Mobihand closing down its app stores
Mobihand have just announced and immediately discontinued their app store services. Mobihand have been in business for over nearly nine years. Since Mobihand launched, BlackBerry AppWorld didn’t even exist, they have been a superb storefront for mobile applications, powering numerous app stores worldwide.
When BlackBerry AppWorld was launched, and ever since, numerous users worldwide have preferred it as an alternative. BlackBerry users in the UK have found it to be a preferable alternative to AppWorld, who ‘rip-off’ UK users with their pricing strategy. Mobihand will be a loss to many BlackBerry users.
Here’s the announcement from Mobihand:
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.
Mobihand customers who have apps they have purchased via Mobihand need to take action ASAP. As they state, Mobihand is allowing customers to still login to their accounts for the next few days, from which previously-purchased apps can be downloaded, or activation codes obtained. Afterwards, Mobihand will be closing down that access. This means you won’t be able to download previously-purchased apps or get upgrades through Mobihand.
