Even the most casual readers of the technology press cannot have failed to notice that app stores seem to be opening on every corner of the internet at the moment.
First there was Amazon making a big splash with the opening of their Android app store.
Soon after, Barnes & Noble announced they would be following suit.
Then RIM confirmed that their forthcoming Blackberry Playbook device would be able to run Android Apps, in the process proving that sometimes the rumour-mongers aren’t just…mongering.
At this point Samsung were obviously feeling somewhat left out of the headlines because they announced that their own app store had reached a milestone: 100 million downloads.
Meanwhile, Ovi, MeeGo App Store, and Blackberry App World continue to grow (probably while making odd sucking noises that can only be heard in Apple HQ) and businesses are waking up to the possibility of opening their own mobile application stores powered by white-label solutions.
What you’ve probably noticed about the above summary of recent app store news, is that none of it featured Apple’s App Store (a name Apple has been able to trademark). Apart from the occasional story about censorship on Steve Jobs’ stroke of genius/cash-cow (and a controversy over the amount of commission Apple takes on in-app subscriptions), the Apple App Store has been forced to give ground to its Android-selling competitors in the news. Furthermore, the balance of coverage is a reflection both of Android’s vibrancy and the degree to which Apple’s unique selling point has been weakened. It is highly plausible that today’s consumers are no longer worried about missing out on the app experience if they buy a device not born in Cupertino.
In this case Apple’s loss is consumers’ gain. Competition between app stores probably means slightly cheaper apps for Joe Public, especially when it comes to initial App purchase costs, although there is a decent chance store operators like Google (who only charge 10% commission on in-app subscriptions) will pass those savings onto consumers as well.
Consumers will also benefit from competition via special deals new store owners will put in place to attract them and differentiate their offerings; Amazon has already committed to doing just this and offers “a free paid app every day” as well as an innovative ‘try before you buy’ feature to its customers.
The new breed of app stores is also good news for mobile developers. As Stuart Dredge (Guardian Apps Blog) points out here, Amazon’s app store will be plugged into the site’s experiential content discovery engine, which makes recommendations to users based on their purchasing history, meaning that apps have a better chance of getting noticed by users who might actually want to buy them. This contrasts favourably with the Apple App Store where the mass of content can be difficult to sort through. Anyway, the end result of developers’ efforts getting noticed more should be that they make more money.
As an aside to this, it is also worth noting that at least at the moment, developers may be able to strike promotional deals with the younger app stores in exchange for giving them a temporary exclusive on an app, and thereby sell many more copies than they would if they released it widely including to the App Store where their work would likely be lost in the morass of competing apps.
Developers are also destined to make a lot more money from cross-programming (coding an app so that it can run on multiple platforms) and new business opportunities as app awareness shoots up.
Businesses will also be winners in a world free from the hegemony of the App Store, as the increased costs of developing and delivering apps for multiple platforms (our specialism) are offset by the opportunity to reach a raft of new customers around the world without having to worry about obeying the occasionally mystifying App Store guidelines. And for those businesses put off by this increase in development costs, a mobile website beckons (another specialism of ours!).
If this all makes it sound like Apple are the only losers in the new world where app stores tout their wares on every corner, then that’s probably because they will be. Still, only a fool would bet against Apple finding another opportunity to take the lead as they did, originally, with apps, when they opened the App Store on July 10th, 2008. After all, it’s taken everyone else three years to catch up.
Tags: 2011 Trends, Business Mobility, Mark Watson, Mobile Apps, Mobile Devices
