Survey shows developer interest in Windows Phone is actually shrinking

 

3:50 PM

Steve Ballmer might want to break out the checkbook and start an extra big “Developers, developers, developers!” chant. IDG News, via CITE World, reports on a new survey of more than 800 app developers showing that interest in making apps for the Windows Phone platform has actually declined since the beginning of the year. The survey, conducted by app development platform Appcelerator, showed that just 26% of developers surveyed said they were interested in making Windows Phone apps, down from 29% in the first quarter of 2013. For comparison, 80% of developers surveyed were interested in making apps for the iPhone and 71% said they were interested in making apps for Android phones.

Attracting app developers to Windows Phone has been a challenge for Microsoft, which has often resorted to simply paying off app developers to bring their apps over to its platform. Even these incentives haven’t been enough to get Microsoft caught up, however — a study conducted last month showed that Microsoft only has 63 of the 100 most important apps in Apple’s App Store while Android has 95 of the top 100. The bigger issue, however, is that even if Microsoft gets caught up with today’s hottest apps, there’s no guarantee that it will get tomorrow’s hottest apps. From this perspective, the company will really need to grow out market share over the next year to build sustainable developer interest.

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Consumer interest in Kik and Viber explodes as BBM fades

6:15 PM

It’s no surprise that the messaging app behemoth WhatsApp generates 95 times as much Google search volume as BlackBerry Messenger. But what’s pretty fascinating is that second-shelf apps like Kik and Viber also now generate 10 times more search interest than BBM. Whereas Kakao reigns as the supreme messaging app in Korea, LINE in Japan and WeChat in China, Kik and Viber are kind of puttering along, trying to steal slivers of market share in many regions. Yet despite the fact that these two B-listers are battling for the No.5 messaging app position at best, they have started generating massive search volume growth over the past year.

What must be bittersweet for BlackBerry is the fact that Kik and Viber started to really pull ahead of BBM at a relatively late date — in the autumn of 2011. If BlackBerry only had taken its messaging service cross-platform and launched on Android and the iPhone two years ago, it would have had a fighting chance of keeping up with the titanic global struggle for messaging app supremacy. WhatsApp, WeChat and LINE essentially all have a shot at establishing active user bases of about half a billion consumers over the next couple of years. This could turn one or all of them into fabulously powerful and lucrative platforms for mobile game and content distribution across all continents.

What must make BlackBerry executives heartsick right about now is the fact that despite the relatively strong media coverage on the imminent launch of iOS and Android versions of BBM, the search volume for “BlackBerry Messenger” is not trending up. It peaked in August 2010 and has been trending down or flat ever since.

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