PocketGear

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

~ the last words ~

pocketgear's peak years overlap with my university stretch in ankara (roughly). but the devices in my hand never matched its catalog. by 2007 i was on a basic nokia s40 with the slow gprs data plan ttnet's parent had bundled with the line. s40 was not s60, the pocketgear inhand-style clients lived on s60 and on windows mobile and on blackberry os. the catalog was real, the audience for it in turkey was very small.

the company was founded in 2001 in durham, north carolina by jud bowman as part of a pinpoint networks reorg. the original name was motricity, then pinpoint networks, then pocketgear. the pitch was the same as handango's, the same as getjar's: aggregate mobile software for every binary format the smartphone landscape had ever shipped, billing each carrier in the right currency, splitting revenue back to the developer. in practice that meant a website you opened on a desktop to buy a piece of software, then a small client you ran on the phone to download and install it.

the catalog grew through the late 2000s on symbian s60, on uiq, on windows mobile, on blackberry os, on palm os, on the early android market that nobody had yet figured out how to monetize (or whatever it was called). pocketgear ran a network of platform-branded storefronts: symbiangear.com, androidgear.com, rimgear.com, palmgear.com, smartphone.net. each one was the same catalog wearing a different platform-themed skin.

~ the record ~

~ the merger ~

in february 2010 pocketgear acquired handango for an undisclosed price. handango was the older brand, founded 1999 in irving texas. the combined catalog crossed 140,000 titles across android and blackberry and windows mobile and symbian and palm. combined revenue across both stores had passed four hundred million dollars since launch. jud bowman stayed on as president and ceo, handango's alex bloom became coo. on paper this was the biggest cross-platform mobile catalog in the world.

on paper. apple had opened the app store in july 2008 and android market in october 2008. by february 2010 the platform-owner stores were already doing more app-purchase volume than every third-party catalog combined. the merger looked like consolidation but read more like two unprofitable businesses combining their losses (close enough). the engadget coverage and the register coverage of the deal both noted the same thing: the value of being the biggest cross-platform catalog dropped fast once each platform owner had a default catalog of its own on the home screen.

~ what it became ~

in 2011 pocketgear rebranded as appia and pivoted away from consumer-facing storefronts entirely. the new business model was white-label oem: appia would run the carrier-branded app store on a verizon phone, or the t-mobile-branded app store on a t-mobile phone, with the carrier keeping the front-page brand and appia keeping the catalog, the billing, the developer relationships. in 2013 both the pocketgear.com and handango.com consumer sites were shut down. appia kept running the wholesale engine for a few more years.

the consumer brands had been the asset that made the merger newsworthy in 2010. by 2013 they were the part of the company that was a liability. honest distance applies. i never bought an app from pocketgear, never registered an account, never had a device the catalog cleanly supported. the broader category, third-party mobile catalogs in the pre-iphone window, was real and big and underdocumented. by 2013 every brand that had run one was either dead or had pivoted to being something else.

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