Mobile App Markets Everywhere (MWC2009)
So the mobile app market has been picking up steam for some time since the success of the iPhone. While most aren’t doing anything innovative, generally speaking centralized app stores are good thing for both developers and consumers alike
With the Mobile World Congress event going on we are getting lots of announcements and date clarifications on all those non apple app stores. Here is what we got:
- Paid Android Store is finally going live. Looks like Google is finally taking submissions for paid apps and they could be available as early as next week. Frankly its about time since the store wasn’t that compelling to developers until a paid model existed.
- Nokia is launching their own store. Called the Ovi, its due out this may ….it looks to be pretty bleh at this point.
- Blackberry is coming out with there application center. While its been announced since fall and RIM has been taking developer applications for the storefront since a few weeks ago, as far as I know, there hasnt been an actual target date besides “spring”. It could be compelling with so many blackberry users, we’ll see though.
- The new Palms Pre also will have an app catalog. The Pre is one sexy little device and could be the dark horse in the smart phone war, and at the very least it should help revive a very much dieing company called Palm. So I’m keeping an eye on how the WebOS develops. There is a palm developer site and an official palm development network blog that has some info which, as of today, has some brief info about oreily publishing ch1 of javascript development for webapps on the platform, but it aint much to go on. As far as I know there isnt even an official launch date yet, only some rumors swirling around a march timeframe. So until then we’ll have to see how things progress.
I think thats all of the current batch of app stores announced that I know of, if anyone else knows of any, leave a comment.