| By Jim Bruene on June 10, 2008 5:49 PM | Comments (3) |
I've written about how the iPhone could change the way consumers use mobile phones to access data (see note 1). But this slide from the Steve Jobs keynote yesterday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), says it much better:
In case you can't read the slide, it says that 98% of iPhone users use the built-in Safari browser, 94% use email and 90% use text messaging. That's an amazing level of usage for what used to be considered "advanced" smartphone features. So far, the impact on ecommerce companies has been relatively small, with just 6 million users worldwide. But with Apple dropping the price by 50% to $199, there will soon be 10, 20, or 30 million Americans connecting to the Web via iPhone. If 90%+ use the browser and messaging, it will have a major impact in online/mobile banking usage.
New App Store
And to help those millions of new users find useful things to do on their phone, Apple is building a new App Store, accessible directly from the main deck of the iPhone once users download the 2.0 software in July. The App Store will include thousands of applications optimized for the iPhone that can be downloaded over the air.
Some will have a cost, with the developer keeping 70% of the revenue, but most are expected to be free. Since there is NO COST to list your app in Apple's App Store (see update below), financial services companies should rush to get their app loaded as close to the July 11 launch date as possible.
So far, only two banks, Bank of America and Germany's Postbank, have included their apps in the current online applications directory (here). A number of other financial apps are listed including Wesabe, Buxfer, and the latest, QuickBooks from Intuit (see inset right and screenshots below). Expect many more in the months and years to come.
Update 11 June: Important clarification from commenter "gerontius" (number 3 below). The current app directory includes webpages optimized for the iPhone. The new App Directory will include "native" apps that run directly on the iPhone operating system. That makes the bar quite a bit higher, depending on what you want to do.
myBudget 
Postbank 
Wesabe 
Yodlee 
Note:
1. For more info, see our Online Banking Report on Mobile Banking
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This reminds me of the old Mac vs Window thing... Which plateform should we develop first?
If you have money for both, great, but if you have a limited budget Google's Android plateform is phone and carrier independent and will be reaching far more users.
Additional note: The top 5 commercial banks are participating in the iPhone 2.0's enterprise beta program. This allows employees there to have all the benefits of an iPhone and still be able to sync with Microsoft Exchange servers.
Note that the Apps you list are all webapps which are essentially web pages optimised for viewing on a small screen in Safari and reviewed/catalogued by Apple.
Apps in the Appstore are going to be native apps sitting on the phone itself - it'll be interesting to see which banks get there first.