These days, mobile technology talk always centers on the power of the smartphone, with conversations usually focused on the plethora of multimedia bells and whistles that always seem to attract consumers. And, of course, which device – Android, iPhone or BlackBerry – delivers the most value and features.  It’s difficult to objectively choose one platform over the other, considering each camp is so fiercely loyal and the lines between them are very often blurred; so, the debate rages on. 

With  manufacturer, carrier and consumer sales rhetoric being driven by this smartphone discourse, where has this left the standard feature phone? Apparently, neglected. 

The Stats Don’t Add Up

But hold the phone. The stats cannot be ignored. Smartphones may be dominating the public conversation, but they do not dominate the market. In fact, of the 6 billion devices in use around the world, smartphones account for just 30 percent of that total. This leaves a whopping 4 billion feature phones that are still very much in operation today. Granted, conventional wisdom dictates that a good many of these feature phone users are en route to becoming smartphone users as prices continue to drop and the slow-to-adopt catch up. Yet, while feature phone market projections for 2016 notch down that 70 percent to an estimated 63 percent, the total still represents a convincing majority of feature phones that will still be in use in the years to come. 

If these feature phone users have felt left out of the conversation, it is with good reason; they have been. The fact is, feature phones have become somewhat of a stepchild in the industry, relegated to the lower rungs of carrier plan hierarchies as the collective imagination of the world continues to be mesmerized by the smartphone and its slick capabilities.  But a further segmenting of the feature phone population uncovers a portion of users that aren’t likely to become technology adopters at all. These are people who are perfectly happy utilizing their devices for what they were initially intended for – to talk. Consider, as well, the next generation of basic mobile phone users: populations in emerging countries, developing areas and rural locations. Their eventual adoption to smartphones will, at best, be a slow one. There is also a group of disabled users who have little choice but to remain using standard feature phones, because their physical, hearing or sight impairments preclude them from operating keyboards or touchscreens.  Similarly, many elderly  continue to rely on voice as the familiar form of communication. 

And consider the entire landline infrastructure. Though this market continues to shrink by attrition, the number of existing landline devices worldwide is immense.

No matter how one slices the pie, there will remain a substantial number of feature phone users in play for the foreseeable future who would gladly welcome smart, new voice-driven software services – or next-generation voice-driven apps – but only if they can be easily adapted to their simple-to-use and highly affordable standard feature phones. 

This is good news for carriers and service providers that are under constant attack to raise ARPUs and to squeeze any revenue they can from subscribers. Strategies and opportunities for selling new services to feature phone users have become increasingly overshadowed by the industry’s focus on the smartphone. Developers of mobile software have also appeared to slip into the growing divide between these digital and voice worlds. For the thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of global smartphone application gurus tinkering busily in their development labs, the main challenge has always remained the same: managing fragmentation. Apple iPhones command a decisive 10 percent of the smartphone market. This is admittedly huge; but Apple source coding is closed, of course. So, if you’re developing for iPhones, you tend not to be developing for anything else. It’s generally too costly for these entrepreneurial developers to simultaneously develop for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry when the odds of even one application significantly connecting with the marketplace seem so slim. 

Optimistically speaking, even apps that do break through the development glut and find a legitimate market usually enjoy only a modest success – and this, after countless and costly attempts that usually end up failing. (Just ask the author of Angry Birds how many rounds of applications it took before he found the one that stuck). For example, of those apps that do defy the odds and succeed, nearly 70 percent of them are only downloaded less than 1,000 times. The math doesn’t seem to add up to offer an overwhelmingly attractive ROI – for the developers nor the providers that drive them. Landing big-money success in this development space proves elusive, at best.

A New Line of Thinking

The lessons for carriers and service providers is that they must think outside of the box – in this case, focusing not just on, but beyond, the smartphone, and include all existing devices – and to fundamentally return to the power of voice as the channel that delivers the most lasting universal value. No doubt, software revenue remains the industry’s proverbial dangling carrot; however, with application clutter entering the  smartphone market,  and the difficulty of application developers to overcome the challenges of fragmentation in producing breakthrough apps that connect with users en masse, smartphones should no longer be perceived as the only, or even the primary route, to the lucrative gains carriers seek. A new and extended line of thinking is required that embraces all devices.

Imagine an environment where device-agnostic applications are serving, quite literally, 100 percent of the market – smartphones, feature phones and even fixed-line phones. Imagine these apps and mobile services existing in the cloud, so that device storage limitations are minimized, if not altogether eliminated.  Imagine these user experiences being accessible on enterprise handsets as well, helping businesses better manage the chaos and confusion caused by the steady consumerization of enterprise communications. 

This is the promise of a new generation of cloud-based, device-agnostic, voice-driven services: to serve ALL phones, ALL persons and ALL users at once. It is a marketplace where no phone is left behind.

Giving Feature Phones a Whole New Voice

As the world around us continues to push forward into the digital sphere, voice remains our most fundamental, natural and instinctual means of communication – the most immediate, the most powerful and the most commonly shared. No matter where technology takes us, or how device form factors will evolve, voice will remain the universal app. Thus, with insightful vision, innovative thinking and the courage to see beyond the smartphone, shrewd carriers that still appreciate the basic power of voice will begin to offer clever new voice-based service options that will reenergize and expand the market’s limited perception of the standard feature phone, even as the industry seems to have forsaken it. They will begin to introduce innovative and profitable new voice-driven revenue streams based on standard feature phone, fixed-line phone, as well as, of course, smartphone use by partnering with perceptive application developers who appreciate the vast potential of voice, and whose creative solutions are courageously bridging and reintegrating the mobile voice/digital divide. 

What are such development opportunities? Many. This is hardly blue-sky thinking. Development labs around the world are integrating voice and digital functionality in new and interesting ways, and they are locating these apps and services on the cloud, so that development isn’t limited by device storage or processing capacities. These voice-based capabilities will include such services as sending emails via quick voice calls, using voice to update social media status, turning video casts into voice message casts, and a variety of additional integrated digital/voice communication exchanges.

Conclusion: Every Phone Is An Opportunity

The reasons for carriers and service providers to support the development of next-generation voice-driven apps for ALL phones are so many and so convincingly compelling that it’s a challenge to cover them all in one article. But two reasons, in particular, stand out above all. It’s an excellent way for 2nd and 3rd tier telcos to level the competitive playing field with the big operators and increase market share. Furthermore, it’s a strategic way for prepaid service providers to add greater value to their voice-based offerings by packaging in smart new voice apps, as well. 

In addition, and hugely important, these next generation voice-driven apps are hosted in the cloud, freeing up device storage space by negating the need to download, which also offers a low-cost alternative to RCS-e development. Voice-based apps are a refreshing alternative to “me-too” digital apps and offer solutions for traditionally neglected and marginalized members of the mobile community: emerging geo-markets, the sight and/or hearing impaired, the elderly and those who are physically disabled. Since these are service-centric rather than device-centric apps, it doesn’t matter what phone the user has in hand. Moreover, these cloud-based voice apps are universal, so a single development initiative covers all devices within a provider’s line. In addition, because these apps use the ubiquitous voice channel, there’s little need for related broadband development. Everybody wins.

What’s the ultimate benefit to introducing next generation voice-driven apps to a smartphone-dominant development environment? The fact that every phone in use continues to drive new and creative revenue opportunities – both today and tomorrow. No phone is left behind.

Javier Martín is CEO and co-founder of Almira Labs.