Apple's App Store turns five: You're great, now change
Apple's
App Store redefined how we all downloaded programs on our smartphones.
But with Google Play outstripping its number of apps, the challenge of
the next five years isn't volume -- it's getting the right app in the
right hands.
What a difference five years makes.
Apple's App Store has a lot to brag about as it celebrates its fifth
birthday on Wednesday. Over the last half decade, it helped fully
realize the Swiss army-capabilities of the smartphone, which could do
far more than make phone calls and browse the Internet. While not the
first, it set the standard for mobile application marketplaces to come.
The best part: it made apps accessible to everyone.
"Nothing like the App Store existed before and it has fundamentally
changed the world," Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said last month,
describing the store's launch at the company's yearly developer
conference ahead of today's anniversary.
But things have changed since the App Store was first introduced by the
late Steve Jobs, and Google Play has surpassed the App Store when it
comes to sheer number of available apps. While Apple's App Store has
always been home to the hottest big-name apps, its success over the next
five years may be shaped by how well it can foster apps both big and
small.
"It winds up being a popularity contest rather than people finding the
content that they want," said Brian Blau, Gartner's research director of
consumer technology. Users are exposed to the top few thousand most
popular apps, he added, so apps must compete for rankings or to get
promoted as, say, a staff favorite. That disenfranchises all the apps
without brand recognition or marketing firepower.
For now, Apple has a lot of impressive numbers to tout. Its App Store
has surpassed 50 billion apps downloaded, with 900,000 programs
available. Apple brags it's paid out $10 billion to developers,
testament that it pays to work with the company even as it takes a 30
percent cut of sales.
Apple has done a great job attracting the developers, Blau points out, by being the leader for developer revenues.
As a result, the iPhone franchise remains the envy of the smartphone industry, even as rival Samsung Electronics has made significant headway
with its own flagship Galaxy S family of phones. In the U.S., iPhone
sales still dominate, fueled at least in part by the breadth of apps.
What Apple did differently
It's easy to forget that Apple wasn't the first app marketplace. The App
Store had precursors from the likes of Palm, Microsoft, and
Salesforce.com's AppExchange. Jobs was friendly with Salesforce.com
founder and CEO Marc Benioff, who had already taken over the "appstore"
domain and trademark. When the time came for Apple to launch its App
Store, Benioff gifted them to Jobs in a gesture of gratitude for Jobs advice to his team years before.
But Apple did something different with its App Store: it made it
accessible to everyone. By offering the apps in a single, simple store,
and making it easy to download and run programs, Apple sparked a new
market. Sure, BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile phones could download their
own apps, but users had to dig for them at different Web sites, and
there was no real guarantee they would work well.
Apple, however, kept a tight rein on the kind of apps it would approve,
and even offered its recommendations. It was a safe and convenient place
for smartphone users who didn't want to deal with the headaches of
downloading programs on other mobile platforms.
The App Store's featured apps.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)
Analyst Al Hilwa, director of Applications Development Software at IDC, called Apple's idea of integrating a store into
iTunes,
which was already providing a tracking content and handling
transactions for music, one of the strokes of genius that contributed to
the success of the iPhone. Opening the platform up for app developers
was another brilliant move, he said. iOS remains popular with developers
not just because it's lucrative but also because of the simplicity of
building for one line of smartphones.
While older smartphone marketplaces had an array of rudimentary games
and business apps, Apple's App Store opened the door to all kinds of
different programs. All of a sudden, fart apps were making a small
fortune as users were eager to find new and innovative ways to use their
smartphones. Games such as Rovio's Angry Birds became a phenomenon,
with the franchise marked as a must-have for any mobile platform.
"The app store is a real reason for Shazam's success," said Rich Riley,
CEO of the music-recognition app maker. "A lot of that is because the
app store makes it so easy to find it, download it, and update it."
Pandora, the second most downloaded free app on the App Store behind
Facebook, credits Apple for greatly changing the trajectory of the
company. For three years before the App Store, Pandora was confined to
the desktop and was "a shadow of the bigger vision," said Chief
Technology Officer Tom Conrad. From day one of the App Store, Conrad
said, the company realized this is the way Pandora is meant to be
consumed.
