[Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis, discusses the latest update to VisionMobile’s 100 million club, and the complex world of mobile software]
VisionMobile is proud to present our latest update to the 100 million club, the watchlist of mobile software products which have been embedded on more than 100M handsets. This H1 2009 update is the latest in our semi-annual publication series that started in 2007, offering a watchlist of the most widely deployed software in the mobile industry.
The finalists: 30 products from 24 companies The latest update to the 100 million club watchlist comprises of 30 software products that have been shipped on more that 100 million handsets up to the first half of 2009. These products range from text input engines and middleware all the way to Java platforms and application suites. It’s quite interesting to note that 80% of the companies that have made it into the 100 million club companies come from the US, the Nordics and Japan.
The newcomers One of latest additions to the club is the Mobile Office software by Quickoffice, which marks the first time that a mobile application has made it into the 100 million watchlist.
Another newcomer to our 1H09 update is WebKit, the Apple-led browser core, shipped on 170 million devices through S60, S40, iPhone and Android devices, which makes it perhaps the most widely penetrated open source software in mobile handsets.
Another up-n-coming company to note is Rococo’s Impronto TLK is a Java-to-bluetooth middleware bridge that has been shipped on more than 150M devices.
Most popular software products by category The 100 million club spans several categories: – Applications: the one entrant here is Mobile Office Suite from QuickOffice – Application environments, dominated by Flash Lite which has been embedded on over one billion devices (including Flash) – Browsers, where Myriad’s (ex Openwave) Browser is by far the most popular web browser, having shipped in a staggering 2+ billion devices. – Middleware is dominated by two products: Beatnik’s Mobile BAE audio codecs, with more than 1.2 billion shipments, followed by Myriad’s Messaging client (inherited through the Openwave and Magic4 mergers) – The most popular operating systems remain OSE by ENEA and Nucleus by Mentor Graphics with more than 1.5B shipments each, although S40 is not too far behind. – Finally, the input engines category contains two products, both developed by Nuance, with EziText being inherited from Zi Corp acquisition. Quite understandably, the T9 component is by far the most widely deployed in the 100 million club, having been shipped in more than 60% of mobile phones by the end of the first half of 2009. Moreover, T9 is one of the very few products in our 100 million club (and the wider arena of mobile software) with significant consumer brand recognition.
Market ups and downs On the whole, the 100 million club members have seen a very small increase in software shipments, despite the worldwide decline of mobile sales. The most notable increases in sales include Adobe’s Flash Lite (now including Flash shipments), ACCESS’ Netfront browser and Scalado’s CAPS imaging engine. Nuance’s T9 also shows a healthy increase in shipments. On the down side, SVG players in general seem to suffer a decline in shipments.
Twenty two billion You could be holding a phone powered by S60, using the Quick Office application for viewing text documents, navigating through the Flash Lite -based menus, surfing the net with Myriad’s Browser and texting with the aid of T9. In fact, there are phones with three (yes, three) separate instances of Flash Lite, used as engines for user interfaces, for applications and a third instance exposed to developers.
So what’s 22 Billion? This is the number you can arrive at if you sum the shipments of all 100 million club products. But more often than not, these software products will co-exist – with an average of 3+ instances in a single handset on average. Yet another testament of how complex the mobile software world is.
Drop us a line Do you have any insights of your own to share? Send us a nice Christmas card with your thoughts or at the very least add a comment! And don’t forget to check out the full 100 million club report.
– Matos