If you read this blog you will know I love my iphone. And I love my iphone apps. Being that my last phone was a Palm Treo and that I have purchased and installed many apps on both the treo and the iphone I wanted to compare the 2 processes from both a user perspective and a business perspective.
iphone app store. I love how the app store works. It is easy to use and navigate. From a user perspective it is nice to know all the apps are located in one place. One problem with palm apps was that there was hundreds of sites that sold apps. This made it hard to know what was available. Everything is in one place at the apple store. It is also nice to know that apple has reviewed all the apps in the store and they adhere to some type of quality standard. One big worry with the palm apps was if you were going to get a virus or something from downloading the app.
From a business point I think apple has nailed it. App developers know that they can just build their apps and sell them. Sure apple takes 30% (or whatever it is). Plus Apple will make a ton of money from this. I don’t think that Palm made much money from apps. This is also good I think for the users. It is nice to know that with only one place to buy you are getting the best (and only) price. Some may complain that no competition in this area is bad. But I think it works for all parties involved (users, developers, and apple). That is why it will do so well in the years to come.
Palm Apps: I appreciate that palm opened up their platform and tried to make it available for anyone to sell and install an app. But just imagine if Palm had used the centralized store model that apple is using now. That cash info may have saved palm and made them into a power in the smartphone industry. As a user I just hated searching and pricing all the palm apps. I never did quite trust many of them and did not trust many of the developers. I never once purchased an app directly from the developer. And never purchased from the palm app store. It was always from a trusted 3rd party. I was always worried about getting the app again if I had to reinstall. With the iphone I know that my purchased apps will always be available.
All in all I love the experience of the iphone application process. My only problem with it is that everything goes through the itunes software on my PC. This works great for the music, video and podcast stuff. But I loved how the palm pc software seamlessly integrated all my contacts and notes. I liked doing things on the PC and just syncing it to my treo. Mostly notes. I would take short notes on the palm and then expand on the ideas on the PC later.
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