What Happened:
The market leading mobile application platform, the Apple app store, has now delivered two billion applications to iPhone owners. This news comes just four months after Apple announced that they had crossed the one billion application mark. Placing a exponential graph on a linear scale, one billion applications in four months is a little over eight million applications daily. According to GigaOm, there are 85,000 applications in the store created by125,00 developers, reaching 50 million iPhone’s and iPod touches.
What This Means:
Even with the launch of the Pre, the expanding Android ecosystem, and the ever popular BlackBerry platform, Apple is having little problems keeping developers on board. Consumers are eating out of their hand. Apple created a perfect balance between the developers and end users, and the formula has needed little change to keep both parties happy. The other platforms must be reaching early for the bottle to get through to lunch.
What We Think:
Apple is indifferent to its mobile end users, antagonizing towards the app store developer community, and generally smug about their success. Aside from adding a “Top Grossing” section to the app store, and blocking some good applications, Apple has done little to improve the store. It has worked phenomenally well, and the trends are only getting better. But if Apple continues to behave as they are, it will come back and bite them square in the wallet.
The computer world has spoken that open is the future. Apple was so caught up in their own knickers last time that they nearly died, after a period of great success. It’s to early in the week to put on the Nostradamus hat, but it would seem that Apple has not learned from its mistakes, and will be content to repeat history.
