revenue share.
• The “ecosystem” is as important as the customer – Developers feel unappreciated
• Too much focus on mobile apps / widgets (on device apps), need to focus on PC and communication / network services.
• Lack of direct customer access
• Lack of timely technical support
• Lack of clarity on processes
• Lack of flexibility in experimenting with business models
• Lack of clarity on purpose of Operator development communities
• Lack of test phones
• Operator specific APIs put too much risk on Developers
• Difficult to determine if an ROI is possible
• Device fragmentation remains unaddressed by Operators
• APIs in silos – need integrated framework
• Too many communities – Operators should partner with device communities, providing APIs. Device communities are far easier to work with.

I will attempt to address these concerns in future posts, and share additional insights from our research, but initially in a three part post I will expand on the arguments I used at the recent Mobile 2.0 Silicon Valley conference to tackle the over arching question: “What role does the Mobile Operator have to play in the Developer ecosystem?”

 Firstly two assumptions:

1. No Mobile Operator should assume they have a birth right to play in this space. Apple has shown that a flourishing Developer community can be created without the cooperation or permission of the Mobile Operator community.
2. If you are an Operator reading this, you have already made some level of investment to open up API’s and provide basic Developer support and encouragement.

It is vital that Mobile Operators take a step back and assess the unique assets and knowledge they can bring to the party. Just offering “me too” API’s, which themselves contribute to a key industry problem – fragmentation, is going to do nothing to address the perception problem of Operators “just not getting it”

So, with this pause for thought, what are the current issues facing both Developers and the nascent apps and mobile data industry? Secondly, if we can identify those challenges, what can a Mobile Operator do to help, if anything?

Part 1: Marketing Support

The over riding thing we hear back from Developers time and time again, is help me make money. We are in the middle of the current trend for launching App Stores, but 99% of these stores are simply retail environments.

In this situation the Developer is reliant on download counts, user ratings, and comments to drive their positioning & prominence in these stores. Whilst community endorsement of the apps and services within a store is absolutely essential, it should not be the only method to drive visibility for the Developer. Data from September quoted 85,000 apps for the iPhone in the iTunes Store alone. So how does a Developer stand out from the crowd?

Spotify famously drove it’s own PR campaign ahead of receiving approval for it’s iPhone app from Apple, building pressure on the store owner to accredit their app, and also helping to build user anticipation ahead of launch. However these tactics, even if they largely leverage free mediums like social media, are out of the question for smaller software houses because they just don’t have the brand equity of a Spotify to stand out in the noise of the market.

Gambling your business’s potential on a user generated star rating seems risky to say the least. That view was backed up by the VC panel at Mobile 2.0. Only GetJar currently seems to understand and address this problem from within their own version of the App Store model. They offer Developers an advertising package which effectively mimics Google Adsense. Developers bid to promote their apps on GetJar’s store and only pay an advertising fee when someone downloads their app.

Most Mobile Operators are pretty effective marketing machines. There is a huge latent opportunity to utilize the weapons in the Operators marketing armory to help support the Developer community.

Of course there are always a million and one things that Operators want to push to their customer base each month. How realistic is it to expect a product manager to sacrifice their customer messages so the Operator can promote a 3^rd party application instead?

Key to success is effective segmentation of the customer base to ensure you hit the right type of customer with the right kind of message. Identification of customers that may be interested in experimenting with apps can be deuced from a mix of the demographic and behavioral data available to the Operator.

Indicators like the type of phone the customer owns, their usage of mobile internet services, their consumption of premium content, and their demographic information can be layered to build up a target audience profile which can be tested with Developer related marketing communications. When we launched O2 Litmus in January 2009, even a fairly rudimentary profiling of the audience lead to a dramatic uplift in the performance of the campaign verses a standard “blanket” direct email campaign. The Litmus campaign delivered a 24% email open rate.

If direct customer communications remain challenging, increasingly Mobile Operators are embracing Social Media as an opportunity to engage their customers in conversation. A quick, and non scientific, scan provides the following data:

Sample Mobile Operator Social Media Accounts:

These emerging channels represent a growing opportunity to promote the Developer’s wares to a switched on digital audience who will be receptive to the message, and peers via the Developer community specific accounts. Currently, there is also less internal competition to use these channels compared to traditional channels controlled by the Operator. At O2 Litmus we are now promoting an “App of the week” on the O2 Litmus Twitter account to help support our Developers.

Finally another huge area of differential and value add a Mobile Operator can bring to the ecosystem is the effective use of its retail footprint. Unlike many of the other non Telco Developer communities, Operators can leverage physical retail stores and a face to face relationship with end users / customers.

Today’s reality is the retail footprint is mostly utilised for selling standard tariffs and handsets and customer service, but there is no reason to not consider creating a “store within a store” environment to promote 3^rd party apps and services. On the Mobile 2.0 panel I described a shopper experience of walking into a store, placing your phone onto a Microsoft Surface table and flicking app’s onto your handset to try out. That step alone could revolutionise the sector by bring apps into the physical, mainstream, world.

In part 2 I’ll discuss customer service, and the opportunity for Operators to step up to provide the support wrap around the world of apps.