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Competition For the App Store Is Mounting
MojoKid writes "Right now the only real 'competition' to Apple's App Store is the Android Market. Presently, anyone using an Android-based phone can download applications from the Android Market, which first started offering free applications in October '08. A drawback to Android application developers, however, is the fact that the potential Android Market user base is fairly small right now, as there is presently only one Android phone available, the T-Mobile G1. However, in the coming months we're also going to see more app stores come online for additional smartphone platforms. Nokia will officially launch an app store for its Symbian OS-based smartphones at Mobile World Congress on Monday. Microsoft is also getting in the game for smartphones that run the Windows Mobile OS, with Steve Ballmer delivering the keynote speech at Mobile World Congress as well."
The company I work for launched a public beta of our third-party app store this week, called Xpressed (the site is brand new, so feedback is welcome). Unlike the app stores mentioned in this article, it's a true "third-party" app store meaning that we're unaffiliated with any device manufacturer or carrier, and so we plan to support any and all phones out on the market that allow applications to be downloaded and installed from non-proprietary websites. Right now this pretty much means most of the Java-based phones on the market (several hundred current phones, plus the hundreds more old and obsolete devices).
It will be interesting to see which model wins out after all of the industry players have their say in this growing application space - whether manufacturer-supported app stores (presumably) integrated with the devices themselves will continue to dominate, or whether third-party app stores like Xpressed will be able to find a footing, especially among developers targeting their apps across multiple platforms.
I for one extremely dislike virtual keyboards. It's quite clumsy to type on them, unless you have a stylus, and even then I'd prefer Graffiti. I don't mean Graffiti-like method, I mean Graffiti; both Graffiti2 from Palm and Letter Recognizer from MS are bad. Transcriber may be interesting ... if I only wanted to enter English text. In full. All the time.
I use acronyms, I use Croatian language, I use programming language keywords and variable names. I don't enter plain English text.
Graffiti is the best entry method to date, seconded by physical keyboards of any format.
The worst of these is Windows constant delivery of messages to the user. On a desktop the "you have unused desktop icons" bubble is annoying - on a Windows mobile device, a bubble that takes the user focus away from, say
is a serious barrier to usage.
The other thing that finally caused me to switch to a Crackberry (which is fantastic) was that it would crash on receiving a call occasionally - brilliant. It was the HTC Tytan if anybody cares.
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.