Remember the days when Handago was the place to go if you wanted to find an application for your smartphone and PocketGear was the place you went if you could not find it on Handango? Those days are long gone and today heralds a new beginning for both companies as PocketGear has announced that it is acquiring Handango. The two application distribution platforms will merge to form the world’s largest cross platform application store and the ensuing stats on this newly merged behemoth are impressive:
- over $400 million in mobile application revenues to date
- over 140,000 paid and free titles
- support for Android, Symbian OS, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm, Linux, and Java powered mobile devices
- 4 billion consumers in 175 countries worldwide and using over 2,000 unique mobile devices
- 32,000 strong developer network
- distribution deals with 4 of the world’s top 5 handset manufacturers, 4 of the top 5 mobile operators in the US, and 3 of the top 10 mobile operators globally
Competition will be intense as this new application store will be competing directly with the Android Market, Windows Marketplace for Mobile and other smaller manufacturer and carrier-created application stores that will come pre-installed on the customer’s smartphone. Given a choice would you prefer to buy from the potentially smaller platform-specific application store or the larger, cross platform conglomerate?
