Computerworld

Ericsson sees opportunities for local mobile app developers

Ericsson says there is an opportunity for smartphone application developers in New Zealand because only 15 percent of the top 100 smartphone apps used by New Zealanders are locally developed. 

It says the most popular local apps are for finance, weather forecasting, mobile service provider, real estate, travel, video streaming, and shopping. 

The figure for Australia was slightly lower, 13 percent and in the Asia Pacific region, Singapore had the highest uptake of local apps, 23 percent, followed by Vietnam and Thailand at 21 and 18 percent respectively. 

The figures come from Ericsson’s latest annual global mobility report, released on 13 June. It shows New Zealand having six million mobile subscriptions at the end of 2016 — representing 135 percent penetration — of which 40 percent had access to LTE (4G services) and 55 percent, access to 3G.  Ericsson forecasts LTE will account for 80 percent of total subscriptions by 2022. 

According to Ericsson, what it calls ‘time to content’ is a key determinant of the uptake of mobile apps. Ericsson defines time to content as the time from when a user requests online content until the time it is rendered on a smart device’s display. 

It says that, in mature mobile broadband markets, consumers typically expect a time-to-content of four seconds or less, which requires a minimum downlink speed of roughly 1Mbps for web browsing, 5Mbps for video streaming and 10Mbps for HD video. 

According to Ericsson the probability of New Zealand users achieving these speeds are, respectively 97 percent, 85 percent and 69 percent. In the region only Singapore and Australia fared better. 

Globally Ericsson reported that mobile subscriptions were growing at around four percent year-on-year, reaching 7.6 billion in Q1, but mobile broadband subscriptions are growing much faster, 25 percent year on year to about 4.6 billion currently. It said that almost three million new mobile broadband subscriptions were added very day in Q1.