Last night I was reading a mobile app store report published by research firm Canalys on Thursday that suggests the “app gap” is still huge.

And when talking about overall available apps, it is. Microsoft has around 145,000 apps for its Windows Phone platform and BlackBerry offers 120,000. But when Canalys took a deeper dive, something didn’t sound right to me.

From the report:

“Of the top 50 free and top 50 paid apps featured in the Apple App Store and Google Play in the United States, based on their aggregated rankings over the first 20 days of May 2013, just 34% feature in either the Windows Phone store or BlackBerry World (as of 21 May 2013). The Windows Phone store contained 16 of the top 50 free Apple App Store applications, and 14 of the top 50 paid. It contained 22 of the top 50 free Google Play store’s applications, and 13 of the top 50 paid. In comparison, BlackBerry World contained BB10 versions of five of the top 50 free Apple App Store applications, and nine of the top 50 paid. It contained 11 of the top 50 free Google Play store applications, and 11 of the top 50 paid.

Dire numbers, no? Yet, we keep hearing from both Microsoft and BlackBerry that they now offer a majority of the top apps found in other app stores. Something doesn’t add up here.

I didn’t do extensive research but I figured I’d have a quick look for myself as to what top apps are missing from the Windows Phone and BlackBerry stores. I fired up the Google Play store to see the top paid apps and then looked for them online in these two stores. Note that I haven’t yet checked the iTunes App Store, mainly because I’m back to using Android for my primary phone and tablet; plus I’m using a Chromebook and can’t install the App Store.

Here’s what I found in my cursory look: Of the top 20 paid apps in Google Play that weren’t utility type applications, BlackBerry was missing two and Windows Phone lacked five; two of which were also missing on BlackBerry — Need for Speed, Most Wanted and Minecraft.

The latter strikes me as odd since Minecraft is one of the top indie game downloads on Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The four that were missing only from Windows Phone? World of Goo, Tapatalk, and TuneIn Radio Pro (TuneIn is available). That’s not too bad.

So why the low figures from Canalys? It has to do with those utilities I mentioned, which are fairly specific to Android’s more open take on apps: You can modify system settings, install third-party keyboards, etc. Several of the top paid Android apps missing on the other two platforms are titles like: Swiftkey Keyboard, Titanium Backup Pro, Nova Launcher Prime (a home screen customizer), Beautiful Widgets Pro, Root Explorer and ROM Manager, for example. Several of these are in the top 10, in fact. And guess what: None of these are available for iOS either.

One would get a completely different comparison if device-specific utilities were ignored and Canalys does admit it:

“The lists also include a small number of apps, such as ‘Find My iPhone’, that are specific to a particular ecosystem, as well as some utility apps, such as flashlight apps, for which similar offerings with equivalent functionality are available. Taking this into account, the picture can be made a little more optimistic, but the presence of clear gaps in their inventories cannot and should not be masked.”

Let’s face it: There are many ways to measure the “app gap” between platforms. It is real because each platform has its own requirements, APIs and corresponding app store. Unless we were all running cross-platform web apps — something that is poised to happen on desktops with Chrome — there will always be apps available for some mobile platforms and not others. And one could measure the top 20, 50 or whatever number they wanted across various stores to get different results.

If you’re researching a mobile platform, the app ecosystem is undoubtedly important. But the best person to determine if a platform’s ecosystem will work for you isn’t a third-party, a research firm or me. Figure out what apps you need to use on a regular basis and check the stores for yourself. You’ll likely find that the best opinion on this is your own.

This post was updated at 8:32am to correct the app count for Windows Phone as “Where’s My Water” was incorrectly shown to be unavailable.

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Here in Europe, people don’t like their phones too thick and plasticky, and that’s been a consistent criticism levelled at the Lumia 920, Nokia’s previous flagship, and for that matter the very similar-looking 928. The 925 makes things sleek and metallic (I like metal; I used to be a proud owner of the Nokia E71) and is, at 139g, significantly lighter than the 920 (185g) and 928 (163g).

The 8.7-megapixel camera has 6 elements, rather than the 5 found in the 920 and 928, and wireless charging comes courtesy of a snap-on cover rather than being built in, but otherwise it’s really, really similar to the 928: 1GB RAM; 1,280 x 768-pixel, 4.5-inch OLED screen; dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor; and so on.

