iPhone App Store vs. Web Apps
Featured prominently on Apple’s site today is that the Apple App Store now has reached 15,000 apps. That’s a huge success by any measure, given the iPhone SDK has been released for less than a year.
What’s also interesting is that the iPhone challenges our conventional belief of reach (web) versus rich (client). Apple was also pushing the idea of web apps for iPhone early on, but it never got traction. Checking Apple’s iPhone web apps catalog today, they only have 3181 web apps. Of course, that may not be the complete list of web apps, but it’s a fairly good estimate.
So why are iPhone apps so successful? We believe it’s because of 3 key ingredients:
- Great Product. Developers are users too and they can easily how cool the iPhone is. They see the potential in the device and they want to contribute to the experience.
- Great Platform. The iPhone SDK exposes many functionality that allows 3rd parties to build interesting apps. Yes, we can talk about how Apple doesn’t let you do everything (like run background processes), but Apple exposes enough to make things interesting.
- Easily Monetizeable. The App Store provides a great channel for anyone, from hobbyists to enterprises, to make money from their apps.
Congratulations to Apple for hitting this milestone.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
[...] Mobile Web and Widgets – mobile operators love mobile web widgets because they want to install these widgets onto the heterogeneous set of devices they sell, to reduce application development cost. With the success of the iPhone App Store and other apps stores from Palm, RIM, Android and Microsoft, it’s difficult to see how web widgets will really gain traction. End-users seem to clearly indicate that they prefer native applications. [...]