All said, I think webapps + Carrier billing are the most credible upcoming threat to the App Store so far.
Peter-Paul Koch agrees and fills in details:
One of the major changes 2011 is going to bring is the start of operator billing on the web. It will provide a user-friendly way of making mobile (and web) payments without those silly credit cards that are preventing the majority of the world to participate.
Koch dubs it “Operator Billing”, but North American-types are going with “Carrier Billing.” Same difference.
Koch also brings up a point I hadn’t deeply considered:
Banks and credit card companies of the world, be very afraid. The operators will come to take your business away.
Koch is right that technically carriers could rapidly dominate cashless purchase that today is the near-exclusive domain of credit/debit cards. Two reasons why it may not happen:
Banksters own more of the US government than Carriers do. Don’t expect the dominate transactional players to cede their perch without a lobbyist fight. Politicians, of course, welcome this profitable-to-them conflict and will work to extend it.
Carrier executive management is dumb. Collectively they lack foresight to join forces to avoid fragmenting the mobile payment marketplace and don’t have the web-savvy to create an easy-to-adopt payment HTTPS API.
That’s why my attention perked up when I heard Google already launched carrier billing with AT&T:
Carrier billing: In December, Google launched its first instance of carrier billing with AT&T, where users could directly bill apps to their phone bill rather than using another payment system. Expect Google to institute more such billing arrangements with carriers around the world, Chu said. He added that working with carriers to set up billing was both expensive and time-consuming, but a very valuable feature to users, and one that could help increase the spending on Android apps.
Google also is pushing for mobile web apps:
HTML5: Chu didn’t add too much here, but said that for Android apps, Google was “betting on” the new Web standard, HTML5, as a way to create apps.
While Google has Asperger’s and isn’t my choice for Leader of the New Carrier Billing Era, they’re exactly what the carriers need if carrier billing is to achieve takeoff within the next 2 years. Google can provide the inter-carrier coordination today along with the HTTPS APIs.
Here the big problem is, again, the carriers themselves. The mere fact Google has already made a deal with AT&T means the other carriers will view Google with even more suspicion. Carriers are unwarrantedly egotistical (they think they can do it all themselves) and don’t want to grant Google a lucrative payment bottleneck, even temporarily.
In short, the carriers are short-sighted enough to stunt a new long-term market worth hundreds of billions — eventually trillions — because it can’t be all theirs.
