Apple’s iPhone App Store boasts some interesting stats. Over 100,000 apps, games, and utilities. Tens of thousands of developers. Far beyond 1-billion downloads to date. A customer base approaching 80-million (iPhone and iPod touch). The highest customer satisfaction rating of any smart phone. So, why does Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s VP of Mobile, think that the upcoming Firefox Mobile will kill off the app stores? From PCPro:
Anyone who knows JavaScript and HTML can develop a great app without having to learn a specific mobile platform.
Didn’t Apple try that with the original iPhone? How’d that work out? Sullivan has a point regarding the frustration developers have writing software for multiple mobile platforms.
We look at the problems it creates for small innovators. You have to create an iPhone app, an Android app, a Windows Mobile app… As developers get more frustrated with quality assurance, the amount of handsets they have to buy, whether their security updates will get past the iPhone approval process… I think they’ll move to the web.
Sounds plausible, doesn’t it? Product marketing is often about differentiation. If the majority of applications run inside Mozilla’s Mobile Firefox, how is one phone differentiated from another? Will browser-based web apps have the same functionality of iPhone and iPod touch applications which run on a full-fledged development platform?
In the interim period, apps will be very successful. Over time, the web will win because it always does.
Is there a specific example of the web winning out, you know, “because it always does?”
My prediction? The smart phone market will continue to grow with multiple vendors (Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, Android, and others) vying for a slice of the growing pie. As Apple has already proven with the Mac, the winner is not always the leader in market share. Revenue, profit, customer base, and ecosystem support are differentiated results where Apple does exceedingly well. Mobile Firefox is unlikely to change that, and no amount of wishing and hoping from a free software vendor will bring about dominant uniformity on cell phones.
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