Healy Jones | 
08 3rd, 2010| 
Some great stats on GigaOM on the growth of the Android…
I love my iPhone’s OS… but my battery life sucks and the network is, well, it’s not that great. I wish Apple would open up here a little!
Jun
16
Wow. This chart from Quantcast is really powerful:
Android gaining share. Source:Quantcast
And Android’s share is clearly coming from the iPhone:
source:quantcast
I wonder how much of this is because consumers are not happy with AT&T? Or is it people who, for whatever reason, didn’t love Apple’s products? Or is it because some Android phones are cheaper? Finally, how many of these Android users are first time smartphone users (like RazrDude) vs. people who switch from the iPhone?
Jun
15
AT&T recently announced new pricing plans for smart phones that limit monthly bandwidth usage, in theory to reduce the strain on their mobile networks caused by Apple’s products. The reaction in the mobile development community has been to become pretty depressed, as everyone now believes that new apps will have to be more efficient in how they use their subscribers’ data plans.
But what if this could actually be good for mobile app startups’ ability to monetize their apps?
Let me explain!
A large number of smaller ecommerce companies make money from 1) selling products and 2) marking up the shipping of their products. In fact, when I was a VC, I saw a surprisingly high percentage of actual cash flow coming from shipping at a large number of the online retailers I evaluated. In some cases, over half the margin was coming from shipping. This is because, as a bulk shipper, the retailer got a substantial discount off of standard shipping rates. The retailer charged the consumer something similar to what the consumer would expect from walking into a UPS store and captured the difference.
If mobile apps could bundle a certain amount of bandwidth with the purchase/subscription to their app then they might be able to capture a similar margin from marking up bandwidth. In other words, if AT&T is willing to act like UPS and sell bandwidth to the mobile startups in bulk, these startups could then mark up the bandwidth and sell it to consumers bundled along with their app.
If the pricing of data plans really starts to bug consumers, AND if AT&T is willing and able to provide bulk bandwidth purchases to startups - including the ability to meter/assign bandwidth to an individual consumer at the moment they are using a particular mobile app - then this could be a way for data-hungry applications to monetize. While a consumer may never be willing to pay for, say online content/video, they may be very willing to pay for the data plan needed to actually consume the content. This could be an entirely new way for startups to actually sell something to consumers who typically expect everything to be free.
What do you think? Am I crazy? Is there anyway AT&T would ever do this sort of a thing? I’d think that the billing would have to be done by the startup or Apple, which is something that AT&T may not like. I also think there is a bit of technical work that would need to be done since the ability to meter additional purchased bandwidth would have to created.
