App store or app sore?
One App Store to rule them all?
(Credit: Apple)Apple has an app store, of course. So does Microsoft. Google has two, one for Android and now one for Wave. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have an app store these days.
We're swimming in app stores. Or drowning.
I'm serious. At the Symbian conference in London on Tuesday, I attended a panel that was overrun with app stores. Nokia, Symbian, GetJar, Sony Ericsson, Handmark, and Handango were all promoting their respective app stores, each talking about how great theirs is.
They're probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?
More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?
After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?
Developers may be spoiled for choice, but "choice" in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for "limited").
This means we'll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it's debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we'll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.
At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.
Outside of mobile, it's unclear what role app stores will play. It's nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it's just one more "forge" among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can "add value" to their "platforms."
Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?
I wish I had a definitive answer. I'm just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.
As a consumer, I don't want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.
Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I'll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn't slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that's the case, what's the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?
It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I'd prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.
How about you?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I think that there should be a store for each OS and that it should be run by the OS developer and that company should dedicate as much effort to their store and to attracting app developers as Apple has with the iPhone and it's app store. I do not want an iPhone, but I do want the same level of support structure for my apps on any phone platform that I choose to go with.
Also I think that this type of app store and support should move into traditional OS applications also. I really hate having to go to each developers website to purchase the latest versions of quite a few software packages.
Besides, we don't have one book store to shop at, one car company to purchase from, and one home builder to create our castle. It's no different with app stores.Viva la difference is the spice of life. Thank god for choices!
If Microsoft's new app store turns out to be worth a damn, that's exactly what you'll get. The rest will either die off or be ignored - by both customer and by developer. My new Crackberry (courtesy of AT&T) came with a ton of crap that AT&T simply will not let me delete - most of them are URLs tied to the AT&T app store. I'm very sure that Verizon pulls a similar trick on their phones. I simply hid them, shoved them to the bottom of the apps list, then went and got Google Maps (including a lot of GPS love), the Facebook mobile app, and the few other apps that I do bother with from RIM's own site. Took all of 45 minutes - most of that was spent waiting for the downloads and installs to complete, like I did with T-Mobile on my previous Crackberry.
Let's shorten all of that and get to the point:
Devs go where they can sell/distribute their wares to the widest audience. Customers go where there's the most (and most useful) apps. If that site isn't Verizon's or AT&T's, then they get ignored until they die, as clued-in users start gravitating to the sites they do want to frequent.
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Devil's Advocate time... :)
There is something that compels in the other direction. In Apple's case, they do make one hell of a solid argument for having a walled garden approach: Security. An iPhone user will know that the app they get from the iPhone app store isn't going to be a trojan, will get patched post-haste if there's a security issue, and etc. For the dev, there's also a compelling argument for a single store to 'rule them all' for a given phone, so to speak - the dev doesn't have to worry about pirated versions of his or her app floating around (there likely will be, but since that requires jailbreaking and lots of other hoops, it's really not worth worrying about).
But... that's also an argument that any other app store can make as well - as long as that store has a reputation for trust...
For Linux goods, I usually hit freshmeat.net (yes, it's sourceforge... so?) Apple stuff finds me at versiontracker.com (even though they do a very respectable Windows and other OSes as well).
Awhile back, folks in Windows could choose from tucows, download.com (here), and a blinding array of other sites to find and get free goodies - from the best to the worst. The fact that things have settled down to just a small handful is evidence enough that the market decided who won - the good ones stuck around, the rest died off or got absorbed, and new ones will pop up occasionally.
Paid app stores are no different - the winners are the ones who consistently deliver, and can get the maximum number of people to frequent them and stick around. After all, nobody complains about having too many convenience stores in their town. Why? Because eventually those numbers settle down as the profitable and popular ones survive, while the unpopular ones become unprofitable and die off.
This would be true if there are systems in place that allow for consumers to sort or "sift" effectively.
Apple's App Store does not allow for people to sort by ranking. I suppose, since companies could "bash" their competitors with poor rankings, a furor would ensue if they allowed this option. In addition, I question Apple's motivation to weed out old, unsupported apps, apps that are not entirely compatible with newer OS's, etc.
As a result, limiting my sort options to "Name", "Release Date", (and more importantly to me) "Popularity", I still have to weed through pages upon pages of battery charge indicators, clocks, and list-makers. Of those listed first (using a "popularity" sort), so many of them have really poor rankings and critical reviews. Sure, they were downloaded a lot (making them popular) but my issue is of quality, not quantity.
In order for your market-based "natural selection" to work, App Stores need to provide consumers with effective and convenient tools (for better or for worse). Otherwise, that brilliant app which is on page 121 will remain buried, rarely (if ever) downloaded, and not paid for.
