It’s hard to believe Apple’s app store only recently celebrated its first anniversary. It’s even more incredible that in just the first nine months, the app store saw one billion downloads. And just three days after the July 11 anniversary, the store hit the 1.5 billion download mark with 65,000 applications available. Not many people could have foreseen the demand for phone apps a couple of years ago, or the wide interest in creating them. But Apple’s success with its app store has motivated other mobile companies such as Microsoft, Google, Nokia, Research In Motion, and most recently, LG Electronics, to follow suit and try to cash in on the exploding app market.
LG Electronics, based in South Korea, is the third largest handset maker in the world. Just yesterday, the company announced the launch of its own app store. They’re starting out with 1,400 applications and it’s only accessible in Asia. But there are plans to expand into Europe and South American a few months from now, and when that happens, the number of available apps will increase to 2,000.
As of today, LG has not set a date to open an app store in the United States, but other companies have already done so. In March, Research In Motion opened its BlackBerry App World store with around 2,000 apps. The company is also working on creating a social networking site to complement and boost use of its applications.
Microsoft said earlier this year that they plan to open Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and yesterday announced that they will begin accepting app submissions beginning July 27. The company said Marketplace for Mobile will launch this fall, and that it will support Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 by the end of the year.
Nokia has launched an app store using its Ovi platform, and Google recently launched Android Market, which is still small, but will probably build a large and loyal developer following. The Palm Pre, which runs on the WebOS operating system, has very few applications available for it, and Palm has been reaching out to the developers community for more. Verizon is also making noise about creating an app store for its smartphones. Apparently, the company plans to aggregate applications into their marketplace from four developer communities: Palm, BlackBerry, Android, and Windows.
No matter what these companies do, how many apps they come out with, or how open they are to developers, they may never be able to catch up to Apple. Other than having time and sheer volume on their side, Apple has one other distinct advantage over every other mobile company—iTunes.
Prior to the Apple app store launch, iTunes was already a widely used program, so many users were already familiar with it. Linking its app store to iTunes not only eased the app download process, there was already a billing structure in place, as well as an account relationship between Apple and customers. This made it easy for app users to get what they wanted, as well as simplifying application monetization for developers.
Apple’s apps are seen as one of the biggest reasons the iPhone has been so successful. As other companies try to jump on the app bandwagon and compete, Apple’s iTunes/iPhone/app store trifecta may make it all but impossible for them to even catch up.
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