- Published:August 9th, 2008
- Comments:No Comment
- Category:consumer news
From Original Post Here
It’s obvious to most that Apple’s iPhone App Store, while having a few stumbles, is nothing short of a stellar success. So like most things Apple, other companies are starting to jump on the bandwagon to get their version of it out.
First out of the gate this time was T-Mobile USA. And again, like most Apple competitors, they feel the need to make their service faster, better, bigger, and more useful. Unfortunately, also like most Apple competitors, I don’t think they really thought it through the way they should have.
According to Silicon Alley Insider, T-Mobile is planning an App Store that will run on EVERY SINGLE ONE of the carrier’s devices. Is it just me, or is the idea of having an app store on like 15 different platforms kinda insane?
Apparently the store will be open to almost any developer, with devs getting a pretty significant share of the money that one developer called “very generous”. A good financial incentive is a good way to get people developing for the system, but I have a question. If you’re writing an app for this app store, do you have to write a version that’s compatible with every phone on T-Mobile? Or can you pick and choose which phones will support it?
If it’s the first case, I can’t imagine many developers wanting to scale an app to run on the lowliest Samsung flip phone, and on the highest powered Android device. That means that most apps will probably default to the lowest common denominator : Java. Leaving most of these apps to be bloated, slow, and generally unusable.
If it’s the second case, and developers can pick and choose (which I think is more likely), you’ll likely see a bunch of apps for Android and Windows Mobile phones, with a small number for the lower end phones. The problem with this scenario is, that the general consumer doesn’t know what the model of their phone is, unless its a fairly popular device (RAZR, iPhone, Instinct, etc.). Most customers will say “Wait, do I have the Samsung t409 or the Samsung t439? I dont know, agh forget it!”.
The only way to get around a problem like that, is for the store to be able to autodetect the type of phone, and display only apps for that specific phone.
To me, the only thing that this is going to become, is a huge bloated hard to navigate mess.
As a long-time T-Mobile customer, the one thing I know they’ve never been able to do well is to set up a WAP frontend interface for a phone, let alone an App Store (they’ve had an Applications link in the WAP frontend for months now with not a thing in it).
With the extreme variety of screen sizes, resolutions, processor speeds, and graphics capabilities of the phones on the T-Mobile, especially including the higher powered upcoming Blackberries, Windows Mobile Devices, and Android phones, It’s hard to imagine how they’ll be able to create a store that actually functions well with the extreme variety of devices. Apple has it easy, while they have 3 devices that can access their App Store (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPhone 3g), they can all run the same software, making it far easier to maintain a store of applications.
Sorry T-Mobile, but I don’t see this working out well for you.
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