I remember when I bought my first BlackBerry September last year, I was super excited about my new phone and equally devastated because App World was inaccessible in my country. Day in and day out I tried the App World app pre-installed on my smartphone hoping it would just work – but no, it didn’t. A couple of search terms later I came across the Mobihand superstore app and the following months were all discovery and fascination as I uncovered the treasures of Mobihand. Today, the superstore has come to an abrupt end, it is no more.
If you are looking for a farewell note, not here, but I can point you to a couple. While app hungry smartphone users say goodbye, some of the developers that satisfied that hunger feel robbed and want to pause the moment. Some developers have not received royalties of their sold apps in months, some after taking down their apps due to non-payments found the app downloads counter still stacking numbers and some BlackBerry blogs that used Mobihand as a store platform probably similarly received $0. A case of one developer was opened in San Mateo Court, Redwood City CA early this year – Case CIV511913 – ANASTASSIYA KOULIKOVA VS MOBIHAND INC, and this is just one developer that stood their ground. How many more were not rewarded their royalties, but silently take in this news?
Here is an apology to users found on the Mobihand website:
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.
