Google and Apple duke it out over apps
The success of the Apple App Store is proving difficult to duplicate for other companies, and Google is beginning to cast about for new and better ideas for getting Android apps built for Android handsets.
The world is aware what a huge success the Apple App Store has been, serving billions of downloads of hundreds of thousands of apps to millions and millions of iPhone and iPad users. With nearly as many Android-powered phones, spread among well over a hundred handset makes and models, one would think that the Google Android App Store would be having as much success as the retail app store that Steve Jobs built. Well, it’s just not working that way.
In response, Google has tasked an internal product management director named Benjamin Ling with making a success out of their app store. It is Ling’s job to entice software engineers, user interface designers, and product managers into the Google sphere of influence to get those apps written, according to a CNET story. Strangely enough, Ling is doing that by recruiting inside Google and out for people to fill these positions inside Google, and intends for those developers to work in-house to develop applications for Android phones and Honeycomb tablets. That might work, but it also might keep independent developers away in droves, knowing that they would be competing with the factory store.
Google has ramped up the number of apps available and the number of apps sold fairly quickly over the last year. The numbers look good in terms of percentage increases, but when you’re starting at zero, as Google was, that’s the way those numbers will look the first year. They are still a long ways from the success enjoyed at Apple. One possible advantage to users is that the Android apps developed in-house might be free, but external developers hoping to make a buck may not be too thrilled about that. It will be interesting to see if the in-house app development idea does any better than the Nexus One idea.
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