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span class="inline inline-center">Local game: Hachiko, game apps developed by Indonesian that have garnered a considerable number of downloads in the Apple App Store. The raging success of the Angry Birds mobile game application, which has surpassed the 500 million download mark, has inspired Indonesian mobile application developers to soar to the heights Rovio, the game’s developer, has reached.

These local developers, although still hatchlings compared to established foreign developers, are positive that the promising smartphone growth in Indonesia will boost them to global success.

After all, the latest study by Nielsen reveals that 38 percent of mobile users in Indonesia are smartphone users who use these gadgets to access the Internet, where most apps are available from downloads via app stores.

 “It hit us that we were not that that big yet when we saw ourselves competing with global game makers,” said Anton Soeharyo, CEO of Indonesia-based application developer, TouchTen.  

Anton, together with his brother and cousin, developed Sushi Chain and Hachiko, game apps that have garnered a considerable number of downloads in the Apple App Store.  

With more than two million downloads and counting, Hachiko ranked as the top 10 most downloaded apps in USA and Japan, an achievement commended by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt at the Regional Entrepreneur Summit in Bali during the middle of the year.

“That was a proud moment for me because I had always wanted to be in Google,” he reflected.

The key behind the success of Sushi Chain and Hachiko, he pointed out, lay in the clever naming of the games.

Anton, who developed the games during his study in Japan, said he noticed that there were no games yet in the Apple application store bearing ‘sushi’ and ‘Hachiko’ as keywords although one was a popular cuisine and the latter a legendary dog from Japan.

He then quickly registered the names, drew up game concepts and hired outsourced graphic design teams while his cousin, Dede Indrapurna, tinkered with the coding of the application.

Rewarding: Bouncity, an application tailored for BlackBerry smartphones, allows users to earn points as "rewards" for fulfilling certain "challenges" set out in the application. TouchTen, like Rovio, had its share of hits and misses. Their first product, a non-game app designed for soccer referees, and their second product, a ping-pong game app, lacked viral appeal.

“We then realized that people were not looking for [tool] applications but games,” he noted.

The success of their game apps has led the company to focus on churning out more of these.  

“We and our investors agree that we must focus,” he said. “Because we aim to build a game app factory which can consistently produce good games.”

TouchTen recently received a US$1 million investment from IdeaSource which Anton said, was primarily spent on expanding the size of TouchTen staff.

Concentrating on a specific mobile application is also the strategy adopted by the developers of Bouncity, an application tailored for BlackBerry smartphones.

Bouncity allows users to earn points as “rewards” for fulfilling certain “challenges” set out in the application, such as checking in at restaurants which have partnered up with Bouncity. Users can then redeem the points for special promotions at these restaurants.

“What we are offering is actually gamification, which is the application of gaming principles in a non-game [app],” Kevin Osmond, the COO of Bouncity, said.

He added that Bouncity offered benefits other deal sites did not. Restaurants, which paid fees for their partnership, won repeat customers. Meanwhile users, who downloaded the app for free, could expand their social networks since the app allows them to connect with other users.

So far, traction has been good for the app which was launched in June. Research in Motion (RIM), the producers of BlackBerry, has even featured the app in the BlackBerry App World.

“Within four months, we have had 60,000 users,” Kevin said. “What’s interesting is that people in Malaysia and Singapore have also downloaded the app, though they mainly use it to share their location.”

Other elements essential for an app’s success are in its design, both in visual terms and in fluidity of use.

“We minimize the number of clicks the user has to make to get from one point to another. In my opinion, four is the maximum number of clicks,” he pointed out.

The fluidity and lightness in design helps apps to overcome slow Internet speeds due to poor Internet infrastructure.

Besides slow Internet speeds, Kevin pointed out that the tech-savvy levels of Indonesians acted as speed bumps for the growth of local apps.

Kevin Osmond, co-developer of BouncityAccording to him, most mobile phone users were still fixated on Facebook and Twitter.

This category of users paid for cheaper BlackBerry packages offered by telecommunication companies which allowed them free access to BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook and Twitter only.

“The main adversaries of Bouncity are those who use BlackBerry only as social tools,” he said.

Surveys have pointed out that Indonesians are among the top 10 users of Facebook and Twitter.

The additional fees these type of BlackBerry users had to pay when they accessed the Internet, which Bouncity relied on, has deterred them from signing up with Bouncity as well as other apps.

Price sensitive Indonesians, who have the propensity to ‘jailbreak’ their gadgets to enable them to download payable apps for free, grate on TouchTen as well who sell their Hachiko game app for US$ 1.99.

 “That’s why I personally think that if app developers want to be financially successful, they have to appeal to overseas markets,” Anton Soeharyo noted.

Application developers also have to deal with the complexities of creating apps which work well across an array of platforms, namely Research in Motion (RIM) for BlackBerry smartphones, iOS for Apple gadgets and Android powered smartphones.

Anton pointed out that developers have to learn the separate coding languages used by each platform, not to mention own the different gadgets that run the platform to test their apps.

“Android is a bit of a nightmare because the size of the gadgets’ screens are different,” he said, adding that this made app optimization tricky.

Although faced by challenges, app developers keep their hopes for future growth high as the tech environment improves.

A recent study by Nielsen, titled the “Southeast Asia Digital Consumer Report”, highlighted that a majority of Internet users in Indonesia use a mobile phone to access the Internet, “making Indonesia the most reliant market in SEA country for this form of Internet access”.

“I believe that in another five years, the [tech] environment will have improved,” Kevin Osmond said.

— Photos by JP/Mariel Grazella