As much as this news shocks me, I am honestly not too surprised to hear it. Popular BlackBerry app shop Mobihand, the biggest competition to Amazon in terms of blog integration, has officially called it quits. Almost every blog that ever had what looked like an “app store” integrated into it, had a backend that was likely powered by Mobihand, offering affiliate commission on sales made through clicks. Ironically, Mobihand paved the way for BlackBerry’s AppWorld and, truth be told, Apple’s App Store; they bridged the gap between app developers and smartphones owners, before the app craze took the world by storm. See the official announcement as posted to their site below:

“What a fabulous ride we had!

From San Francisco to Indonesia, from Brazil to Moscow, for eight years we served millions of worldwide customers with their app needs and delivered hundreds of millions of downloads.

We enjoyed the rise of many different platforms. BlackBerry and then Android were the biggest. And we suffered through the fall of others. Goodbye Palm and maybe BlackBerry?

Remember when we downloaded apps onto a PC and then sideloaded them through a cable to our phones? Today, our apps are discovered, downloaded and updated with very little effort right onto our devices (phones and tablets that we could not have imagined when we started). We are proud to have pioneered many of the innovations that all mobile users enjoy today.

We lived through all of these changes, including the entry of some very large companies into the app industry. These companies changed the industry with their massive resources and easy access to existing customers (which some of them vigorously protect by closing their app systems).

Domination of mobile app distribution by a relatively small number of large companies has made participation increasingly difficult for independent app distributors. While it was very hard to reach this decision, we have concluded that we have to discontinue our current services. We can only hope that the assets we built over the years will find a new purpose.

Thank you for the opportunity to serve you over all these years.

The MobiHand Team

P.S. Customer accounts will be accessible for a few more days. Customers will be able to re-download purchased apps or get their activation codes, but no upgrades, new codes, or swaps will be available.”

On a good note, Mobihand as a company is still staying around, they are just discontinuing support of their App Stores.However, this announcement should come as no surprise. Unlike BlackBerry Smartphone java apps of the past, PlayBook apps and future BlackBerry 10 apps must to be installed via App World.

So a big salute to Mobihand for pioneering the game that we know as online app sales, and all the best of luck for all future endeavours from your friends at TheCellularGuru.com

Tweet