OS Provider Hosted Mobile App Stores

There has been great frenzy in launching mobile app stores by different Mobile players after Apple launched its app store. The latest to join the bandwagon is Microsoft which is planning to demonstrate their version of app store – “Windows Marketplace For Mobile” at CTIA 2009. This will come as an inbuilt app in Windows Mobile 6.5 which is expected to hit the market in the last quarter of 2009.

Apart from Apple and Microsoft, we have other players in the mobile space who have opened their own markets.  

1. Google – Android Market
2. Nokia – Ovi Store
3. Blackberry – App World
4. Palm – Software Store

Let us briefly look at the desktop market.

The top desktop operating systems we have are (from wikipedia):

5. Windows (XP,Vista..) ~ 90.5%
6. MAC OS X ~ 5.54%
7. Linux ~ 1.13

Now the obvious question we want to ask is – do these Desktop OS’s have a Desktop App Store packaged along with the OS? None have it. This app store concept is a new concept confined to just Mobile OS. Such an idea was brought into market initially by Apple for iPod and iPhone.  Following the success of this business model, this was later copied by other players.

In the same way should we expect a App Store for desktop apps from Apple? Is it a feasible model for the three main players in the desktop market?

There is something called store.apple.com which sells third party software which run on Mac OS which is similar to the App Store for iPhone but accessible over the internet. Atleast Apple has a place to consolidate and sell stuff which work on Mac OS while Microsoft has no such store. On the other hand Microsoft have the Windows Market Place which certifies if a particular software is compatible with a Windows OS, lists them in their product list and provides a link which takes you to the software publisher’s site. Yet these sites dont cover all the apps available in Windows OS or Mac OS. For the desktop market typically the internet, retail chains, ecommerce shops, eBay like market places act as the gateway to buy and download desktop software.

With the consolidation and maturity of the Mobile Market, the number of apps out there would become humungus that it would soon be infeasible for the Mobile OS players to go through an elaborate approval process which currently they are doing and list all those. Already iPhone third party app developer community is feeling the pain of the slowness of the Apple’s approval process and also they face the possibility of rejection. Infact to circumvent this approval bottleneck an app named Cydia has already cropped up which is mimicking the iTunes Appstore and has started acting as an alternative to iTunes in iPhone to source iPhone apps from a wide variety of sources.

With the increase in the amount of power and capability packed into Mobile OS, the complexity and the size of the apps in Mobile OS will start equalling the apps in desktops. The browser experience would also become enriched and as friendly as the experience in normal desktops. With all these developments, along with market consolidation in terms of players and increase in number of applications developed for Mobile OS, it is possible that the application distribution model will start moving towards the  distribution model used for third party desktop software. In that scenario the current OS provider hosted Appstore will slowly fade away. May be it too early to call – let us see how this market matures.