Handango

» see handango.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

handango opened in 1999 in irving, texas. randy eisenman ran it. the premise was simple. before the iphone there was no single place to download software for the existing universe of smart pocket devices. each platform had a different binary format. each carrier had a different billing relationship. handango stitched these together into a website where you could buy a piece of software and have it land on your palm pilot or your nokia communicator without a cd in the middle.

the 2003 launch of handango inhand was the version most users remember. it was an on-device store. you opened a small client on a symbian uiq phone and browsed categories without going through a desktop browser. by 2006 the client was on symbian s60 too. then on blackberry os, then on windows mobile. in pre-iphone terms this was a serious distribution channel.

the company's 2007 revenue was around $5.5 million. the staff was 51 to 200 people depending on the year. for a pre-app-store catalogue store this was the right scale.

handango's peak years overlap with my university stretch in ankara. but i did not own a palm pda or a symbian smartphone in that window, so the store never appeared on a screen i was using. the nokia handsets common in turkey ran s40, not s60, which meant no inhand client. honest distance.

~ the record ~

~ how it actually ended ~

the iphone shipped in 2007. the app store opened in 2008. android market opened the same year. the value proposition handango sold to developers was that handango knew how to bill a blackberry carrier for $9.99 and split the proceeds. apple offered a higher cut and a billion-iphone roadmap. there was no contest.

in february 2010 pocketgear acquired handango. in 2011 pocketgear rebranded as appia and pivoted to a white-label oem app store engine, the thing that ran "verizon's store" on a verizon phone behind the scenes. the consumer brands handango and pocketgear were shuttered in 2013. the wholesale engine kept running for a while longer.

~ what came after ~

handango proved the smartphone app store could be a real business several years before apple built the version everyone remembers. what handango did not have was the platform leverage. apple owned the silicon and the os. it owned the payment rails and the lock on the home screen. handango owned a website. the difference was the whole industry.

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