Here’s how IHS Screen Digest mobile chief Ian Fogg reacted as the unveiling happened:

Strong hardware similarities of #Lumia 925 to 7 month old 920 shows how much #Nokia is held back by Windows Phone’s sparse hardware support—
Ian Fogg (@ianfogg42) May 14, 2013

And there’s the thing. You can tell Nokia didn’t have that much to shout about in hardware terms, because its main message around the 925 is the around the photo-centric apps it’s pre-installing, namely Hipstamatic’s Oggl and Nokia’s own Smart Camera software, which clearly seeks to rival Samsung’s recent efforts in the Galaxy S4. This is all good and fine, but exciting? Not so much.

Look lower

But even if the limitations of the Windows Phone platform don’t allow Nokia to truly exercise its innovation muscles, that doesn’t mean the Finnish handset maker is taking it easy. Just look at what it’s doing at the low end of its range, once we’re out of Microsoft territory.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the QWERTY-enabled Asha 210 offers an incredible amount of social functionality for its $72 price tag (the Lumia 925 costs just north of $600). And just last Thursday, Nokia revealed the Asha 501, a touchscreen device that runs the new version of Nokia’s S40-derived operating system and also comes in at under $100.

The new version of Asha comes with features such as Fastlane, a second homescreen option that provides direct access to recently accessed contacts and apps, rather than showing a conventional grid of apps. This is all a result of Nokia’s purchase in early 2012 of Smarterphone, a Norwegian company that tries to make so-called featurephones seem, well, smarter.

Nokia has come in for a lot of flak for calling its all-touch Ashas “smartphones”, with many seeing this as a trick to inflate its real smartphone shipment figures. That may be one motivation, but I honestly think Nokia has every right to call these devices smart. When the 501 came out, Nokia also made a major push for developers to address the revamped Asha platform, releasing a new SDK and new in-app payment tools. Apps that are already on or in development for the platform include Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter, and also games from the likes of EA and Gameloft.

Sure, heavier apps are lacking, but frankly the kinds of apps we’re talking about there might be better executed on a tablet than a smartphone anyway – particularly given the excellent battery life promised by Asha phones, Asha-plus-tablet is starting to look like a pretty tempting combo.

Who’s smart now?

Of course, the big promise with Windows Phone these days is that it will hit lower and lower price points, perhaps becoming a viable rival to low-mid-range Android devices at some stage (right now Nokia has only managed to cross the $200 threshold with Windows Phone products, namely the Lumia 520). These Ashas are already targeting the same rivals, though, and they are more optimized for the price point than efforts based on Google’s OS.

Nokia is clearly putting a large amount of effort into industrial design and user experience for both the Windows Phone and Asha ranges. However, it has way more freedom to tinker with its own platform. There’s also the small matter of price — the Lumia 925 costs 6 times as much as the Asha 501 so, if customers respond well to the new version of the Asha platform, the potential impact of the 501 will be greater than that of the Lumia 925. (That is admittedly a big “if”, though, as last quarter’s results showed roughly even sales for Lumia and full-touch Asha phones, with Lumia heading up and Asha down.)

The Lumia 925 sure does look fine, and if I was in the market for a high-end smartphone I’d give it strong consideration. However, in terms of making a real splash, the innovations Nokia is making at the low end come through more starkly than the tweaks made to its Lumia range.

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The company’s devices and services division managed to eke out a profit of €4 million ($5.2 million) in the first quarter of 2013, if you ignore “special items” during the quarter (namely, a €72 million restructuring charge, a €27 million boost from a cartel claim settlement and a €1 million hit associated with the purchases of Novarra, MetaCarta and Motally). That’s up from a €126 million loss in the same quarter of 2012, based on the same non-IFRS terms.

However, earnings per share were still -€0.02 for the quarter. That’s a loss of $0.03 per share, slightly better than analysts’ predictions of a $0.05 per-share loss, and significantly better than the $0.10 per-share loss in Q1 2012.

But let’s look at handset sales.

Nokia sold 11.1 million smartphones in the quarter — that’s 5.6 million Lumias (up from 4.4 million in the previous quarter), 0.5 million Symbian smartphones (down from 2.2 million in the previous quarter) and 5 million Series 40-based Asha full-touch devices (down from 9.3 million in Q4 2012, which is probably a combination of seasonality and the rise of cheap Androids in the emerging markets). Nokia CEO Stephen Elop noted in an earnings call that two-thirds of the Lumia sales in Q1 2013 were running Windows Phone 8 while the rest of Lumia sales were phones that run older Windows Phone software.

The average selling price of a Nokia “smart device” is up 34 percent year-on-year, from €143 to €191. This has helped the devices and services division hit underlying profitability for the second quarter in a row – overall, the group has now been profitable for an extra quarter on top of that.