The App Store's success spawned imitators, some successful (Google
Play), while others quietly faded away (Palm and WebOS). Windows Phone
has its Marketplace, while BlackBerry has its App World.
Competition heats up
Apple has long touted the number of apps available to its iOS
devices, but it can no longer claim the title of largest app store.
Google Play boasts 975,000 apps, edging out the App Store. It too has
seen more than 50 billion app downloads.
(Credit:
Apple)
It's no surprise the Google Play has exploded, thanks to the aggressive adoption and promotion of Google's
Android
platform, which was widely embraced by the carriers that didn't have
exclusive deals to sell the iPhone. In the U.S., while AT&T
dominated smartphone sales with the iPhone, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile,
and Sprint rallied behind Android and Google Play's predecessor, the
Android Marketplace.
Android is the top smartphone operating system in the world, far outstripping Apple's iOS, according to market data.
Android's runaway expansion and its open-ended adaptability for multiple
smartphone makers come at a price. The fragmented nature of the
platform can make it more complicated and costly to build for, which is
one reason most apps launch on App Store first with Android to follow.
IDC analyst Hilwa noted where Android apps must span multiple versions
of the platform, Apple apps have one; where the number of Android apps
shops is in the triple digits, App Store is Apple's only game in town.
That's why Apple customers spend the most on content and apps, he said
Help for the little guy
But with the number of apps in App Store's inventory approaching a
billion, that leaves a giant swath fighting for -- and seldom winning --
the spotlight.
Derek Lamberton's apps, and those like his, "just get sort of lost
underneath the pile," he said. The independent app creator's company
Blue Crow Media specializes in city guide apps. His best-selling one is
London's Best Coffee, which is consistently in the top 10 for the food
and drink category.
"All my apps at this stage will hit the top ten when they launch, but
unless there is a serious social media effort...it's really really hard
to get new users," he said.
Even with top-tier exposure, the halo effect is brief. The New York
Times twice highlighted a Lamberton's Craft Beer New York app, and it
would give him a big spike in sales the day immediately following. But
after the one-off jump to 250 or so downloads, the norm of five to 10 a
day quickly returned.
"I see it again and again, developers don't want to release their
download numbers because I think because they're ashamed," he said.
"Outside of super games, there isn't a lot of money to be made."
"I see it again and again, developers don't want to release their download numbers because I think because they're ashamed,"
--Derek Lamberton, independent app developer
The future
Lamberton's challenges show how Apple can be a victim of its own success as it embarks on its next five years of App Store.
As big as App Store has become, the "wander the aisles" method of app
discovery doesn't work anymore, Pandora's Conrad said. "Looking forward,
the big opportunities in the App Store are to move beyond this
merchandised, best-seller based browsing model" to search relevance.
Last year, Apple purchased app search and discovery company Chomp only
to quietly close it down within months. On its own, Chomp was an
alternate search website for Apple's App Store and, later, Google's
Android platform, that retrieved results based on app function, not
name. Despite the takeover stoking expectations of app discovery
improvement to come, Apple never integrated Chomp's search tools in the App Store.
App Store on iPad
(Credit:
Apple)
The upshot is users have a hard time finding the exact app they're
looking for. And unless they're blessed with a name like Facebook or a
big marketing warchest, developers struggle to find their audience.
While Apple wouldn't provide anyone to talk for this story, Apple iTunes chief Eddy Cue said at
WWDC last
month that Apple is working on making app discovery better. The company
has added a feature that finds apps based on age range so parents can
find apps for kids, and it has launched Apps Near Me, which finds most
popular apps in a smartphone's location.
But even that improvement relies on the same thing Apple always has for app discovery: popularity.
Gartner's Blau, noting that Apple hasn't done much to help the apps in
its universe that are hobbled simply by obscurity, said the change will
have to come from within.
"This is something only Apple can fix."
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