P.S. Apple should have more categories or sub-categories like "Clocks" or "Battery Indicators" or "Fart Noises", things that just clutter up my experience, waste my time, and keep dollars in my pocket.
"Nevermind."
For years we had lot of little shops where you could buy goods in the real world and software in the online world from mainly one supplier. Then both in the real and online world someone had the great idea of pulling all the stuff into one big store selling lots of 3rd party good.
The different app stores are no different, just like you would expect to find say Nike shoes in any shoe department you would expect to find a Facebook app in most App stores. If you want something different then you shop around to fond the stuff you want.
'All these' app stores give people easy choice of what's available to their product. Most people will just be happy with what they are given, if they see an app they have to have on a competitors store then it may tempt them to change so they can get it. But the fact that you will loose all your current apps could be a big reason to stick with the current system, especially if you have paid for apps.
The loosers will be the stores that get people buying apps but don't supply a good stream of new apps. People will spend money and then be disappointed that there are not the new apps they want. If they change provider and write off the money they have spent then it will probably make them hate their last provider and maybe even make them reluctant to spend new money on their new system after learning that one day they may have to write off that money.
It don't seem that different to the later 80's early 90's when a personal computer could come with a huge variety of different operating systems. We all know what happened there MS's tactic was to get the developers onboard and won the race through having the best software. The same will be true of the app stores. The one that gets the most software will probably win.
With Apple at 100,000 apps and still climbing you would have to say the competition have to make it easier, cheaper and more profitable to use their app store to compete with Apple. But with Apple developers only having to support a few hardware options you have to say the competition will have to learn that less phones is best if you want to fight Apple at the app store game. So far Palm seems in the best position here.
One of the things I really miss about Ubuntu now that I'm no longer using it is the Package manager which essentially does what you're talking about.
You add the addresses of software repositories to the manager and it checks for updates periodically presenting you with a list of updates when it finds them for you to ok and install all at once.
Microsoft have the infrastructure in place: Windows Update, but of course they haven't opened it up to other software vendors.
If I'm picking a device, the availability of apps for competing devices is a decision factor. Being able to compare what's in Device A's store versus what's in Device B's store makes this easier. Again, a user-side plus.
Sorry, but you're having trouble escaping your vendor-side and developer-side perspectives, even when you put words in users' mouths as you did here. They ain't the words that _real_ users are saying.
Consumers mostly care about their perspective, not the vendor's or developer's. Which is right because it's *our* money.
As an iPod touch owner, I really couldn't care less if Developer X is on the fence between iPhone OS and Android OS. I just care what's in the App Store *now.* And if Google Android overtakes iPhone/iPod touch, I could always switch and abandon my old apps assuming I could get the same functionality on the new platform.
Let's be real: there is testimony out there from Android developers seeing fifty to hundred times fewer downloads than iPhone developers of similar applications. Android development is currently in hobby status or must be subsidized by a different part of your business.
To build your typical user's trust (that is, people who don't know or even care to know the difference between C, C++, C#, Java, etc., let alone Apache, GPL, LGPL, GPL v2, GPL v3), a user has to have a feeling of security that any given application is free of virus & malware. What I like about Apple's App Store is that I have a level of confidence that if I download a particular app, it won't steal my passwords or monitor my keystrokes.
So, in this regard, it is a good thing to have a central app store that users can feel they know what they are getting.
After years of buying songs from the iTunes Store, Joe Consumer has a longtime relationship with the vendor, Apple. When Apple starts selling apps, Joe Consumer is going to feel safer buying from Apple, rather than going to some dodgy little website with typographical errors, paying with PayPal, and hoping that the product is what the description says rather than a screen that proclaims that your address book data is being sold online.
You need to step back and understand the Big Picture from Joe Consumer's perspective rather than living in your shuttered developer-centric (or simple tech geek) basement.
I've said this before. Apple has a unique advantage of being able to sell to both the iPhone and iPod Touch users, giving them a distinctive edge over their competitors. This is too often not considered when comparing App stores.
Yea seriously, why couldn't Microsoft do that with the zune? I personally hate the zune HD, but I'll bet you that if Microsoft released a Zune Phone, or something with the Zune OS, it would be very successful, more than it is now.
- by Expatriot November 15, 2009 5:12 PM PST
- Your point about consumer confusion is well taken and strikes me as Linux's main weakness. There are too many distros to count, distros that were the distro du jour a few years ago seem dead today, and sorting out the differences in a meaningful way is difficult for a non-techie consumer. Both Linux and FreeBSD do essentially the same thing, and both suffer from the same problem (FreeBSD to a lesser degree -- NetBSD, OpenBSD, PCBSD), but FreeBSD does have the advantage of the entire collection being centrally managed, which makes it slightly easier for a non-techie to learn.
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