Mobile Software Distribution: Store vs. Market
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a very good and often quoted paper and in the mean time book to explanation why open source works so well. Besides the good content, it is a metaphor that I like a lot.
Apple’s AppStore seems to work well currently (100m downloads in the first 60 days), but continues to receive criticism for the unpredictable banns for applications (Podcaster and also recently Mailwranlger). Apple takes the freedom to control the content and to remove applications that do not meet the requirements or that they simply do not like in THEIR STORE. Some “contributors” are seriously upset about the devaluation of their sometimes very hard work to provide a piece of software that can only be distributed through a single channel - the AppStore.
Google is yet to prove to be different, but I have good hopes for their “store”, which they call “market”. This sounds much better to me wrt to the expectation I would have for a place to distribute my software through. On the android blog it is announced as
Tags: apple, business, business model, community, iPhone, mac, mobile 2.0, open sourcean open content distribution system that will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered devices. The concept is simple: leverage Google’s expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers like you.
