Thanks mostly to Palm, Windows and Symbian, developers have had the tools, and the platforms, to create applications for years now. The problem has always been that it’s so incredibly difficult to get a critical mass (think: your less tech-saavy friends) of users to a) download an application and b) install it on their phones.
Thanks to increased mobile bandwidth (via EDGE, WiFi and now 3G) and the rapidly growing popularity of mobile browsing (thank you, iPhone), people even began to sound the death knell for mobile applications in favor of web apps (an approach I’m still pretty bullish on - particularly if you’re operating on a shoestring budget).
The problem has never been lack of innovation in the application space but rather overcoming the challenge of educating users as well as changing the way they behave - never a trivial task.
With Apple’s launch of the Application Store in the coming weeks, I’ve been wondering if they’ll be able to re-envision the process of discovering, downloading and running applications the way they have with some many other things, including the mobile phone provisioning process.
For you iPhone owners out there (for those that haven’t taken the plunge yet, the following description will still sound familiar), remember when getting a new phone involved dealing with a borderline incompetent clerk for 30+ minutes while they performed credit checks and had you sign reams of documents over and over again? Now think about the process of buying your iPhone and setting it up in iTunes. In the comfort of your home! For me that was a truly groundbreaking innovation for a customer experience that is often fraught with pain points.
There are only a few weeks to go but the optimist in me thinks that with this launch (and the launch of Android’s answer to the App store, whenever that may be) we may be on the verge of finally seeing developers and their applications have a proper, user-centric platform for discovery and distribution of their applications.
“I’m seeing an excitement among mobile developers that I’ve never seen before,” said Sam Altman, chief executive and co-founder of Mountain View-based Loopt, a location-based social networking service.
“People who said they’d never start a mobile (applications) company because they didn’t want to rely on the carriers are now starting companies focused only on the iPhone.”
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