Here’s what Elop said in a statement:

“At the highest level, we are pleased that Nokia Group achieved underlying operating profitability for the third quarter in a row. While operating in a highly competitive environment, Nokia is executing our strategy with urgency and managing our costs very well.”

For the second quarter of this year, Nokia predicted a slight worsening of its devices and services operating margin from -1.5 percent to -2 percent, citing the reason as “competitive industry dynamics continuing to negatively affect the Mobile Phones and Smart Devices business units”.

In short, the turnaround remains far from complete, and Nokia still has to prove itself with the Lumia range. Perhaps the large-screen Lumia smartphone rumored by the FT on Wednesday might help. I imagine the lower-priced Lumias announced in February will also provide a boost.

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Since then we’ve seen flagship smartphones, mostly running Android, with displays first at 4-inches, quickly followed by 4.3 and 4.5-inches, now up to 5-inches and even beyond. You’d think that’s great if people want larger screens on their phones, and according to T-Mobile, 77 percent of their customers do. But can this growth in Android flagship phone displays actually hurt the most used mobile phone platform? It already has lost at least one customer.

See you later, Android!

Sascha Segan at PC Mag is done with Android and screen sizes are the sole reason. After speaking with several phone manufacturers, the issue is one of “moar”, he says: Consumers in the U.S. and Canada equate value with phones packed with as many features and top hardware components as possible. We want more screen space, more functions, more of everything in our mobile devices. So based on the trend of larger screens, Segan isn’t likely to switch back to Android any time soon, if ever. As he put it:

“But the Android world has been seized by the tyranny of moar. To switch back, I need a decent one-handed phone. Like about 25 million other Americans and Canadians, I take public transportation to work, and I really like to play games standing up.”

I know Segan personally as we’re peers in our industry and often see each other at trade shows and launch events. Truth be told, we’re both smaller than average in size. And yet, while I understand his complaint, I’m actually fine with larger devices. Why the difference? I am, and always have been (even with the original iPhone), primarily a two-handed smartphone user.

Could others follow suit? It depends on how big phones get

Regardless, Segan makes an excellent point. In today’s market — and likely for some time — if you want a top o’ the line Android smartphone, you’ll either need hands sized like Andre the Giant (and pants pockets to match) or you’re going to use your handset with two hands in most circumstances. Who knows; small tablets might replace smartphones for many as our perceptions of portability evolve.

There’s an alternative of course: Android phones start getting too big for a large audience and consumers turn to smaller devices that run iOS, Windows Phone or BlackBerry 10. Obviously, one person leaving Android due to flagship phone sizes isn’t even close to being a trend. Looking forward, however, this could become an issue if handset makers continue down this path.

And I see no reason why those who make phones will stop with the “bigger is better” approach to design. The top selling Android phones these days tend to be larger than average. Add in the fact that we now have high-resolution 1080p display panels, and there’s even more room for phone screens to grow.

After all, after a certain pixel density, there’s little benefit to cramming more pixels in a smaller screen. The new 1080p screens should still look just as good to most people on a 6- or 7-inch device as they do on the 4.7-inch HTC One or 5-inch Samsung Galaxy S 4. Maybe “moar” is better for now? If not though, opportunities for Android competitors could get as big as the screen on Android flagship phones.

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The Microsoft-led group, called FairSearch, was already behind a previous (and as yet unresolved) complaint to the Commission over Google’s search practices, in particular its alleged tendency to rank Google services higher than those of rivals. However, Nokia (the handset maker) and Oracle (the anti-Android litigator) joined FairSearch last September, indicating that the fight would be further extended to the mobile sphere.

That has now happened. According to a FairSearch statement on Tuesday, “Google uses deceptive conduct to lock out competition in mobile”. The main issue at play here is the way in which Google bundles its suite of services with Android: if a phone manufacturer wants to build an Android phone that includes consumer favorites such as Maps or YouTube, the manufacturer is then also obliged to “pre-load an entire suite of Google mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone”, the complaint states.

The other issue is that of Google’s distribution method. FairSearch characterizes the giving-away of Android as “predatory” and “below-cost”, arguing that it “makes it difficult for other providers of operating systems to recoup investments in competing with Google’s dominant mobile platform”.

According to FairSearch counsel Thomas Vinje:

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data. We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market. Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google’s Android operating system.”

So far, Google’s only response has been to say: “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.” Meanwhile, a New York Times interview with EU Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia suggests that European antitrust officials had already been looking into Android separately from their long-running Google desktop search investigation.

Is there a case here?

