Building on the trend of Apple, Nokia and others – Sun makes the move into a independent Appstore deployment. As Apple has shown that it is a viable business model, it only makes sense – end-users like to shop around, and are willing to pay for smaller apps. As Google Android starting to make its way into mobile phones, and Nokia “opened” up Symbian – the end-user community developer trend will create a business eco-system worth spending some research on. The project is codenamed Vector but will likely be called “Java Store” after its official launch.
Here is some quotes from Jonathan Schwartz by way of Washington Post.
“Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won’t be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution – but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That’s clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world’s largest audience.”
“The store will be for all Java devices. Initially, the PC desktop will get the most attention from developers and customers, but there’s plenty of Java-enabled phones and developers will be pleased to have another distribution channel, especially one with the power of Sun behind it.”
Read the full article here. Read Jonathan Schwartz blog entry here.
Other bloggers covering this topic include: OStatic, Mobile Marketing Watch, Mobile Blogs, IndicThreads.
Conventional Valley wisdom have been that free is good. In terms of Android, this is the case – free is good! But, once you start to compare it to iPhone, some essential questions come up.
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