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РусскийApple's App Store to face strong competition
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Launched two years ago, Apple’s App Store has become the leading mobile application platform worldwide, but other players are seeking to emulate App Store’s success.
App Store: 225,000 apps and still counting
The App Store enables iPhone, iPod Touch and now iPad users to download apps that take advantage of all the device features. The idea was to create a platform where developers could build web-based applications.
As of June 2010, there were more than 225,000 apps, 5 billion downloads, and 150 million active users of the service. The App Store launched in July 2008 with only 500 apps, but that number went up quickly: 10,000 by December 2008, 100,000 the following November and 225,000 latest June.
Despite accusations of having an inconsistent approval process, the App Store has been a tremendous success for Apple, independent developers and ordinary users. And it's clear that the App Store has largely contributed to iPhone’s success as many users actually buy an iPhone for the apps.
No App Store without developers
For every application, developers get a 70% cut of revenue, while Apple takes 30%. This revenue model has enabled developers to generate more than a billion dollars in App Store revenues.
What is cool is that the App Store allows even the smallest development team to compete with the giants. However, it's hard to stand out from the crowd, so App Store millionaires are the minority.
According to a study by IT researcher Gartner, there will be 4.5 billion downloads of applications and 6.2 billion dollars will be sent on App Store in 2010.
App stores for other devices
The number of “consumer-oriented handset downloads” is expected to rise from less than 2.6 billion per year in 2009 to more than 25 billion in 2015, according to a Juniper Research report.
The application store trend seems inevitable since it is being driven by industry players who are seeking to emulate Apple’s success with the App Store. Competitors have indeed developed their own software stores.
Palm published an application store similar to the App Store for Palm devices and announced the App Catalog for webOS on the Palm Pre. RIM also launched its application store named "BlackBerry App World".
Microsoft has released Windows Marketplace for Mobile, an application store for their Windows Mobile platform while Nokia has launched the "Ovi Store" (which replaced its earlier "Download!" application). Moreover, the independent giant GetJar has recently passed 1 billion downloads.
Another platform, Android Market is used in conjunction with OHA's Android operating system. According to AndroLib, Android Market now has about 92,000 applications, and is on pace to surpass the 100,000 benchmark by the end of July 2010. It's the main threat for Apple's App Store.
Google's App Inventor will lead to an app explosion
Google has recently released a new product called "App Inventor" that will change the landscape for creating apps for smartphones. From a simple Web interface, App Inventor allows people who don't know how to code in Java (Android's app programming language) to create apps for their Android phones.
The App Inventor tool allows consumers to create their own applications rather than hope developers create what they need and get it into an app store.
By the way, if only 1% of Android phone buyers decide to create only one application, that means that 1,600 (Google says 160,000 Android devices activated/day) more Android apps will be created every day.
That means that over half a million additional apps could be created every year. That is more than two times Apple's current total app count...
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