The fundamental concept in antitrust regulation is that of market dominance – if the target of the regulation doesn’t dominate the market in a way that potentially lets them stunt competition, regulators can’t hold them back, as that would mean distorting the market unnecessarily. That’s why I don’t believe anything will come of complaints made over Apple’s carrier contract terms, for example – iOS devices don’t actually dominate their market.

The case for Android dominating the smartphone market, though, is much stronger. We’re not talking about the levels of dominance Google enjoys in desktop search – there, it owns just under 90 percent of the market – but, as FairSearch has noted, around 70 percent of smartphones shipped worldwide at the end of 2012 carried Android. That is a lot, but does it amount to market dominance?

There are three main problems with this theory. The first is that iOS, while not dominant, is very strong; much stronger than OS X was as a rival to Windows when Microsoft (oh, the irony) got hit with a $794 million EU antitrust fine for bundling Windows Media Player with its OS. Indeed, in the EU, iOS has a market share of around 25 percent, and Android has a market share of just over 60 percent (the 70 percent figure quoted by FairSearch is weighted somewhat by the high numbers of Android phones being shipped to developing countries).

Secondly, it is viable to fork Android and forego the standard Google suite. Amazon has done just that with its Kindle Fire range of tablets, which is doing just fine. In China, Baidu has done the same, replacing the Google suite with its own services. In Russia, Yandex is also developing its own set of rivals to Google’s services, although its strategy is more a case of piggybacking on standard Android than of rip-out-and-replace – in itself, this demonstrates that rival services can get a chance on Android, particularly if the operator rolling out the phone is keen.

Finally, this is a market in constant flux. Android’s rise has certainly been meteoric, but there is a chance that some alternative, whether it be Firefox OS or a Kindle phone or a de-Googlified Samsung OS, will stop it in its tracks. Microsoft and Nokia would certainly have something to gain from straitjacketing Google in the near future, as they want Windows Phone to succeed, but the regulators may be queasy at the thought of interfering in an already tumultuous scene.

In short, this one is complicated. Whatever happens, though, it’s a formal complaint, so the EU will be forced to acknowledge it and decide whether or not to launch a formal investigation.

Anything else?

Glad you asked! Almunia also dropped a few interesting tidbits in that NYT interview about the Google search case. He insisted that the Commission wouldn’t require Google to change its ranking algorithms, but he did say Google would need to start more clearly identifying results that link to its own services.

“Maybe we will ask Google to signal what are the relevant options, alternative options, in the way they present the results,” he suggested.

According to Almunia, Google will submit proposals this week about settling the investigation. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has already concluded a similar investigation without any major crackdown on Google, but that will not necessarily influence the Commission’s thinking, particularly as Google has a greater share of the European search market than it does in the U.S.

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In a roundtable Q&A at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Elop said that tablets may fit into Nokia’s mobile-centric strategy, but he seemed to be more thoughtful than decisive on the matter. He noted that all the assembled journalists had traditional notebooks. Not so, I said, unclipping the tablet part of my Acer W510. What did I think of Windows 8, he asked. A mixed bag, I replied. Another piece of feedback for his fact-finding mission.

What is Elop waiting for in the tablet space, another journalist asked. Three things, he said: Nokia is watching the tablet market evolve; it is “watching the specific platforms and where they stand in terms of maturity”; and it is focused on “understanding and seeing with [its] engineers the ability to differentiate under those conditions”.

Now the prevailing wisdom is that Nokia would go with Windows RT/8 in the tablet space. Is that platform mature? Heck no. Could Nokia differentiate on it? Never say never, but Microsoft is still trying to get its customers to wrap their heads around the RT-desktop user interface split – do we really want to see further customization confusing people at this point of initial education?

How about Android? As a tablet platform, Android still isn’t there yet — that’s a function of its paucity of tablet-optimized apps, rather than any intrinsic flaw. True, Nokia probably has more opportunity for differentiation there, but it’s an extremely tough market, what with Samsung ruling the roost as it currently does. There’s no analogy to be drawn with Nokia’s work on Windows Phone, which no-one dominated when Elop dived in.

No other tablet platform is anywhere approaching maturity – with the exception of iOS, of course, though that’s not an option. And so, while Nokia is probably testing Windows RT/8 and Android tablets in its labs — it would be crazy not to be doing so — by the criteria laid down by its leader we can make a pretty educated guess: that we should not expect Nokia to launch a tablet anytime soon.

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This will help Nokia hang onto its position in emerging markets — good news for its fortunes in the next year or two. But the really interesting announcement from the Finnish firm today was that it is opening up its Here mapping, location-based services and augmented reality suite to other mobile platforms and to third-party developers who might now be able to use it for innovative applications. This is a much more long-term play.

