Mobango, a so-called “social mobile application store,” recently announced that over the last 12 months alone, it has seen a 500% increase in mobile downloads stemming from it network. This proves further that mobile apps are big business, even outside Apple’s App Store and the Android Marketplace.
In business for the last three years, Mobango is the only social application store that not only allows users to find and download apps and user generated content but also store and distribute them to their friends. It’s an interesting take on the app-store ecosystem, and one that’s proved very popular with users.
The application store, launched less than two years ago, is one of the biggest in the world with over 20,000 cross-platform mobile applications which work on Symbian, Android, Flash Lite, Palm, Java, Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms. Central to its success is Mobango’s “Pay Promoted Download” (PPD) business model that offers developers and publishers the most effective way to distribute applications targeted by country or phone model. It’s a unique performance-based mobile distribution platform where customers only pay for the downloads generated by Mobango.
Beyond just centralizing mobile apps and making them easily available to download, Mobango has created a community around the apps being offered in their marketplace- a method that users obviously respond to, and one that creates added value for the brands and developers distributing their apps through the platform.
Mobango is on the right track and is taking cues from social networks and other community-focused channels to integrate into its own. Though many have most likely never heard of Mobango, we’ll no doubt be hearing much more in the future.