docomo Newsletter Mobility 30

docomo market puts smartphone apps within easy reach

October. 7, 2010

DOCOMO made headlines in Japan early this year when it announced the April launch of “docomo market,” a mobile Internet portal providing easy access to mobile content and apps around the world. Today, a half-year later, the portal is helping more and more smartphone users in Japan discover mobile apps and content.

As a Japanese-only service, however, the portal has received less attention overseas than in Japan, so we’d like to take this opportunity to update our English-speaking readership on DOCOMO’s open initiative to nurture Japan’s smartphone apps market.

It’s a portal, not a store

The new service is not actually a store, but rather a portal to sites offering mobile applications and content. As explained when the service was first announced in January 2010, docomo market is targeted at Japanese users who are unfamiliar with smartphone apps.

Most apps currently are offered overseas, and in English, which complicates searches for Japanese-speaking users. Moreover, the overwhelming number of apps now flooding the market can make searching extra tedious.

In response, DOCOMO decided to launch a portal that conveniently aggregates the world’s best and most popular apps, and then explains them with handy descriptions written in Japanese, thereby enabling users to quickly grasp the app’s purpose and suitability to individual needs and preferences.

Open to multiple devices & platforms

Leveraging i-mode’s success

Although DOCOMO is relatively new to the smartphone app market, its unprecedented success with i-mode gives it crucial insight into how to package offerings that meet the needs of the Japanese mobile market.

When i-mode was launched in 1999, DOCOMO carefully considered how to attract users with the right business model. At the time, Japanese consumers were still unfamiliar with the Internet, so the model had to help them quickly grasp the concept of using online content, rather than simply pushing them into the cybermaze and hope they’d figure things out for themselves.

Ultimately, DOCOMO devised a structured, top-down model featuring a user-friendly i-mode menu of high-quality apps, sites and content created by DOCOMO-designated official content providers, which enabled first-time users to start enjoying the mobile Internet quickly. The model was a massive success, with i-mode eventually attracting some 50 million subscribers.

And now DOCOMO is applying such lessons and know-how to docomo market, which, like the i-mode model, has been carefully fashioned to help Japanese consumers quickly catch on to a new field — smartphone content.

For example, a simplified, one-stop billing procedure enables customers to use their regular monthly DOCOMO bills to pay for third-party apps and content from around the world. The result is greater convenience and peace of mind for customers, giving them the confidence to swim farther into the ocean of smartphone content.

Another lesson DOCOMO learned with i-mode is that the content-provider market in Japan has matured to the point where individuals, not just companies, are capable of developing reliable, high-quality content. Consequently, it was decided that docomo market should introduce the best innovations from all types of providers—not just “official” providers—so long as they meet certain criteria for quality and reliability. As a result, the portal is ensuring discoverability for the widest possible range of apps and content, including those for i-mode.

Expanding Japan’s mobile ecosystem

Ultimately, DOCOMO sees its new app portal as a virtuous effort to expand the mobile pie, rather than an effort to carve out an exclusive corner of the market and then wall it off. By serving as a crossroads between global developers and the country’s huge base of mobile users, docomo market will help the mobile app and content market continue to gather momentum going forward, to the benefit of everyone.

Mobility 30 (PDF format:45KB) October, 2010