4 Keys to a Great Developer Ecosystem

The Pre's biggest disadvantage is its app store, the App Catalog. At launch, it has only about a dozen apps, compared with over 40,000 for the iPhone, and thousands each for the G1 and the modern BlackBerry models. Even worse, the Pre App Catalog isn't finished. It's immature, it's labeled a beta, and Palm has yet to release the tools for making Pre apps available to more than a small group of developers.

- Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2008

With the rise of new app stores, attracting developers to a platform or app store is important to drive revenue and stay relevant. Today’s consumers know that “there’s an app for that,” and they want that app on their phones. If today’s carriers or handset manufacturers can’t offer those cool and useful apps, consumers will switch to another platform, carrier, or app store to get them.

Today’s carrier or handset manufacturer is now serving more masters than ever before – in addition to their stockholders and consumers, they must now attract developers to their offering. App stores and great developer programs are a way for carriers to be more than “dumb pipes,” and maintain relevance in the rapidly growing mobile content ecosystem.

The good news is developers will flock to these new platforms and create applications. They will sell them in app stores, which will drive app store revenue, and drive consumers to these platforms. A good vibrant developer program can increase revenue, drive new consumers to devices, and add new services to devices without effort on the part of the manufacturer/carrier. (For example, see the iPhone.)

The bad news is that developer programs can go off the rails – see Palm’s struggles with their Pre development community. As you can see from the Palm testimony, when developers get mad, they use the internet to show their disapproval – like here , here and here – and thoughts spread virally amongst developers really, really easily. (A lot of developers are bloggers, active forum contributors, and avid social media users. Some of them are even SEO/SEM experts. It is one thing to be hated on the internet, but it’s quite another to be hated by the people who can get to the top of Google page.) Palm’s poor launch is a wake-up call to take a look at what makes developer programs succeed or fail.

Today’s app developers are not traditional ISVs (independent software vendors) – they are college kids in dorm rooms, experienced programmers coding after hours, and small shops run out of garages – think the early days of the internet. While larger ISVs are important and part of a vibrant ecosystem , their needs are different than those of small developers. Because of this difference in motivation, it makes sense to give ISVs a separate track, with a business development manager contact. Smaller developers, by contrast, need a contact who understands them – someone who is a developer and understands the technical and logistical problems associated with creating applications for your platform.

The keys to attracting small developers to a particular platform are simple yet often missed: give them tools, share revenue with them, communicate with them, and be transparent with your rules.

Give Them Tools

Today’s mobile application developers are looking for the most effective way to create and bring to market their mobile service. Because it is impossible (or at least very difficult) to predict what will be a runaway success in an app store combined with fragmentation issues, creating an app is a substantial upfront cost to a developer not just in cash outlays but in time costs as well. One way you can lower the barrier-to-entry for new developers to your platform is to give them great, easy-to-use tools and lower their time costs so they can spend more time developing and less time learning how to use your tools.

Apple’s iPhone SDK is a great example of this – they created tools that made it easy for developers to create visually attractive applications. Fragmentation is still a huge problem and appears to be getting worse. If you operate a mobile application store on multiple handset platforms, you must give developers tools to allow them to tackle the fragmentation issues. By contrast, Palm refuses to distribute their SDK publicly, and has about a dozen apps.

Sharing is Caring

Sharing revenue with developers is very important to attracting them to your platform. While the standard is becoming 30% with Apple App Store, other stores are picking different revenue splits. Windows Mobile went with the same split, while BlackBerry opted to give their developers a little more with an 80/20 split. T-Mobile has taken a different tack with their announced app store – it will cover all T-Mobile handsets and have a revenue share based on bandwidth use. Now that there are carrier app stores and independent app stores, it is very possible that a consumer will have more than one app store on his or her phone – even one from a carrier, one from a handset OEM, and an independent one. With that in mind, developers will sell their applications in the stores with the largest reach and the most generous revenue share. Some app stores, like China Mobile, have announced revenue splits as high as 50-50 between developers and the carrier. If your app store is not the only option, developers will seek other venues to distribute their apps.

Have a Dialog with Your Developers

Communicating with people who are developing software for your platform at their own expense is important. Forums, wikis, and blogs are the best ways to do this – developers, by their nature, will first Google a problem they encounter. Have a developer relations staffer monitor these forums, and answer questions. BlackBerry has done a great job of this – all of the developers I know comment on how responsive their developer relations staff is on forums.

Not communicating with your developers is a grave mistake. Complaints in the blogosphere are rampant about trying to get answers to questions from Apple. Then, there is the mother of all PR/Developer Relations disasters, Palm’s actions with their PreDevCamp group. It seems that the organizers of these events signed an NDA with Palm, tweeted to their community that they signed such an agreement, and were then informed that they violated the NDA by tweeting about it. Developers will use social media to communicate with each other about your product – join the conversation or let it happen. Trying to muzzle it will lead to a disaster – such as one of the organizers of your dev community writing an article in Businessweek airing their grievances and predicting your failure. Hell hath no fury like a developer scorned.

Transparency

Developers, particularly small developers, will follow the rules of your app store. However, if you have rules regarding submissions, it is important that they be applied evenly across the community and across applications. When you don’t do this, you have the PR storm that Apple had around approvals – the process itself, approving the baby shaking application, and the Trent Reznor/NIN debacle. Whether you decide to approve everything or follow content standards, you must consistently follow this policy.

Conclusion

Today’s consumers expect mobile apps on their devices. (See the Walt Mossberg quote at the top of the article.) A thriving developer ecosystem is a great thing for a platform and an app store, and will drive revenue if properly managed. Transparency, dialog, sharing revenue, and provision of tools are keys to growing a developer community.

(Disclosure: Ondeego is a BlackBerry Partner.)

Questions? Comments? Want to discuss developer relations strategies? Reach Matt at Matt (at) ondeego (dot) com, or leave a comment.