Score another one for the iPhone. Yahoo is abandoning its mobile app for the Blackberry and other smartphones in order to focus more on its recently relaunched iPhone app. For every other phone, it is concentrating development efforts around the mobile browser experience. People applying for the smartphone app, which is still in beta, are receiving a notice (reproduced below) stating that “Yahoo has decided to cease development” of the app on May 20th. Yahoo Mobile now only has eyes for the iPhone. Rather than create a million apps for every other phone, it is standardizing on delivering the same experience through the mobile browser. Or so it would seem.
A Yahoo spokesperson confirms:
We are reprioritizing some products to help us better deliver the best possible experiences to consumers on mobile. To streamline our services, we will not develop Yahoo! Mobile for smartphones to focus our efforts on mobilizing Yahoo!, improving Yahoo! Mobile for web and Yahoo! Mobile for iPhone as well as developing new and engaging experiences for consumers, partners and advertisers.
We currently have mobile products that reach hundreds of different devices (including Blackberry), and we continue to expand that comprehensive list.
The company announced a revamped Yahoo Mobile in February, and rolled it out in April with a new iPhone app and browser support for more than 300 devices. Yahoo Mobile now combines mobile search, your email, IM, and social messaging streams, and personalized Yahoo content such as news, sports, stocks, and RSS feeds.
Standardizing on the mobile browser certainly makes economic sense. When it comes to developing apps, Yahoo needs to pick a platform and it is clearly going with the iPhone. Every other phone will have to do with the mobile browser for now. (Although, Yahoo says it will develop apps for other platforms when it sees enough demand. Update: Indeed, I have been able to confirm that new apps for the Blackberry and other mobile platforms with a different look and feel than the discontinued smartphone app are in the works). While Yahoo is putting a lot of effort into making the mobile browser experience more app-like, it will still never be as fully-functioning as a customized mobile app. There is nothing wrong with betting on the mobile browser. But just last March during a briefing I had with Adam Taggart, head of product marketing for Yahoo Mobile, when I asked whether Yahoo was leaning more towards distribution through apps or mobile browsers, he replied:
We are embracing both, apps and browser. We as Yahoo are all about ubiquity. We have a renewed appreciation for the browser because they are getting materially better, but you can always do more with an app on your phone. In the immediate time frame you will see a lot more standalone vertical apps coming out of Yahoo.
He positioned the other smartphone apps as a way to address people with Blackberies and other Web-capable phones who have iPhone envy. Here is how he positioned the smartphone apps which Yahoo is now abandoning:
The smartphone app is a way to turn your smartphone into an iPhone at no additional cost, if you are envying the iPhone.
The smartphone app actually included some features not found in the iPhone app, such as a socially aware address book which could pull contacts from the phone’s native address book and merge that with your Facebook friends, IM buddies, or other contacts on the Web. Don’t expect that feature to come to a mobile browser anytime soon.
Here is the text of the email sent to interested beta testers:
Yahoo! has decided to cease development of the Yahoo! Mobile smartphone app
effective Wednesday, May 20th. So you will not be provided access to the
beta program for this product.For the time being, we will be focusing our efforts on the newly-launched
Yahoo! Mobile experience for browsers (available at new.m.yahoo.com) and
for the iPhone (available via the Apple App Store).We really want to thank you for your interest in being a beta tester. The
feedback we receive during these programs is extremely helpful in improving
the customer experience across all of Yahoo!s mobile products.In the meantime, stay tuned for more exciting new mobile product releases
from Yahoo!. Theres a lot coming and we want to hear your feedback!Many thanks,
The Yahoo! Mobile team
Update: I changed the headline of this post from “Blackberry App” to “Smartphone App” because the beta app being canceled runs across several smartphones. Also, as I note in the update above, Yahoo may very well be working on other apps for the Blackberry and other mobile platforms. But until we see those, its main focus currently, as far as mobile apps go, is on the iPhone.
