Simless Prepares Launch of Standalone and Integrated Mobile Application
Mountain View, California (PRWEB) July 12, 2017 -- Simless, Inc., the pioneering digital SIM card technology company, founded by former AT&T and Deutsche Telekom employees, has announced its plan to launch both a standalone and smartphone-integrated version of its mobile app later this summer. Over the past few weeks, over one hundred thousand of people have expressed interest by pre-registering for the app via social networks.
The standalone version of the Simless mobile app will be available for download initially on mobile phones and tablets running Android 5.1 or later. Key features of the standalone version of Simless mobile app include:
• Recognizing and managing inserted physical SIM card(s) in single, dual-SIM, or triple-SIM slot phones
• Providing basic SIM card related information such as phone number (MSISDN), SIM card serial number (ICCID) and International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI). This is useful when subscribers need to activate new SIM cards or transfer their phone numbers without having to remove SIM cards from the phones to read the identifiers engraved or printed on them
• Providing cellular network signal strengths whenever available so that if subscribers have 2 or more SIM cards, they can compare and pick the network with the best coverage
• Allowing the purchase of prepaid SIM card airtime in over 130 countries and from over 500 mobile operators
• Receiving rewards and offers from mobile network operators and other advertising sponsors
• Allowing the purchase, download and management of additional digital SIM cards hosted in an authorized reprogrammable removable SIM card (similar to Apple SIM) or hardware embedded SIM (eSIM)
The smartphone-integrated version of the app has all of the standalone version features and also contains a secure digital eSIM that currently works with devices based on Qualcomm and Mediatek system-on-chips. It will be preloaded on compatible devices featuring Simless digital eSIM technology.
Since its demonstration of the world's first GSM phone without a removable physical SIM card slot at the 2015 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Simless has been granted a key patent for its digital eSIM technology. The standalone and smartphone-integrated Simless mobile app versions are the culmination of exhaustive research, development and live testing with operators and manufacturers around the world.
"The market currently represents a perfect storm for the introduction of Simless mobile app," said Izzo Wane, co-founder and newly appointed CEO of Simless, Inc. He added, "As we enter a new phase in our startup's journey, my co-founders, team members, investors and I are very excited to finally bring this product to market."
SIM cards are a $6+ billion market with over 5 billion SIM cards sold annually, mostly in emerging markets where over 90% of 4 billion subscribers are prepaid customers. These prepaid customers are very price-sensitive and tend to carry in average 2 or more physical SIM cards generally in dual-SIM or triple-SIM card slots phones to receive the best prepaid airtime offers from highly competitive local mobile operators. By comparison, the population of US prepaid SIM cards users is about 50 million (or about 15% of US population) thus it is clear that the real opportunity for Simless on consumer devices is emerging markets.
In the meantime, Apple quietly continues to galvanize the industry. To avoid building a dual or triple SIM card slot device, Apple launched a hardware eSIM chip integrated into recent versions of the iPad. Some analysts predict, based on Apple’s current aggressive activities at standardization bodies, they will introduce eSIM on iPhones in the next few years. This would improve the customer experience dramatically as the end-user would simply use a mobile app to get a digital SIM card that is stored on the eSIM chip. Other consumer device manufacturers are currently exploring how to imitate or beat Apple to market via cost-effective alternatives to hardware eSIM chips, which add significant cost to their overall bill of materials.
Some mobile operators have begun piloting or even rolling out digital SIM card platforms, technically known in the industry as subscription management platforms. Digital SIM card platforms solve persistent SIM card procurement and distribution problems and SIM card challenges faced by consumer and enterprise customers. The platforms will replace physical SIM card factories and some physical retail stores by allowing the remote purchase and download of digital SIM cards into eSIM-enabled devices. Mobile operators are also aggressively researching how to effectively run future subscriber acquisition and retention campaigns in an eSIM era.
Simless is initially focusing its mobile app deployment efforts on emerging markets because that is where market conditions best fit its services. Simless is working with several global mobile network operators and smartphone manufacturers to launch digital eSIM technology for the consumer market. Although the IoT market for a digital eSIM is still in its infancy, Simless continues to work with key IoT players to advance its IoT strategy. Interest in embedded SIM technology for IoT is growing quickly due to the excitement around 5G, NB-IoT and the 20 billion connected cellular devices projected for the future. The excitement has further intensified last week for subscription management platform and eSIM solutions vendors following ARM’s acquisition of Simulity a provider of eSIM solutions for IoT. With an industry-leading consumer eSIM solution as well as IoT platform, Simless is well-positioned to play an important role in the years to come.
For additional information please visit http://www.simless.com or send and e-mail at: hello(at)simless(dot)com.
Sam King, Simless Inc., http://www.simless.com, +1 4152986375, [email protected]
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