Why are developers still sticking to the App Store? →
Marco Arment’s response to The New York Times article questioning Palm’s survival in the smartphone marketplace:
Apple’s App Store is not popular because it gives developers an opportunity to write more software and sell it through a proprietary, pain-in-the-ass storefront system. It’s popular because it came with a huge audience, so the development-time investment was more likely to be worthwhile. Trust me — we wouldn’t put up with Apple’s bullshit if there wasn’t a lot more money to be made than any other mobile platform.
If someone knows App Store development, it’s Marco Arment. As always, it’s an interesting point of view. However, there’s an ‘enough is enough’ barrier that the App Store is fast approaching. If Apple doesn’t do something to fix the ‘pain-in-the-ass storefront system’, I’m afraid even the money isn’t going to be good enough. At least I think it works that way. After all, Android is gaining traction, and HTC is pelting out some amazing hardware. Palm may be doomed, but the App Store has everything to lose.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
It’s premature to say that the App Store model will fail when competitors gain traction.
No one knows yet the faults of a totally open system like the kind Google is proposing.
It may be that the wild-open approach to mobile software will be so unstable that we’ll better appreciate the App Store’s conservativeness.
I’m not defending everything Apple does. I’m just saying that for non-nerds the answer lies between conservative and completely open, and I think it will tend more towards the conservative. After all nobody wants mobile to go the route of PCs running Windows.