The Apple Apps Store - What A Good Idea… If You’re Apple
by Ewan Spence
Ah yes, the much vaunted Apple Store, chick full of applications for your iPhone or iPod Touch, providing the user with a simple one click access to everything on offer. Is this the long sought for nirvana of mobile app distribution? Perhaps it is for Apple, but not for the developer community.
There’s no simple way of putting this, but the screen of the Apple iPhone will only show a fixed number of applications in the store. There is going to need to be some sort of filtering in place, to provide the top picks, the recommended applications, and those that get a burst of activity. Yes, simply having an application in the store will generate some sales (anecdotal evidence shows the mere act of registering a podcast for iTunes generates around 400 subscribers without actually doing anything), but that’s not going to be enough. These digital paths are paved with gold, remember?
Developers will still have to get people’s attention; they will still need to fight online to get their ‘Super Clock’ application noticed more than ‘Wonder Clock’ and ‘Time Flight.’ They’ll still need a website, they’ll still need to capture eyeballs, and that’s not something that Apple will have clear guidelines on – I’m sure we’ll have rotating weekly picks of apps (much as we do with podcasts) but the process of how these are chosen is going to be murky at best.
How long until we hear developer ‘A’ claim that Apple is favouring developer ‘B’ and giving them help, promoting them in the ratings, just because ‘A’ is in the Valley and ‘B’ is in Poland? Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s going to take very careful management of expectations and customer handling to navigate choppy waters – and the price drop on the iPhone rises up like the rocks of a Siren as to what can happen when it goes awry.
The more Apple become a services company with day to ay contact with the paranoid world, the less they become a distant faraway godlike visionary hardware company. This is going to be a very interesting period for the Cupertino company, and it’s interesting to me that they’re holding onto as much of the delivery chain as possible.
Developers write the app, submit the app, and then relaise that their influence becomes much more limited. They need to spend their marketing effort pushing Apple’s Store as well as their product – smart move on Apple’s part, having every developer shill their Store to their users (for which they’ll only take a small percentage of any software purchase fee).
What it does do is leave Apple as the sole distributor of pretty much every application that’s going to be written for the iPhone. Unlike Windows Mobile, where a .cab file can be hosted anywhere and downloaded from any URL to the phone; unlike a .sisx file in Symbian OS which again can be downloaded from anywhere; unlike .jar and .jad packages that are pretty much universal. Competition is a good thing, and having options at every part of the delivery chain is key. If Walmart doesn’t like a trucking company, they get another one.
Yet Apple has control of the last mile – from their server to the hardware. They’ve bypassed the network carriers. They’ve bypassed the traditional third party application stores like Handango. To a certain extent they’ve neutered the free (as in choice) route to market that developers have traditionally had to reach their customers.
The bottom line is Apple’s bottom line. They’re not giving up an inch more than they have to. So yes, the Apple App Store may look like a silver lined cloud, but the cloud may rain on some people’s perceptions of the company.