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Everything and everyone is focusing on the iPhone. I can’t wait for some real competition to be released. (i.e. Palm Pre)
I have to agree with you. I love my iPhone (gosh, my iPhone kinda pays the bill since I blog about it for a living), but I’m really looking forward to some real competition. I’m very disappointed by Android so far.
I agree, I’m an iPhone developer and recently got my hands on a dev Android, massive disappointment.
The Pré lacks the capacity to compete with iPhone on an applications level due to it’s WebOS.
The Pré, contrary to popular belief, is not a direct competitor to iPhone and those that see it as so will be sorely disappointed.
Derry, I guess we’ll just have to wait and fine out.
Pre also lacks the licensing for multitouch, hope they have some good lawyers.
Sorry, but it’s a tough uphill battle for Pre. Right out of the gate, it’s not even capable of playing these kind of games. Need For Speed Undercover, which pushes mobile gaming near the limit. Plus the vast iTunes ecosystem. Using Sprint, the weakest of all carriers is a bad choice.
Does everyone think the whole world uses an iPhone and no one else matters any more?
Blackberry apps are irrelevant.
fuck no! I really hope not.
I love the look and feel of the Apple Pod/phone device but because iTunes is such a fucking dog’s dinner [a messy try-to-do-everything piece of software] that I absolutely refuse to reinstall it on my laptop since reinstalling the rest of the operating system at large (note to apple fans: this wasn’t the cause for my reboot, but it so badly screwing up my music database and hijacking icons and applications didn’t help its cause) despite the amount of support it’s getting from yahoo and others.
I am a NOKIA supporter, and while not a great fan of blackberry, am also disappointed to discover they’re abandoning development on those platforms.
yes, the whole willing-to-pay-for-apps world uses an iPhone and no one else matters any more
I am one of the mobile developers who Yahoo attempted to recruit for their Mobile Dev team about 2 years ago and turned down continued interviewing because they were not pushing for such a focus.
Its about time Yahoo..
What has this got to do with twitter?
lol @DogBreath.
Is it that hard to create/maintain apps for multiple phones? This makes me wonder if maintaining an iphone app is harder than it should be.
Even TechCrunch seems to only focus on writing about new iPhone apps.
This is a poor move by Yahoo. There are still tens of millions of Blackberry users world wide and they are effectively giving us the finger. Lets not forget that the Blackberry Curve outsold the iPhone in the first quarter of 2009. Yes, its on multiple carriers, blah, blah, blah. But more people walked out of stores with a new Curve in their hands than did iPhones.
It can’t be that hard to maintain an app on both platforms, especially when Blackberry app’s Java. This is simply one silicon valley company giving into the hype of another.
i agree with this dude
Yes I agree with him too.
Wow, Blackberry is still a very widely used smart phone platform and will still be around for a while, even though the iPhone is gaining ground.
Maybe if things pick back up, they’ll reopen this part of their development team.
k cool I posted a blog saying what a poor decision on yahoos part. And that I consider myself discriminated against for my investment in a blackberry. Also that I am now no longer a yahoo user and am not interested in their “new” direction.
Amen Jeff. What’s especially ironic is that Blackberry is much more relevant in a world obsessed with iPhone than Yahoo is relevant in a world obsessed with Google.
If Yahoo wants to be a playah they gotta play…mobile is NOT the place to cut costs.
Sorry Jeff, but you don’t seem to know how expensive and time consuming multi platform development is.
We’re doing contract work for large media companies on iPhone, Android and Blackberry and they all start complaining after some time.
And I can’t hear that sales numbers argument for BlackBerry, Symbian & co anymore…
We have the data: the exact same apps see 10x to 100x more downloads on the iPhone than on all other platforms combined. Often it’s even more than that…
When it comes to paid apps, all other platforms than the iPhone are total waste of time (just talk to some Android devs).
Don’t get me wrong: I hope this will change, because Apple needs strong competition. Otherwise they’ll get to arrogant…
But right now the iPhone is the way to go…
Too Right!!!!
wow blackberry got slapped
Packaging fail, Chinese ppl over did it.
http://www.epiclosers.com/load/8-1-0-374
I’ve ummed and ahhed for the last couple of weeks about developing a decent app type store for J2ME apps and came to the basic conclusion that it’s a waste of time.
