Apple’s App Store created an easy way for both mobile users to buy apps and for developers to distribute their programs. It spawned a great deal of innovation within those developers and there have been more apps written for the iPhone in one year, than there has been created for Windows Mobile ever.
There a number of reasons:
The first is the fact all of the Apps are in one place and this helps both the developers and the consumers. The developers can pay one site to distribute their apps, immediately reaching the entire app buying audience. For the consumers it is the flipside of the same argument. When somebody wants to buy an App, there is no trawling sites to find thee app that you want and finding the best price, thus simplifying the whole buying process.
The second is the market which is buying the phones. Windows Mobile is predominantly bought for business use, where as the iPhone was designed as a feature phone, where the standard user was already paying for ringtones and wallpapers. Getting those people to switch from paying $3 for a ringtone to paying $1 for an app was very easy.
The next is the type of apps which have been written for the platforms. Windows Mobile apps are used most days once bought, normally in the workplace to improve productivity, and are invariably complex multi-level apps. If we look at the iPhone apps, there are more games and ‘30 second’ apps. Most Windows Mobile apps are for niche use, most iPhone apps will be used by everybody.
Device centric apps. If you want to write an app for the iPhone, you have one screen resolution with 2 (soon to be 3) different handset’s hardware to write for. There are so many different screen resolutions available for WM that it makes it difficult for developers and consumers to know if the app will run. The hardware choice further confounds things with so many different combinations of GPS, Camera, Accelerometers and physical keyboard/optical keyboard options. Writing an app for all WM devices just isn’t possible.
I am really looking for to Windows Marketplace which will address most of these points and I expect that a number of the iPhone Developers will port their apps to re-produce their success on WM. Lets just hope that the road bumps wont put too many of them off.
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