“By gaining scale, we can increase the quality and quantity of the data we receive,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told his audience here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. That’s a valid motivation and, along with the potential new Here services that third-party developers will create, this move will probably make Nokia’s devices more attractive. It also gives Nokia a serious platform that is abstracted from the underlying smartphone OS. But greater exposure for this core Nokia service could also serve as a hedge against a post-smartphone future.

Bear with me here.

The more I think about Google Glass and the wearables revolution that it presages, the likelier it seems to me that “glass” will eventually supersede the smartphone. With the rise of tablets, particularly small tablets, a vast amount of functionality is now being replicated across two devices that people carry around with them regularly. Smart glass could take over some of the functionality that today works better on the handset – particularly talking, navigation and simple messaging – leaving web surfing and gaming for the bigger screen, with less overall overlap.

If that happens, if people have maps in front of their eyeballs more than they do now, if augmented reality becomes more than a nice idea with few essential use cases, then we’re looking at a wave of service innovation that is hard to imagine in the current smartphone paradigm. There will be limited opportunity for hardware differentiation — the quality of these core mapping and AR services will be where most of the action is.

Someone in the audience asked Elop today whether Nokia would bring out smart glass. “We clearly have established a pattern for being leaders in augmented reality,” he replied. “You can well imagine there’s a whole array of new experiences with new platforms coming in the future.”

A vague, non-committal answer, yes. But Elop and his company have clearly been thinking a lot about this trend. If they make Here the go-to location-based services and augmented reality platform, they’re as well placed as any to take advantage and maybe, just maybe, take the lead. The company has reinvented itself many times before, and it can certainly do so again.

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That was then, this is now. Mobile computing is now the growth business and, for those in emerging economies who previously never managed to get their hands on PC hardware, smartphones are their first computers. And what’s running on such handsets in Africa, the most untapped market of them all? Not Windows – which is why Microsoft has just launched a concerted campaign, called 4Afrika, to change that situation.

Windows Phones for Africa

The lynchpin of this scheme is the Huawei ’4Afrika with Windows Phone 8′ device. Microsoft has already released lower-end Windows Phones in African markets, such as the Nokia Lumia 620, but those are relatively expensive – in Nigeria, for example, that device is expected to cost around $250. The Huawei 4Afrika phone will cost $150.

It would be interesting to know how heavily Microsoft is subsidizing this phone, because the Huawei 4Afrika is a variant of the $300 Ascend W1, which targets the European market. The 4Afrika phone has a 480×800-pixel screen, a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor, a 10mm-thick case and 4GB internal storage, along with front- and rear-facing cameras. Standby time – a big deal in markets where power can be unreliable or hard to come by – is rated at 420 hours.

According to a Microsoft blog post, the handset also comes preloaded with “custom apps created by African developers for African consumers”.

Not bad for the price, you may think. But look at the local prices for cheap smartphones – and by this I mean the likes of Nokia’s semi-smart Asha devices but also BlackBerry and Android phones – and you’ll see handsets priced around $80. That’s almost half the price of the Huawei 4Afrika.

According to Ian Fogg, senior principal analyst at IHS Screen Digest, that discrepancy could take the Huawei 4Afrika out of reach for many:

“This is a cheap smartphone for Windows Phone, but it’s still significantly more expensive than the entry-level Android smartphones in the market or the Nokia Asha devices, which Nokia are putting head-to-head with entry-level Android.”

However, Fogg pointed out that Microsoft’s tight reference platform for Windows Phone 8 meant the Huawei 4Afrika would give a much better experience than those cheaper Android phones, which may use cheaper and less powerful components.

Wider campaign

It’s also worth noting that 4Afrika is a scheme that goes beyond phones. Microsoft will also be working with authorities and ISPs in Kenya and elsewhere to deliver cheap wireless broadband using experimental white space technology and solar-powered base stations. The company will also launch an online hub in April for small businesses, giving them free services and, for some, free domain registration.

As Ali Faramaway, Microsoft’s VP for the Middle East and Africa, put it in a separate blog post:

“When we look at the world, many see China or the BRIC countries as the next big opportunity for growth. At Microsoft, we view the African continent as a game-changer in the global economy. We believe deeply in the potential of technology to change Africa, and we equally believe in the potential of Africa to change technology for the world.”

Whether or not Microsoft succeeds in ensuring that technology is Microsoft-based, is up for debate. But it’s certainly worth a shot and, if 4Afrika does really accelerate the rollout of connectivity on the continent, all the better.

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