Originally posted on 25Jun10 to IBM Developerworks (8,988 Views)
Wow!
In just five months, Bharti Airtel’s App store has had over 13 Million downloads. What a terrific example of a Telco App Store in action and (presumably) making money for the Telco. This article came across my screen this afternoon and given my previous posts about Bharti’s App Store and carriers wanting to get into them (something I’ve seen all over Asia) to try and arrest some of the revenue bleeding to Apple (and to a lesser extent Google, Nokia and RIM) through single brand (phone) app stores.
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/printarticle.aspx?cid=742043 – Thursday 24 June 2010 | 03:29 AM CET, Telecompaper
The article is really brief, barely a footnote, but it does lay out some interesting facts:
- 13 Million downloads since Feb ’10
- Over 71,00 Applications available, up from 1250 at launch
- Support for 780 different devices
- 1.2 downloads per second
I guess having over 200 Million subscribers does help achieve these sorts of numbers 🙂 . I have some a bit of background about Airtel’s App Central store and the technology it uses, much of it IBM technology. IBM Portal and Mobile Portal Accelerator are used to drive the interface which is able to support over 8,000 different devices from iPhones to WebTVs (remember them? They seem to be making a bit of a comeback at the moment) and everything in-between. These screen dumps are from their old mobile site – I will post some new ones if I can get them soon.
 Airtel’s App Central on a PC
