Yesterday, Samsung unveiled the Mobile Applications Marketplace, a storefront purposed with peddling Samsung-friendly Windows Mobile and S60 applications to consumers while making developers some more cash than they otherwise might. It’s an admirable idea at face value - but is it the beginning of a terrible trend?
Centralized application stores are nothing new - third parties and carriers have been providing places to purchase mobile software for ages. After the Apple App Store began reporting monumental numbers, however, there was a significant shift; suddenly, those responsible with making the handsets tick wanted to be the ones vending the wares. Google launched the Android Market. RIM announced the BlackBerry Application Center. Palm will be debuting the webOS App Catalog with the Pre. What do Apple, Google, RIM, and Palm have in common that Samsung lacks? They control the platform for which they’re selling applications.
If you’re looking to start an application outlet, you need to be at the reins of the platform; if you don’t, you’re further segmenting an already messy market. With Samsung launching their own boutique, others will likely follow; suddenly we’ve got all sorts of manufacturers all peddling the exact (or nearly exact) same junk in a different way. Some might have an on-device store, while others rely on a web-only storefront - all of which would are likely to have completely different interface. Developers who choose to offer their goods through multiple outlets will need to maintain each one individually, monitoring sales and collecting revenue from each individually. Consumers never get the native, unified experience that makes the App Store so enticing. It’s a step in an entirely wrong direction.
That’s not to say that the device makers couldn’t make things better, however. In fact, they’d have to be the ones to do it - but they’d have to work together. Nokia has been surprisingly mum on the S60 app store topic, and Microsoft’s nose is split between the Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7 grindstones right now - so those two are unlikely to have a fix-all solution for the current iterations of their platform any time soon. Thus, responsibility falls to those pushing the devices off the line. If you’re going to get knee-deep in app sales, guys, you need to form an alliance. One store, one common interface, one thing to pitch to consumers as the place to go.
Should it happen? Certainly. Will it? Of course not. Every company involved is a direct competitor with the rest. By the time they worked out agreeable terms and managed to get it onto devices, Windows Mobile 7 (which will include SkyMarket, purported to be Microsoft’s official rebuttal) will have launched and penetrated enough of the market that developers likely wouldn’t be interested anymore. Oh well.
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I checked it out. The reason I didn’t look around more: couldn’t figure out how to sort them by price to find free ones. Come on, get me hooked then make me pay.
Not every company needs Widgets either.
umm….
couldn’t you say the same thing for blogs???
then we wouldn’t need the techcrunch crap!!!
oh wait.. that’s your baby!!
peace…
Please guys think twice.
Its not about consumer needs its about control of the market.
Nobody cares about your interests, really.
Fare well, independent self organized internet (if you ever existed).
Hi, to rekindle hope for an independent, self organized internet for APPS, please check out http://www.getjar.com, which did 22 million app downloads last month across all phone platforms. We’re in your corner.
Bill
have you ever tried to purchase an app from your carrier’s deck? if so you’ll understand why those appstore-like stores are sorely needed. in the best of worlds, there would be a one stop shop for all but until those greedy carrier bastards do their job, we have to rely on apple and other manufacturers to bring a better experience to the end-users.
I agree about the terrible consumer experience on carrier decks. Before joining Flurry, I lead product marketing at Digital Chocolate, a mobile game publisher with worldwide distribution on tier 1 carriers. Navigation, discovery, merchandising and the amount of information the consumer had with which to make a purchase were all significant problems. The App Store fixed many of those problems, revealing how to create a solid user experience on a mobile device. But it’s not just the experience, it’s the fact that the iPhone has such a great display area, is all touch, great graphics rendering, etc. The truth is that the billing, creating an affordable all-you-can eat data plan, and allowing both firmware updates for the iPhone as well as app updates for developers are major underlying factors driving the great experience. The carriers never had the incentive, given that their revenues were dominated by voice, and that they were trying to make the best of a legacy network. Apple addressed that. Of course the downside for the iPhone’s success is not just (inferior?) copycats, but also the sheer amount of competition for developers. They need to understand their consumers and iterate their apps to become and remain competitive. The good news, overall, is that digital “retail” distribution is IMPROVING, and being driven by competition among application stores. It’s long overdue and I would say welcomed by all the developers Flurry works with. Peter (VP Marketing, Flurry)
that is so very nice that you have done something with your life.what do you like to do most of your time?
I just love hearing how the carriers/manufacturers think platform standardization will save them all. They are kidding themselves.
Or this article: http://bit.ly/1OGv
You’re missing the point. Samsung’s users expect to get apps that *work* and are not offensive. If Samsung owns the experience, as the customer expects, then they can do quality control. Likewise, when there is an issue w/an app that they’ve downloaded on their Samsung phone, they’re going to expect the customer support/bug report/download experience, etc. to lie w/Samsung.
Why the heck would my Mom even consider going to the Platform’s site (say Android or WMobile) to deal w/app issues or downloads. The user expects the experience to come from the place they bought their phone or their phone manufacturer.
This is a rerun of earlier in the decade when handset vendors all wanted to create content portals e.g. Samsung Fun Club. In reality none of them are very good at this kind of thing, even Nokia.
It seems like everyone is trying to follow the Apple business model.
Its not about consumer needs its about control of the market.
Nobody cares about your interests, really.
Fare well, independent self organized internet (if you ever existed).
Samsung’s so called “app store” does not look very good… I really doubt it will get much user interest. Companies will soon realize that developing app stores requires expertise and is a business in itself. It is not in samsung core business to create and maintain app stores. I suspect that ESD (Electronic Software Distribution) players like Digital River will probably enter the market soon and will help the market structure itself.
While it may create some confusion, it also has the potential to simplify the experience of extending a mobile device for users that are not aware of all that is available to them on the platform.
To keep the Mobile Applications Marketplace from creating confusion, Samsung has the responsibility of ensuring they make clear which applications will run on which devices to help offset the fact they don’t control the platform.
“Nokia has been surprisingly mum on the S60 app store topic”
Dude, what???
Nokia has had Download! in their phones as their app store for ages…again, it might not have the visibility the Apple Store has had in the US, given the tyrant carrier behavior here.
And that is even before they decided to re-organize things under OVI (which has had a long and low-key roll out)…and will probably succeed where Apple blew it big time with .Me: convergence & cloud.
At least ask someone in the industry to check your hypothesis before writing…
Falling walled gardens, fixed-rate data plans and more open/powerful handsets will lead to great app markets that defragment (disintermediate?) both the carries and the handset guys.
Everypoint and GetJar are both making progress on this front, but with different approaches. As a shameless plug, Everypoint’s Nemo beta is now open to developers at http://everypoint.com.