I actually think that Yahoo are doing the right thing.
For those who are remotely interested:
http://www.jasebell.co.uk/2009.....tless.html
is this grab really the product? where are the yahoo products beyond email - finance, sports and news - that people actually still use? is “today” going to be some ridiculous port of the FP so that users can get all of the latest generic updates on britney spears? and “people”? - until yhoo buys twitter can they please stop pretending that people are going to network there? IM should be a separate app - in fact any yhoo app worth doing should be separate…
It was only 3-4 years ago that Yahoo itself was a trendsetter. What do they hope to gain by abandoning an entire platform which they didn’t really do a good job on anyways (I uninstalled Go from my BB long ago). Hopefully they get their feet back under them, but I don’t see that happening.
seems like a no-brainer
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed.
Yeah, focusing all efforts on a device that is 3% of US mobile phones with a 2% US market penetration is the kind of brilliant leadership that got Y! where it is today.
Yeah, but iPhone users are the ones who typically access the web via their phones. People using feature phones and BlackBerries rarely surf. People use BlackBerry as an email and IM device, not a web device. How many people were consuming Yahoo services with their BlackBerry? I’m sure Yahoo has those numbers and if they were significant, they wouldn’t be abandoning the platform.
Interesting how people criticize product decisions without having any data.
Nothing they do matters anymore. They are the walking dead!
Blackberry has been losing share steadily to the iPhone. I still love my Blackberry. But I run an iPhone advertising and game/app marketing company called AppLytics. We are seeing a steady shift in continued usage and growth. We recently signed iShoot and several of the largest indie iPhone developers to our platform. They are focusing less on other mobile platforms and we are happy to see companies like Yahoo start to move toward a single platform.
Such nonsense. I feel sorry for your customers. Other than having to endure the guy running the place is posting adverts on blogs, you don’t know what you are talking about. Besides the fact that anyone advocating a single platform for anything is an idiot, RIM has done nothing but grow over the last 2 years. As the post update shows, the orginal post was wrong and actually yahoo is developing a BB app.
Your confusion would be understandable since the post is such a muddle, “Yahoo needs to pick a platform and it is clearly going with the iPhone.” Next sentence - actually a BB specific app is in development. Yeah…clearly.
iPhone is becoming more and more game based / useless app that does this even matter? I mean are there this huge group of people that actually even use Yahoo anymore?
Of course your statics show iPhone growth. It’s your focus and all you track.
A big bomb for BB
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed.
Yahoo Mobile does that not for first time - abandoning… what they got in return… I’d rather not to comment
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed.
I don’t really care, installed it once and never used. Maybe because the Google app is much better and they are still paying MUCH attention to the BB platform?
Anyway, I have both, iPhone and Blackberry Bold and I use the BB Bold 90% of the time… for business, no comparison at all, the BB is way better. Fortunately there are many companies paying the right attention and developing great apps like Socialscope, Evernote, Bolt Browser and more.
Who cares? The mobile site is good and the XDA developers site consistently churns out high quality stuff.
Isn’t this all rather pointless on Yahoo’s part? I’ve tried oneConnect and other Yahoo apps for the iPhone and none of them are very impressive. They are sort of a jack-of-all-traces but master of none.
Sure, I can update my status on several platforms at once…big deal. None of Yahoo’s apps support direct messages or @ messages on Twitter. And because apps don’t run in the background, I get logged out of Y! Messenger.
Yahoo is circling the drain…distant second on search, no viable social network and no compelling products to use. It’s really a shame too.
early days; android will catch apple by year’s end globally
people will get used to not paying for apps
This doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. I had a Blackberry, now I have an iPhone. I didn’t install a Yahoo app on my Blackberry, I’m not really interested in a Yahoo app for my iPhone. The question to be asked here is - are Blackberry users really missing out?